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A brilliant painter's life, interrupted

11/30/2012

Metropolis (2007), acrylic, charcoal, porous point marker on canvas, 84” x 132”

Ignorance was truly bliss when I spotted this staggering, large painting at the AGO last month. I didn't know of the artist, so I viewed it at face value, no back story. It was the only photo I took during my luxuriously long, first-time visit to the Frank Gehry-redeveloped gallery. I needed more Denyse Thomasos.

The painting hits as a visual mash-up of Leviathan nightmare and architectural chaos, created with a free, confident, skilled hand. Art can do that: have you gasping in front of what is just canvas and markings. It can rock the centre of your being or reinforce exactly where you sit in the universe at that moment in time. Maybe this is what they mean by having an out-of-body experience.

Some post-viewing googling unveiled the tragic news that the artist Thomasos, born in Trinidad and raised in Canada until moving to New York in 1989, died this summer "after an adverse reaction to a dye injected for a routine MRI," according to a statement at the Olga Korper Gallery, where her work has been shown throughout her professional life as an artist. She was my age, recently married, a mother.

An important Canadian artist with an international reputation, a professor at Rutgers University in New York CIty, Thomasos has since had many news stories written about her work and her life, interrupted.

Her brilliant paintings, which deal with heavy themes ranging from super-prisons to slave ships and rampant globalization, are left to speak for themselves.

Here are a few examples, and an interview, where Thomasos generously explains her process:

Untitled, 2012 acrylic on canvas 48" x 60" (Image courtesy of Olga Korper Gallery)

Arc 2001, acrylic on canvas 48" x 60" (Image courtesy of Olga Korper Gallery)

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This week's blog is brought to you by the word Juxtaposition

11/23/2012

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A friend of mine was a little obsessed with cleaning her carpeting in the condo she brought brand new several years ago. She seemed to be at constant war with her wall-to-wall. I always assumed it was her strong design aesthetic that drove her to splurge on a top-of-the-line vacuum-cleaner but I couldn't figure out the vacuuming fetish. This month she finally broke the bank and had it all ripped out and replaced with wood floors. The installer sucked up 12 shopvac cannisters of dust from her two-bedroom unit. Clearly the carpet was installed before the unit was cleared of debris. Not really surprising if you live in a building that flew up in a condo boom, which is sort of how it happens in Vancouver.

A family member in the construction business says that when you're part of a crew that is told you have to finish up and be out of one condo project by a Friday and show up at another on Monday or lose your pay, you do more than just sweep it all under the rug; you chuck all the bits of building stuff into the walls and drywall over the problem. If it were not for the whistle-blower involved in the Athletes Village mega development the uninsulated pipes hidden behind drywall would be leaking through several buildings by now.

Which brings me to "juxtaposition," a key term in post-modernism that speaks to issues of globalism and consumerism in relation to art.

Bloom tables: Salvaged Western Red Cedar tree stumps filled with creamy organic resin

Against this backdrop of some seriously shoddy workmanship — even within those hastily-completed interiors — is a considerable number of talented, skillful designers who spend their days creating furniture pieces of supreme workmanship and beauty, as evident in last weekend's Eastside Culture Crawl. The Bloom tables (right) by Mth Woodworks and Peter Pierobon's Plumb Pendant cedar lamps (below) lie in juxtaposition to the slap-dash boom-town antics.

Against the clutter of cranes marking the current boom, these visual poems are more than lovely use items; they provoke us to consider the role and value of art in society.
They are fully realized form and function against a speculative-market-driven built environment.

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Weaving through weighty material

11/16/2012

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I needed to shed my years of sewing and knitting and general crafting so I went to art school. No more crochet hooks and embroidery hoops; I wanted to do Real Important Art.

But it was only after I could finally separate out all the crocheted pot-holders and felted figurines from the lump of Fibre Arts that I could see that this is a medium that offers endless innovation beyond what I wanted to do in paint or metal or wood.

Fibre arts has a global and historical connectedness but it's the culture embedded in those fibres that really carries weight. A doily is not just knotted cotton thread but a slightly-disdained symbol of women of a certain generation; a cheap polyester shirt can refer to class or sweatshops. Fibre is rarely neutral, but hot with connotations. It can be at once attractive and repulsive, modest and monumental. It can reveal the artist's intimate passion for the material or method and evoke ideas of global exploitation or environmental degradation — often in the same piece.

Vancouver sculptor and educator Liz Magor capitalizes on the cultural weight of fibre in her new show at the Catriona Jeffries gallery in Vancouver (through Dec. 22). It's impossible to feel nothing when confronted with revealed box after box of familiar yet altered, oddly-accessorized garments. They almost demand the viewer to connect the gaudy contents, construct a narrative, create a character. There's a lot of chatter in that quiet space.

Yet even the most abstracted, distilled fibre arts works have a lot to say. A recent tour of the World of Threads international festival (continuing in Toronto to Dec. 2) revealed conceptual artworks fabricated from everything from brocade to pig intestine. A felted cloth full of gaping holes hangs heavy with dark emotion. An expansive, torqued mandala-like piece of dirt brown sisal and burlap is surprisingly uplifting.

Or maybe it was just being in this gallery, in the company of some engaging examples of fibre artwork, just one of the many venues celebrating conceptual fibre arts during the fest.

It was quite a contrast to the art scene back home; Magor's show is an exception in this photo-conceptual-branded town.

One of Liz Magor's many boxes of garments in the I is Being This show.

Toronto artist Lorena Santin-Andrade's Warm, felted wool

Lisa DiQuinzio's Good Morning, Midnight, 91" diameter

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Maker's mecca in downtown Toronto (for now)

11/9/2012

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A real trip: Toronto's textile-retail district is a visual feast for any kind of maker. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Stephen Cruise's 1997 public artwork at Richmond and Spadina. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Like other Vancouver makers, I mourn the latest closures of stores dedicated to those who work with their hands, hearts and heads, for love or livelihood. Last month it was the needlework shop in my neighbourhood. Dressew is fast becoming the city's last great fabric store standing.

So the first chance I got while in Toronto last week I headed to the mecca for fibre-arts-makers: the Queen/Richmond/Spadina area. This bit of heaven boasts 100-year-old storefronts jam-packed with notions both humble and grand: a button shop — just buttons — next to one devoted to beads or ribbon or wool or shiny embellishments. Across from a luxury textiles boutique is a warehouse crammed with tables heaped with remnants. All in the space of a couple of blocks, and right in the thick of the city.

Yet even Canada's biggest textile retail district appears threatened by encroaching condo towers. (Note the billboard in this photo hawking pre-sale units in the "Fabrik" development on the site of the old King Textiles building.)

Just when you think you're the last fabric-hound standing there's the World of Threads festival to restore the soul. This multi-venue Oakville-Toronto event showcases staggeringly skillful works embedded with rich ideas and spaces to consider, and to transcend. Despite the diversity of media and methods, a thread runs though this fest: in an all-too-consumptive art world these artists are grateful for the chance to show. The value of the work is not foremost in commericial saleability but is in the maker's connection to the material itself, the often transcendent physical experience of the making, and the connectedness to the pattern of art forms that pass down through families and through every culture.

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Dogged by one Sick Puppy

11/2/2012

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The threatened species in its natural habitat.

Coming up with new ideas is typically the easy part for creatives; deciding which of those ideas are just distractions is quite another thing.

Self-editing is an important part of the creative process. For me, the lightbulb goes on (Eureka!) and often dims as I re-think the logistics — or start calculating costs of materials. Ideas surge and retreat in almost regular rhythm. But Sick Puppy won't stop dogging me.

I know the idea of crocheting a giant version of an old novelty craft is a major distraction from my work. I know that "because it's funny" is not a good defence. I've tried to reject Sick Puppy but it's exactly the fun/silly/slightly repressive sensibility contained in this once-common bathroom item that attracts me. When it comes right down to it, Sick Puppy is a sweet anti-art-authoritarian notion.

Despite the challenge of trying to come up with a suitable fibre to fabricate the beast, or figuring out what would stand in for the toilet roll and how the beast could possibly be stored or shipped, the idea of a six-foot-tall pompom poodle doll with googly eyes perseveres.

My Sick Puppy — still an abstraction — obviously refers to Jeff Koons' giant Puppy, but I relate it more to an untitled artwork I saw at The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal a couple of years back, in what appeared to be two elephants made out of socks and whatever else was lying around the artist's basement. Cast in bronze. Fighting. I instantly fell in love with Winnipeg artist Jon Pylypchuk's childlike depiction of aggression, exalted through the appropriation of the bronze tradition. It's this potent mix of Art Brut and authoritative monumentalism that provides the thrill at first sight.

That crash of sensibilities is not so different from Sick Puppy's potential. It might exude a strong attraction-repulsion effect. It might call into question kitsch and craft versus art and high concept, the masculine and the feminine (Sick Puppy is clearly a bitch).

Or maybe I'm just the sick puppy here and should bury the beast once and for all.

Pylypchuk's 'elephant fight' (at right). See how he develops his ideas, without fear:

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A brilliant painter's life, interrupted

This week's blog is brought to you by the word Juxtaposition

Weaving through weighty material

Maker's mecca in downtown Toronto (for now)

Dogged by one Sick Puppy

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