Other Worlds
Other Worlds is an exhibition in the form of a fabulatory essay examining the role of the artist as a visual explorer in literal and symbolic dimensions. It brings together painting, photography and video works by Canadian and international artists from the mid-19th century to present day.
The historical thread is drawn from Bernard Smith’s 1960 book European Vision and the South Pacific, a study of James Cook’s three voyages —1768-71, 1772-75 and 1776-79—that explored the Pacific Rim, the northwest coast of North America and the Bering Sea, and Antarctica. It was Smith’s contention that the trained artists Cook enlisted had to develop a visual language in order to record new phenomenon—impressions of light for example—while maintaining the empirical demands of research. This “impressionism” would have a transformative impact on art (and the viewer), bringing together the art of seeing and art as information. The earliest exhibition work is an 1864 painting by Robert Scott Duncanson (the first recorded African-American artist), of Owl’s Head Mountain at Lake Memphremagog, which straddles the Quebec-Vermont border. Two 1899 oil sketches by Canadian William Blair Bruce—then living in Sweden—are of Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea and a view from the coast of Saint Nazaire, France. More than illustrating what appears to the eye, there is an expression of the Sublime, an embodiment of experience of place and thought.
Although the recording role of artist-painters diminished in the 20th century due to photography, there were still remote locales and a lure of the unknown, voyages of discovery, routes of wandering, and an ever-changing frontier of visual language. Examples are paintings of Newfoundland, Alaska and Greenland done between 1914-1929 by American Rockwell Kent, and of Papua New Guinea by Australian William Dobell, who visited in 1949-1950. Their respective painting languages are different, but share a form of the surreal and witnessing for the first time. The continuing fascination with remote locales is evidenced in the photographic work by Lorraine Gilbert of a trek in Iceland, and Rosemary Laing’s use of the Australian desert as a site. Again, there is a surreal quality to both, but achieved by different means. So too for Stacey Spiegel’s panoramic view of mountains from Banff, using digital technology to transform the image and “embed” the phenomenon of freezing, thawing, flow and erosion. It expresses weather and geological time through the eternal mountain (a subject link to the Duncanson and Kent paintings).
“Other worlds” can be generated from the familiar and ready-known. John Massey’s This Land photographs combine the interior of a “freshly minted” car as a framing device for landscapes, which in another age would have been painted. Massey uses a language common to advertising, but from another perspective, it is the new sublime, although intentionally disquieting.
Time-based media lends itself to both pictorial manipulation and a narrative, as in the works by Rodney Graham and Kelly Richardson. Graham constructs an episode from the past in Vexation Island that is both a fairy tale and a fabulation. Rather than the events of the shipwreck, it is looped through causality, the castaway’s attempt (played by Graham) to survive by shaking a coconut from a palm tree. Paradise can be an eternal nightmare. Kelly Richardson’s Exiles from a Shattered Planet, is also a looped video, a continual cascade of flaming debris from the sky—“visitors” from another world —onto a “sublime” landscape (a view comparable to the one in Duncanson’s painting.) There is, however, no cataclysmic end to Earth, and rather than fear, we can “stand in awe.” So too for the floating heads in Laing’s work, a hallucinatory interjection onto the landscape.
Painting as a tool and medium for the exploration of place and thought is by no means exhausted, and hence the inclusion of works by Brian Burke. Failed Experiment #2, has a literal, pictorial quality—a trek into a bleak unknown—but the title suggests a cautionary tale of folly and oblivion, and has as much resonance for the human spirit as does “success.” The nature of the “experiment” is left to our imagination. Dead Man’s Pond #9, brings the “other world” to the local. It is a pond in a Charlottetown, PEI park with several speculations on how it was named. Burke has depicted an “explorer” swimming in the pond, but in search of what? The title and images offers a segue to David Burliuk’s opus painting-mural Surrealist Conception of Life, 1932. Burliuk arrived in the USA from Siberia via Japan in late 1922; the New World was his other world. His painting reduces the Atlantic Ocean to a “pond,” and among its many complex, allegorical pictorial elements of “the savage and the cultured,” is Columbus (most likely) as if a castaway blowing a bubble of the world through a pipe.
The power of art is the possibility of recording information, expressing innermost thoughts, and telling stories. Doors can be opened to “other worlds” as a way of knowing. Every fictional world is based on a reality, which can return to confront “our world” in a cognitive way, and likewise, “other worlds” can feed the imagination. The continuation of mysteries is as important as answers.
Other Worlds is curated by Ihor Holubizky.
ARTIST LIST:
RODNEY GRAHAM KELLY RICHARDSON JOHN MASSEY ROBERT SCOTT DUNCANSON ROCKWELL KENT
WILLIAM BLAIR BRUCE ROSEMARY LAING WILLIAM DOBELL BRIAN BURKE DAVID BURLIUK STACEY SPIEGEL
LORRAINE GILBERT