The latest show at Blouin|Division, Le temps passe lentement, features work by Tammi Campbell, An Te Liu, Sarah Stevenson, Simon Hughes, Matthew Feyld, and Daniel Langevin. It is a mixture of sculpture and wall art.
While exploiting the appearance of being abstract or non-objective, it is not. With its stress on the similar, on miming and homage, it is closer to drag than it is to Modernism. And it is clearly closer to the sort of Pictures art that was fashionable in the 1980s. It shares a lot more with re-photographing photos than it is like the painting that that it borrows its style and imagery from.
That kind of work, which is what I assume the accompanying text is very vaguely referring to as “Post-Modern” with all its “arch (ironique)” qualities, was also quite different. The work of the 80s played against scale more, had a detachedness to it that concentrated on the ways that the work was being re-mediated and tended to question referentiality. It could be caustic or analytic in its appropriations, but that is not exactly the case here which, framing aside, comes off more like Tate McRae play-acting as a fusion of Britney Spears and Xtina. In particular, the sculptures feel very familiar (in look, strategy, rhetoric) and the whole thing is rather comforting, rather brown. At a certain point of historical institutionalization, irony can cease to be irony. This is less about something as vague as nostalgia than it is about something concrete and familiar as comfort. And the show as a whole is more about the ensemble as setting than the specific nuances introduced by appropriating the familiar.
Hughes’ work may be the most indicative of what’s going on. Cave of Decorator #4 would make a nice poster for the whole show. This could be described as decorative realism. The pieces have that prop quality common to much of the painting circulating in the city. But they seem far more competent and less shrouded in absurdity than prop painting tends to be. There is also something a bit warmer about them. Not much else comes through.
Maybe a little anxious about all this warm and fuzzy familiarity, the text informs us that Feyld includes a “legend” for the extended layering of hues that make up his work on their back, a kind of index of their coming into being. But this is unseen. It is a footnote to give depth (the pathos of “hidden labour”) where there is only pronounced surface.
Awkwardly curated, the lighting seems more dismal than usual for the gallery. The exhibition is split up into two spots. Starting narrowly and then curving around into the wider display space, the narrower space is more interesting because it goes further in showing off the framing of the whole thing. In the wider space, the old support beams easily complement the Modernist style of the work in the show.
But the narrow entrance space is a different matter. It provides a condensation of the wider show, cut down to a few pieces of wall art, suspended sculpture, and some set on a plinth. The proximity to the work which the space imposes denies it much gravitas, the suspended, fragmenting globe giving thematic echo to the general thrown-togetherness of it. What the clustering demands is a more vertical view of the work. If the wider room could exploit architecture as a strength that grounded the work and retained the focus on it, that is less functional here. Instead, you get directed to the exposed aspects of the building, its dysfunctional lights and pipes. The works no longer seem like props on a theatrical set and more like those on a film set. It ends up being the curating, intentionally or not, more than the works themselves that does most of the conceptual work.
The more curious thing is that the space is rotting and there is not much attempt to hide it. There is water damage scattered around at the stair entrance and curling bits of wall. There is water dripping into buckets and pooling on the floor and yellow stains coating the wall. The starkness of lines and the contrast between industrial objects and display space comes off like a Brutalist joke.
In a way, the just mentioned details provide a good segue into discussing the new Janet Werner show at Bradley|Ertaskiran, which is also about theatricalizing the domestication of familiar, second-hand imagery. Featuring her typical appropriation and distortion of magazine imagery, Spiders and Snakes is described by the gallery this way:
Collaging and folding image upon image, Werner adds spatial and psychological depth to the often simplistic portrayals of female bodies found in the works’ photographic source material. Feathers and Fold carries all the satisfaction of a high-impact editorial; it is easy to get lost in the lush brushwork of the pink fur jacket, the sleek leather gloves, and the playful glimpses of bouncy curls only to be confounded by the strident corner fold that hides the subject’s face. Instead of identifying markers, Werner paints the face with a single drooling streak, mirrored in the smudged linework on the canvas’ edge, an imperfect tear or stain on an otherwise seamless image.
But everything about this description seems wrong. Spatial depth is largely what the images lose in translation and what sticks out the most is their flatness and the crudity of their construction. It is not the source material that is simplistic but the painterly rendering of it which strips out its details and ruffles its lines. The editorial impact is denied, replaced by a dull and ham-fisted set of repetitive compositional strategies in flat, watered-down colours that seem anything but lush. There is no playfulness but a kind of anxious and armoured horror of the potential of beauty, so much so that it has to be sacrificed through the limp folds of the construction.
The stark superimposition of two images, split across the figure horizontally or vertically, tends to be a pretty basic gimmick but at least it is better than what she has been doing for years. Werner’s work also typically comes off as propish, something to sit in the background that does not bear much looking at and gets lost in conversation. That seems to be the design. Here, the minimal conflict introduced by the harsh delineation gives the images a degree of tension she does not usually muster.
Maybe the most interesting thing about it is the stress it puts on scale. The show makes obvious how much her work benefits from being miniaturized. Whether viewed online or from a distance in the exhibition space, her paintings always seem to work better when they look small. The closer you get to them, the more their composition and brushwork fail. They quickly go from glam to glum. It is this minimal animation that is their primary accomplishment.
This seems thematically fitting, but it also tends to overpower the generally gimmicky nature of the images that she creates. The inclusion of depictions of folds and the stark superimposition gives this crop of paintings more coherency than she usually displays. But this is largely due to the fact that she has rarely used the relation between figure and space well. Here, it is afforded a level of distortion and strangeness by cropping that is crude but not “hysterical” like usual.
Coupled with the very obvious and showy interpolations of bits of colour field painting that tend to overshadow the figurative component, the paintings verge more on abstraction than before. They are still flat and the attempt to imbue them with some vague psychological value only becomes more unconvincing as it is externalized into the geometrical formalization of the canvas.
