In the bunker of Bradley|Ertaskiran is Joseph Tisiga’s exhibition, It was God the whole time. Consisting of ten paintings and five sculptures, these are framed by the accompanying text this way:
Tisiga indulges in our perceived expectations of his paintings; interrupting familiar scenes or genres with critical or comedic relief. These disruptions are often shocking or amusing, like an inside joke or personal musing only the artist is privy to. […] Tisiga’s work oscillates between the recognizable and the uncanny, the real and the absurd. [np] A recurring character in Tisiga’s work, the seemingly simple mask doubles as an exercise in language making. Tisiga, a member of the Kaska Dena First Nation, reflects on how Kaska do not have a readily apparent visual aesthetic for objects or imagery. Within his works, Tisiga contemplates the construction of different modes of signifying as a necessary preservation tool for future Kaska. Yet, despite his commitment to unpacking visual identity tropes, Tisiga creates paintings that are purposefully difficult to read.
Nothing he does in terms of the images would have been very out of place over the past decade. (1, 2) The haunted, the absurd, the personal, the uncanny, the art historical reference, and the subsequent appeals to personal and social identity offered by the document are all forms of framing that we encounter in the city’s galleries almost every week and which have been strung across his career. The pretense that there is anything “shocking” or “difficult” here is belied by the implication that it is all indulgence. Everything about it is overly familiar, including the appeal to “preservation” etc. which provides the slight existential melodrama common to Contemporary Art marketing.
The imagery within the paintings is a hodgepodge, the point of which seems to be how scraped together it is. There are references to local folk tales and generic masks, totems and headwear, but they are mixed in with werewolves, video games (Mario Brothers' Toad), and writhing and pathetic, Dzodhie hit them with his gloves appears to be a reference to Hypnosis (1904) by the German Symbolist painter Sascha Schneider, illustrator of Karl May’s Winnetou books. Aside from the cliché examples of “hybridization,” there’s the gas can cliché, this time surrounded by butterflies, and even some dynamite fishing, presumably to poke fun at the idea of the indigenous bond with an idyllic nature.
The larger departure from other work of his I have seen is in the scale he is using and the curatorial decisions about display that have been made both of which overshadow the predictability of the “content” and add to the work a dimension, unintended or not, that is fresh.
The paintings come in at a uniform size (159.4 cm x 199.4 cm) which gives them a character that could be interpreted as simply arbitrary or conceptual. I will assume it is the latter, although the rhetorical effect of the conceptual gesture reinforces the implications of the former.
The uniformity of their framing and display highlights how uneven they are in quality, mostly crude. The figures are only sketched out, although a few seem over-articulated to the point of distraction (butterflies). There is a droopy, performative pathos to some of the weeping of the paint and the cracks of glittery whiteness that often show through to draw attention to the gesture of figure-making.
Individually, the works have a certain narrative suggestiveness which dissipates when they are viewed together and they take on the quality of absurd doodles. There is an unelaborated, almost discarded quality to a few of them, and that gives the show a likable if underwhelming informality.
They work well in the space, their strictly linear arrangement along three walls giving it a truncated quality rather than the more typical exploitation of the high ceilings to stress a variance in scales and physical interaction that other artists resort to. Instead, it is all flatlined and barely animate, something which is serviced by the general muddiness of the colours. There is a stillbirth quality to the show that comes from this and is reinforced by the general conceptual strategy that seems to be at play.
Playing against the band of paintings are a series of sculptures. These and similar works have been shown elsewhere but they are functioning here as a point of contrast to the paintings. They are hooked in both thematically and in terms of motifs (the image of bricks). The sculptures, which are assembled out of collected trash that has been covered in plaster and ochre wax, conjure claymation creatures as well as more obvious art history references (early Modernism, Outsider Art, etc.).
The pedestals or plinths were apparently something of an afterthought, but if that is the case, I think it is a fortunate one. Cobbled together of flat faux bricks with seams showing, they ironically complement the phoniness of cultural totems, “culture” being the illusionistic faux finishing manufactured to occlude things.
If the paintings in themselves tend to be a bit underwhelming, the general gesture (it is unclear how deliberate it is) being made by the show is quite effective. On a trivial level, he is engaging with the kinds of critiques of “representation” that people like Lori Blondeau have made careers out of. The caveat to this, and the aspect which makes his work more genuinely inventive and acerbic, is that it takes this a step further and undermines the easy irony and redemptive sentimentalism she employs or that of the anthropological/cultural reconnaissance work of people like Marianne Nicolson.
What is at play here is not merel the problem of (mis)representation but of the misguided notion that art is, or even can be, cultural in any particularly meaningful sense of the term. We should be specific here since the term culture is so infamously slippery, so overly loaded with meaning it tends to the meaningless. There is a sense in which people use it in which it effectively suggests what would better be termed heritage (collective memory, tradition) and there is the at least equally common and far less helpful sense in which it simply means stuff. Because saying that there’s some stuff in the context of stuff sounds stupid and really explains nothing, people usually do not put it this way and use the term culture (or better, “material culture”) instead. But this is worse, not better because it so easily gets confused with the other common meaning.
Recognizing (albeit elusively) the intellectual bankruptcy of imagining people as cultural is not where it ends. If the work, quite effectively, mocks any attempted translation of it into a form of cultural expression, it does this not by being “difficult to read” but by making reading as a method ridiculous by virtue of not being difficult at all. The result of both the uniformity and simplification of the use of space and materials and the entirely clichéd irrelevance of the “content” brings the work close to the principles of Minimalism.
