Reviews: Burtynsky and Dorion at Blouin|Division; Bui at McBride Contemporain; Hier at Bradley|Ertaskiran; Wainio at 1700 La Poste
A meadow, a picnic, a gathering; apple cores, bottles, cigarette butts, charred remains. This is the scene of the 1971 sci-fi novella Roadside Picnic by Soviet-Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, chronicling familiar items left behind from visiting extraterrestrials, uncanny matter from another world. This is also the stuff of Stephanie Temma Hier’s world: ants, trash, birds of prey, teeth, fish, and bones abound. […] …always straddling a fine line between alluring and grotesque. Beyond the perils of consumption, we find a world where the nostalgia for lost innocence takes on new meanings. And yet, the sheer scope of Hier’s pieces does not lessen the care or sentimentality imbued into each object; sweet, comic relief and personal mementos are sprinkled throughout.
The installation features trash as the elements of a theatricalized setting for its central works, which are far more distinctly in the realm of sculpture. Its wall works blur the lines more. In both cases the balance of play and sentiment tips toward a kind of folkiness. This is quite distinct from the recasting of trash in a show like Michelle Bui’s Affinités poreuses at McBride Contemporain, where large pigment prints offer elaborate compositions of food and other wastes coming together in vibrant soft colours that suggest flattened abstract painting.
Her ability to do this within the genre of still-life, with strong resemblance and reference to the seemingly inimical ones of all-over and lyrical abstraction, is seductive and compelling certainly, but it is also recuperative. In both emotional and political senses, this project proposes a stance within the mainstream culture in which we globally exist, that encourages a harmonized awareness towards overconsumption and a kind of critically self-aware acceptance of the economic models that compel it. Bui emphasizes the potential redemption that poetic and aesthetic meaning can bring to our experience of the bewildering and challenging world of objects and experiences around us.
These and the exhibitions discussed below are to varying degrees about the relation between sentimentality and garbage. Garbage was always a treasure trove for the avant-garde, who raided it to create totemic figures or to present “the everyday” in ways that tended to look an awful lot like abstract painting. From the 1930s until the 70s, this gesture usually had something to do with the return to myth, whether in the surrealist vein or that of mythologies quotidien. As an artistic choice, it tends to be essentially redemptive and increasingly easy to place into topicality, giving it an obvious social resonance that tends to deny its visual power.
The overlap between a kind of “abstract” formal language and the “environment” is also central to the work of Edward Burtynsky. At Blouin|Division, a quasi-retrospective of some of his work is fruitfully juxtaposed next to some recent work by Pierre Dorion.
With work spanning from the 90s until more recently, the Burtynsky show demonstrates his usual propensity of using high-tech field cameras to create landscape images that lean heavily on the visual norms of abstract design rather than those more common to the landscape genre. Caught at high angles and providing a kind of God-like or lunar view, the imagery also shares a lot with epic cinema as it looks at largely figureless spaces that have been sculpted by settlement and industrial exploitation.
Typically marketed under the theoretical model of the “Anthropocene” and a stress on the “geological” over a more immediate human experience of time, Burtynsky’s moves long ago became over-familiar and flat. Ultimately, is such imagery really any more some sign of geological time than a photo of my bathtub? The interesting thing the photos do is to actually call the credibility of their indexical aspect into question. They may not be Pictorialist, but they are not that far off, presenting a different type of hyper-controlled and technologically mediated view of the world that equally relies on a series of largely romanticising ways of treating it filtered by a choice of familiar formal arrangement and framing.
What stands out the most is their cinematic quality, something that their juxtaposition against the work of Dorion makes more obvious. Dorion’s paintings tend to stress their relationship to architecture and the minimal dividing line between the design of living spaces and the rigorous logic of non-objectivism. As acts of depiction, they tend to collapse this into objectivism.
Although he has been working in a similar vein for decades, Dorion’s work seems more current than ever. Most of the exhibition is dominated by humming blues, pinks, and purples, either cast in gradients or hard lines. It is also cinematic in a much more impressive way than Burtynsky’s work is, creating a range of (deliberate or not) suggestions from films like Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986) to the later work of Nicolas Winding Refn and the million mediocre copycats of his neon stripper lighting. Dorion comes off the more radical because his work is the more rigorously reductive.
In all of these cases, either by design or colouration, giving the earth (or living space) “pathos” is a way of enchanting it. Whether it is windows or garbage, there is something very familiar on display. Keeping in line with this is Carol Wainio’s exhibition Réenchantement at 1700 La Poste. In title, it plays on the notion that the world somehow became less enchanted with the industrial revolution and what followed, symbolized here by the children’s illustrations and tourist postcards that accompanied the early stages of this process. These are even given their own little vitrine in the basement to stress the “material culture” basis of the work in the show.
Her work is a hodgepodge of styles and techniques, but illustration is the thing that wins out. This is not just because the heart of her work is quite traditional draughtsmanship that matches up to the Victorianism that she employs. A different hand is employed in the more graffiti-like gestures and crude doodles that she often uses, sometimes hidden among details, but usually more forcefully scribed across the image, its thin figure giving such large canvases their minimal unity.
Most of the work is dominated by soft browns and blues with the occasional flash of green or pink. The older works have darker hues and tend to more forcefully separate the figures from the abstract swirls, blobs, and weeping paint. It may be the last of these that is the most annoying, suggesting an overly performative sentimentality applied to the general flatness of her use of acrylics. This would work if the imagery was intended to be sardonic, but it does not appear to be. What it does successfully is look like rotting postcards. Its nostalgia is one for this print material, preserved through a kind of vomitous whimsical painting that comes off like a publicly commissioned mural on the side of a hardware store in some little town.
In each of these exhibitions, with more or less explicitness, there is an appeal to an “alien” position. This gesture is then severely curtailed by being reintegrated through a process of sentimentalization and familiarization. Each of the exhibitions are exercises in distancing and then domestication through the aesthetically familiar where the pleasure of design and texture is neurotically tempered by an entirely dubious stress on thematic import.