In: art
Lauren E. Simonutti | 1968 – 2012
July 25, 2024LAUREN E. SIMONUTTI | 1968 – 2012
It is somewhat at a remove, but no less sad, to mourn the passing of a person whose artwork comes into your purview and you find it enticing and uncanny and unsettling in the best way ― and then you find out that they passed some time ago. There won’t be anything more than what is already there, and there is a finality there – even a loss, perhaps, though it’s oddly ‘retroactive’, though that word seems inexact – that adds a further tinge of sadness.
Simonutti passed at the age of 44 : her struggle with schizophrenia ‘consumed her until she was torn from life’ (to quote one of the many online testimonials to her). It was not stated in any of my research whether she took her own life, but the idea that the darkness swallowed her is not an unconsidered one, nor one that I offer without empathy.
A number of Simonutti’s evocative images appeared in my social media feed, and that led me to research a bit more, and become enamoured of her haunting photographs. Perhaps that’s a dangerous word – ‘haunting’ – to use : she passed over a decade ago, and her images still proliferate appropriately, but there’s that notion of what is left behind and lingers…like a ghost. If you believe in such things, that is.
These are powerful images, and have even more to consider in that the artist died so young, and struggled with mental illness. Often, as a critic, I wonder if my words add more or simply distract : when considering writing about her work, this was a concern, and so I thought it best – most appropriate – to present them with the more resonant words of others that engage in a dialogue with the photos, perhaps in unison, perhaps in a contested manner.
I will say very little, but will try to be like Bruno LaTour’s assertions about what an art critic should be, and try to simply offer a bit of direction while not being overt and overbearing….
Simonutti, in speaking of her life and work, was unapologetic and frank about her struggles with mental illness. When I read her words, I was reminded of one of my favourite statements about ‘sanity’ (it comes from G. K. Chesterton, whom I have mixed feelings about, but I became familiar with it from Timothy Findley’s fine book HEADHUNTER – which I cite below – so I feel Findley’s empathy overrides Chesterton’s smug catholic ‘knowing’…) :
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.
The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
This was where Marlow began the treatment of every patient.
I also thought of Findley’s HEADHUNTER for an exchange between Doctor Marlow and the sister of one of his patients. They’re discussing how Marlow wants Olivia’s permission to discharge her sister Amy, who is an award winning, acclaimed poet but also suffers from bouts of schizophrenia :
Olivia who had been faithful in her visits—and had seen Amy twice a week—said: “But she hasn’t been cured.”
Marlow said: “She will never be cured, Mrs. Price. Never. As a consequence, we have two choices. We can opt for one Amy or another.”
“One or another?”
“One of them—assuming we can adjust her medication successfully—would spend the rest of her life in a drugged condition that would amount, in effect, to sedation. This Amy would have no poems, no birds, no Wormwood [her cat], no other world but the dead world out there now—and she would be incapable of responding to it. It would simply be a landscape through which she moved— deadened, uncaring and uninvolved.”
“And the other Amy?”
“The other Amy would have a minimum of medication. Only enough to reduce the extremities of her anxiety. She would be a slightly less tense version of the Amy we have now.”
Olivia looked from the window. “What would become of her?” she said.
“She could go home to her house—and be with her birds.”
“But—dear God. Doesn’t freedom put her in jeopardy?”
“Not in my view, no,” said Marlow. “It would give Amy back the only life in which she can function—in which she is happy.”
“What about her writing?”
“There is every chance this Amy would continue to produce poetry. After all, the Amy who wrote in the past was very nearly the Amy we have.”
An excerpt of Simonutti’s own insightful and almost painfully self aware words :
This is a visual narrative of an unexpected & devastating situation in which I find myself, which also is relevant to the lives of many others. It’s just not often spoken about.
Madness strips things down to their core. It takes everything, and in exchange offers more madness, and the occasional ability to see things that are not there.
I’ve selected a number of Simonutti’s images below to share, with my ‘speaking in collage’ to accompany them. I have attempted to find a synchronicity between the tableaux the artist has presented, and the titles and words she chose to accompany them.
You can explore those at the main post here.
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Lowell Shaver | Process
April 12, 2024Dave Green | Self portrait in the window of the Greenwood Cemetery chapel, Owen Sound, 2024
‘Time is nothing. We have our memory. In memory there is no time. I will hold you in my memory.
And you, maybe you will remember me too.’
(J.M. Coetzee, The Pole)
There is a Salvatore DiFalco quality to Dave Green’s photographs. It’s not just the scenes he presents us, but also the deep almost oily blacks and the grain of the film in many of his photographs. There is a physicality to these scenes, even when seen online : unsurprising, as he’s a photographer who is all about the photographic print and not just within the digital milieu of the present day, that has both its advantages and failings….
DiFalco is a writer and literary critic : I first encountered his fiction in a Canadian literary magazine in the early 2000s and this inspired me to seek out his book of short stories Black Rabbit & Other Stories.
These are urban stories, gritty snapshots of people who are frequently flawed and even, perhaps, a bit repellent. They take place in Toronto or Hamilton or even my own territory of the rust belt wonderland of Niagara, and several memorable ones that are situated in the latter two sites are as engaging as they are grotesque. The characters that inhabit DiFalco’s Black Rabbit (from Stories or Outside or Rocco or Alicia) could also populate some of the scenes that Green presents to us. Green’s work is not quite so dire or dour, nor quite as nihilistic, but his photographs do intersect with DiFalco’s world, whether literally (in his choice of places or his on the cuff captures of his immediate world) or through implication, with the unembellished frankness of Green’s photographs.
Death is also close in DiFalco’s stories : and the image that spurred this response to Green’s work – Self portrait in the window of the Greenwood Cemetery chapel, Owen Sound, 2024 – also speaks to an affinity, if not a comfort, with stark endings and perhaps remembrance, perhaps not.
[gallery link="file" size="medium" ids="5984,5985,5986"]
From the artist’s site : Dave Green was born in Toronto (1963), Ontario and grew up in the small Southern Ontario city of Owen Sound. In the early 1980s he moved back to Toronto to study photography at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University). He has worked as a house painter, a fibreglass worker, a photography technician and as an educator. He served as an instructor of photography at Ryerson’s Chang School of Continuing Education and has taught photography to youth affected by violence. He has travelled extensively throughout Canada, the United States and Europe, always with a camera.
The words of LP Farrell, from the introduction to Green’s book Personal (Dumagrad Books, 2017):
Looking at some of these photographs now, the prescience startles and the storefront facade windows, the tired barren highways, the sombre diners seem less a lament or nostalgic yearning for a different time, which is what I thought back then, than a crystal ball, sometimes literally reflecting, but often revealing a life marked by deep solitude. It is as though Dave saw, understood and then showed us what would happen to us all before life hit. Dave Green has photographed a world already disappearing like a picture not quite fixed, time remorseless and unrelenting. Time doing its thing.
———————————————————
This is a book of contrasts, the tension in the dialogue a whisper. Look here: youthful lust and yearning, women and lovers juxtaposed with landscapes busted and stripped down. Lust is a counterpoint to dilapidation. The tang of tungsten light in cavernous bars and then a street lamp, suddenly a votive light in a night sky over lovers like some crazy benediction. As if there was hope…
You can see more of Green’s work at his site here and his IG is here. Green is also represented by the MF Gallery.
If there is a reckoning, it is on the road. The photographer/passenger, the night and a beautiful woman at the wheel; a motorcyclist with a life garbage-bagged and strapped to the saddle of his BSA, maybe in flight. A bleak stretch of road ahead, road the arbiter. Love goes but the road always stays. Road, the redeemer.
LP Farrell, from the introduction to Green’s book Personal (2017)
They drove in silence, the landscape a work in charcoals and flaked quartz.
———–
What the fuck did he just do? He stopped running. He was out of breath.
He looked around him. He was standing nowhere.
(Salvatore DiFalco, from the short story Pink, from Black Rabbit & Other Stories)
I’ll end with how I feel an affinity for Green’s images of the rust belt wonderland : I could be looking at the streets I haunt in St. Catharines or Welland, and even the older images from the 1980s offer a run down weariness, a punky nostalgia, that I also remember from my youth in Niagara. I see echoes of Chris Killip or Tish Murtha, in the images of Dave Green as much as I see my own city, too.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Print is Not Dead | Photography That Matters ON PAPER
April 12, 2024PRINT IS NOT DEAD| PHOTOGRAPHY THAT MATTERS ON PAPER
APRIL 22, 7PM
Registry Theatre, Kitchener, ON
Tickets HERE $15 (also available at the door)
Camera sale starts at 5:30PM @londonvintagecamerashow
In a world of fast image-heavy, screen-based storytelling, why do artist still see value in slow printed photographs? Is it still possible to become a published artist/photographer in Canada? Why are these photographers still concerned with the analog world?
Join local photographers, Colin Boyd Shafer @colinboydshafer , Robin Claire Fox @robinclairefox , and Karl Griffiths-Fulton for a panel discussion hosted by photoED Magazine’s publisher Rita Godlevskis @photoedmagazine to share the pros and cons of (now) rare analog experiences.
This live, in-person discussion will NOT be recorded and will exclusively share the behind the scenes stories of IRL humans that have successfully presented their work in high-quality PRINT.
Join us to learn more about how these local folks created their legacy works, and stick around for some qualitative peer-to-peer networking, connecting, and supporting these incredible (and rare) Canadian projects.
Stick around to review these artists works on paper. Photo books and magazines will be available for sale. Support incredible local photography IN PRINT.
SPECIAL BONUS! Ron and Maureen Tucker of the LONDON VINTAGE CAMERA SHOWS will be onsite, allowing us all to ogle and purchase their quality analog cameras and accessories Sale starts at 5:30 until 6:50 and then after the panel discussion.
Presented by curated. @thecovertcollective
Want more information? DM @thecovertcollective
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Gerald Slota | Home Sweet Home | 2010
October 30, 2023Gerald Slota | Home Sweet Home | 2010
(in collaboration with Neil LaBute)
Welcome to the midnight America, the one that exists parallel to the “real” world. It’s a dark country, one where men with hooks haunt Lover’s Lane and scarecrows walk on moonlit nights. It’s the place where people go when they slip into the cracks between light and darkness, a world of routewitches and oracles, demons and ambulomancers.
The rules are different here, and everyone’s playing for keeps. Be careful. Be cautious. And listen to the urban legends, because they may be the only things that can save you from the man who waits at the crossroads, hunting souls to keep himself alive.
Welcome to the ghostside.
Home Sweet Home is a collaboration between Gerald Slota and playwright Neil Labute. Introduced to each other in 2008, they began corresponding and working together (via email, for the most part, as they did not actually meet in person until – fittingly – an exhibition of this work in New York City in October 2010.) From the statement about Home Sweet Home : “For the first time Slota’s visual narratives are aligned alongside written narratives. The series title serves as an ironic reference to much of the early material’s dark focus on themes of home and family.”
The world that Slota and LaBute present us with is the descendant – a successor, in some ways – of the sites and landmarks from Michael Lesy’ The Wisconsin Death Trip. Denizens of a desperate world, sometimes leading lives of ‘quiet desperation’ (but not always, as secrets fester and explode, unable to be contained forever, just as some of the ‘narrators’ of these images must share what they have held inside….)
I also interpret these as postcards from the characters in Harmony Korine’s infamous film Gummo (1997) : a ‘loose narrative follows several main characters who find odd and destructive ways to pass time, interrupted by vignettes depicting other inhabitants of the town.’ That descriptor could apply to Home Sweet Home as well as Korine’s experimental film….
LaBute – whose words offer an unsettling nuance and depth to Slota’s images here – has also observed that “we humans are a fairly barbarous bunch”…..
This isn’t a new concept—the idea that stories change things, rewrite the past and rewrite reality at the same time…
The true secret of the palimpsest skin of America is that every place is different, and every place is the same. That’s the true secret of the entire world, I’d guess, but I don’t have access to the world. All I have is North America, where the coyotes sing the moon down every night, and the rattlesnakes whisper warnings through the canyons.
The true secret of the skin of America is that it’s barely covered by the legends and lies that it clothes itself in, sitting otherwise naked and exposed.
More of Gerald Slota’s work can be enjoyed here. Slota was also a recently featured Artist You Need To Know from AIH Studios’ continuing series : that can be enjoyed here.
All italicized quotes are from Seanan McGuire‘s books Sparrow Hill Road (2014) and Girl in the Green Silk Gown (2018) from her Ghost Road series. In these stories the urban legend of ‘Resurrection Mary‘ is told from the point of view of the dead girl Rose Marshall who’s been wandering the highways and back roads of a ‘secret’ United States of America since her death in 1952….
~ Bart Gazzola
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Ron Boaks | Stairway To The Heavens V | 2017
October 20, 2023Ron Boaks | Stairway To The Heavens V | 2017
There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.
(Ad Reinhardt, from Art-as-art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt)
The dead cannot remember themselves; that’s why the living have to.
(Sarah Monette)
At the risk of getting too personal, too subjective, it’s often not a good experience to go to an art opening when you’re known in the community as an arts journalist. RM Vaughan has written about this, but there are – of course – exceptions to this rule, stepping outside the space where you have individuals attempting to bully and bleat or blow smoke up your ass, ahem.
When I was spending time in an exhibition of Ron Boaks’ painting a few years ago at a gallery in Niagara, an impromptu conversation with the artist became a high point of interaction and conversation about his work (and the larger milieu of artmaking, too).
At that time, Ron and I spoke about a body of work I colloquially refer to as the ‘Staircase’ series. These are (literally) darker works with an assortment of symbolic or metaphorical glyphs “scratched” and seemingly etched into and upon them : many of the pieces are defined by the recurring – but simple and perfect in execution – staircase. This offers an invitation to another site : not so much an ending as a transition to another place and sense of being.
Our conversation, at some point, touched upon how these were scenes Ron had created in response to the loss of loved ones : and I should clarify that they were dark in a formal sense but not in an experiential one. They had an element of hope, an injection of transcendence, perhaps, instead of a commentary on endings.
This painting that I’m featuring is from that exhibition and grouping of artworks : Boak’s Spirit Arise series.
Boaks’ words : “With this body of work, I am trying to capture “the lightness of being”, that essence of life, state of grace, of being alive right now. In 2013 two very dear people to me died. Awhile after their passing, I began to feel lighter in “spirit”, as, if they were now free, that it was OK for me to feel that too. This lightness is translated into these paintings as the energy or spirit entity, surrounded by rich colour. The paintings are grounded by the almost drafted line, measured, as it were, like distance markers on a map. X and Y coordinates are usually there, doubling as chromosomes. There are collaged bits, often as the pieces on each side edge that mark my boundaries. Balance and the interplay of opposites is as important as ever. Some of these paintings are serene and sublime while others are happy in their intensity or darkness. These are complex relationships made visible as simply as possible. These works need to be mulled over, absorbed and enjoyed.”
I would later visit Ron’s studio and we chatted about his work : I always love when artists trust me enough to invite me into their spaces, and I think that initial conversation had a role in that.
This is an image that offers a sense of what comes after death (and I say this as someone who is between an agnostic and an atheist, most days): but that which we leave behind us exists in a variety of forms, whether our experiences with others or the impressions we leave upon them, that inspire those whom remain to commemorate our passing.
Ronald Boaks’ career as an artist spans 30 + years. He has exhibited throughout Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. His artwork has been widely collected and can be found in many public, corporate and private collections nationally and internationally.
More about his work can be seen here (Boaks was a previously featured Artist You Need To Know from AIH Studios’ continuing series) and at his site.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Diane Beard | Walking from the Darkness to the Light
October 2, 2023Diane Beard | Walking from the Darkness to the Light
“…life is brief and lovely, not long and foolish, that it is strange and beautiful, yeah as a dream, then so let it be, if it must be tears, if tears alone may serve…”
(Jack Kerouac)
Diane Beard is a photographer who takes pictures of her immediate community of Welland (usually while walking the streets of the city), often manipulating the images digitally to have a surreal or abstracted quality.
She was one of the featured artists in the Welland Creatives Network’ 13 on the 13th exhibition at the Welland Historical Museum in 2022. We became acquainted during COVID, when the artists’ group I facilitate – the 5 x 2 Visual Conversations – began to ‘meet’ online, and Beard was an enthusiastic and impressive participant.
Diane is the widow of artist Ross Beard (1953 – 2019) who was arguably the most significant visual artist in the history of the city of Welland. Frankly, I prefer to say ‘is’ as a recent exhibition of his work indicated that he lives on in his artwork and the joy many find within it.
His passing was – is – a fracture in her life, and part of her response has been the many images she’s produced and shared, both online and in the Niagara visual arts community.
From a recent exhibition – which was titled Walking from the Darkness to the Light – in St. Catharines : “Having been surrounded by Ross’s awe-inspiring art, sharing the same love of nature and appreciation for the Niagara area, driven by grief combined with a loss of identity after Ross’s passing, yet with no formal training, Diane began taking photographs as means to express her feelings and emotions. Diane’s sense of color and form transcends a simple mundane scene into something abstract and at times unrecognizable mimicking the profound change in her life.”
I’ve been lucky enough to talk with Diane often about her work. The contrast between a scene you recognize and something completely alien is one of the aspects of her work that’s alluring. Beard has an innate sense of colour, composition and a vibrancy in her scenes. This vivacity is an appropriate challenge to the fact that these images are, at their genesis, about loss and mourning and how to move through that….
Beard shares images regularly on social media, and is a prolific artist. I’ve only shared a small part of her body of work, and more can be enjoyed here and here.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Ron Tucker | Black and White and Silver and Platinum
September 8, 2023Ron Tucker | Black and White and Silver and Platinum
I’ve overthought this. The downfall of writers in general… arts writers in particular. I got so tied up wanting to write something that would do justice to the work of an amazing photographer who I am absolutely honored to know, that I tied myself in knots and got a serious case of writer’s block. It’s never happened before.
So – I’ll let the work speak for itself, and scribble down a few things I did manage to get out.
Here it goes.
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Tangible Stories | Leslie Love exhibition at The Old School House
September 27, 2023Tangible Stories | Leslie Love exhibition at The Old School House
I run a medium sized arts institution in a century old building, in the oldest postal code in Canada, in a sleepy town with one set of stoplights, where Leslie Weigand Love presents Tangible Stories, an exhibition that alchemizes grief.
With such a direct and forthright conversation about life, and all the characters that weave in and out of the artists narrative, Tangible Stories bring us a capacity to understand how we can move grief : that cheese-grater heart feeling – the learning of a self anew without that physical presence of one who has passed, by drawing close the echoes of community and intergenerationality. A show created in conjunction with her deceased father, Love shows us a knowing of proximity that moves beyond death while honouring mystical answers, and the work is a multilayer practice in salvaging of family objects, repositioning how we examine daily work, and reclaiming it with a fresh contemporary take on materiality.
The repeated sunflower theme throughout the exhibition, the artist’s sunny disposition, the acknowledgement that life is a circle with petals, not a half moon horizon. A full cycle of raising children as we are raising ourselves, and with the knowledge of family and what came before, using discarded old signs silkscreened by an uncle, as substrate for paintings based on her late fathers photographs.
Ripped up mechanical manuals become petals, paint made with metal fittings from his welding shop, a repurposed welding visor that contains images of his band, an inner/outer life many artists and creatives straddle. The work we do from our hearts welded to the work we do for a paycheck to feed and provide and clothe those we love.
Remnants of her family’s work jeans ripped and braided into a rug. The mythologies we ascribe to as families as we create from our familiar collective memory – what/how we remember as small eyes, looking up to characters and personalities our parents know. A troubled band mate asleep in the coat room after a big party, the first day of moving into a new home that directly echoes the age of Love’s child when she moved back to the property she grew up on- the exhibition unfolds in thematic ripples.
Gifting the viewer with a unique and familiar feeling, how perspective shifts with time and age and the acknowledgment of vulnerability, how the back of a van was used for childhood camping but also was housing a dream of touring with a band, imagery of her parents eyes directly across from a mirror that reflects the viewers own.
I suppose it all comes back to Love, how aptly named, to bring forth so much compassion of self, honour an alchemy of grief, to show us that we can process loss in the context of community and family. That the work of materiality and re-purposing vitality, allows objects to incarnate new meaning and purpose in a cohesive beautiful exhibition of work.
This exhibition runs until October 28th, 2023, and is viewable at The Old School House Arts Center, on the unceeded territories of the Qualicum First Nations.
https://www.theoldschoolhouse.org/2023-leslie-love
~ by Guest Curator Illana Hester
Snapshots – Emerging Artists in Waterloo
September 25, 2023This past summer, The COVERT Collective’s Waterloo contingent of curators (Mark Walton and Conan Stark) gathered a group of 3 young artists from Waterloo Region to put on an exhibition of their work. With assistance from The City of Waterloo and The Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, Snapshots was created from the combined works of Raha Rahman, Ernst, Rullmann and Daniel Burton, and hung at the city’s Visitor Information entre through the summer.
On Saturday September 23, 2023, the group’s work was shown in a large format video on the walls of The Clay and Glass Gallery in Uptown Waterloo, during the annual Lumen Festival. Over 40,000 were wandering through the streets that night… and this is what they saw…
Click HERE to see the video!
~ Mark Walton
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Curtis Doherty | Who Knit Ya? | 2024
February 25, 2024Curtis Doherty | Who Knit Ya? | 2024
February 20th to March 9th 2024 at Westland Gallery, London, Ontario
Out of these you make what you can, knowing that one thing leads to another. Sometime, someone will forget himself and say too much or else the corner of a picture will reveal the whole.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I am alive in everything I touch. Touch these pages and you have me in your fingertips. We survive in one another. Everything lives forever. Believe it. Nothing dies.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As the past moves under your fingertips, part of it crumbles. Other parts, you know you’ll never find. This is what you have.
(Timothy Findley, The Wars)
Mining family history in terms of artmaking is both a rich and a dangerous field. On this front, Amy Friends’ exhibition Assorted Boxes of Ordinary Life is a touchstone for me. In her exhibition, the assemblage – the editing, as to what might be revealed – of inherited objects that had significance that might be discerned by a visitor (others of which were opaque to an outsider) and the works that they inspired had a universal appeal. I say this as someone who has been exploring their ancestry in Niagara and found out some things that are also problematic (United Empire Loyalists as ancestors did not please me, ahem. I was comfortable with dissidents and criminals). Perhaps more of the ruminations of Timothy Findley is apropos here : “The occupants of memory have to be protected from strangers.”
In that same manner, Doherty presents a personal story that resonates with many of us, on many levels. Due to the locale – the sites he’s revisiting in paint being referential to Newfoundland, and the diaspora that has often been an experience of the people there, seeking work and economic stability far from home – the works of the late David Blackwood also come to mind, as an expansion of the conversation. One might see Blackwood’s works as one chapter of a story about Newfoundland, and Doherty’s as an addendum, decades later, but of the same ‘families.’
The artist statement :
“In 1930 a one-legged woman gathered all she had into a raggedy old chest and left Newfoundland for Quebec with her 6 year old son. Armfuls of photos, documents, and objects [lay] there for a century. What you are about to see is all of this brought to light [and] brought to life.
Witness the reality of the boy and his one-legged mother navigate the harsh landscape and time, the abandonment from the father, and the beauty of The Rock. The tangible and the intangible collide with areas of flat colour [so you must look] under the ribs of the wooden chest, to see the heart that lay under the ribs of the living chests.
“Who Knit Ya?” is a common Newfoundland term that asks who one’s parents are – a question this young boy asked his whole life. It begs to ask who we really are, and what legacy will we leave? It would be beyond folklore for anyone depicted here to imagine themselves captured in artworks a century later, and [moreso] what their toil paid forward. So as you view this work, be inspired to acknowledge the fact that we are just the tip of a larger iceberg, in a larger historical story. Ask yourself with introspection: WHO KNIT YA?”
I spoke to Doherty about his paintings (this new chapter added to family lore) after the reception for the exhibition, when conversations about the works led to wider considerations about the series. The words of the artist in conversation :
“It is a family story of mine…the small boy in the paintings is my grandfather, whose mother was the one legged woman, and whose father abandoned them.
There is also depictions of the mother’s parents (The Seal Hunter being her father- my great great grandfather). Through receiving this old trunk from my grandmother and all it’s neglected artifacts from 1880-1930, I’ve been able to piece together some family history, tell their story, and bring it to life from everything I found within that trunk. That was the trunk they moved to Quebec from Newfoundland with in 1929 / 30.
There are a few themes I’m touching on…stories of broken families, reconciliation of that brokenness, and lack of privilege and opportunity my grandfather had and [yet] still overcame it…And also just paying homage to hard working people of the past and the [amazing] thought [that] they could have never imagined they’d be depicted [and celebrated] in the future.”
In engaging with Doherty’s paintings, I’ve found myself looking through the lens of (appropriately) Canadian authors like Timothy Findley or Margaret Laurence whose characters are trying to make sense or discern a larger pattern of both their experiences or events that have defined their lives. This mirrors Doherty’s impetus for his paintings, and how sometimes the fragments are pushed together in a way that might not match the ‘reality’ but speak a contemporary truth to the descendants and inheritors of these objects and memories….
Now I am rampant with memory laments Hagar Shipley (from Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel) as in the declining days of her long existence she looks back on her life, in flashes both more intense and ‘real’ than her current state and often suffused with emotions both joyful and despairing. In some ways, she’s trying to reconcile conflicting and contested elements of a difficult story, just as we see in Doherty’s paintings, with his own family.
Doherty’s exhibition Who Knit Ya? – which the artist has subtitled ‘a vibrant exploration through a forgotten “new found land”‘ – is on view until March 9th, 2024 at Westland Gallery, London, Ontario. It’s presented in tandem with another exhibition titled Tales from the Rock (a group show of artists inspired by Newfoundland). I’ve relied heavily on literary references here in speaking to Doherty’s exhibition – and why not? It’s the stories we tell ourselves, or modify, as seen in Doherty’s paintings that define us. This is true even in the title of the show being a question that asks for similar stories from the viewers themselves : consider your lineage, and the people who defined and deformed you. Perhaps you see yourself as the latest link in a chain, or a break, instead.
Thus I am also comfortable to suggest you seek out David French’s play Leaving Home. It was one of the first stories I consumed, as a young man, about Newfoundland (though it takes place in Ontario – another parallel to Doherty’s paintings) that was not pure sentimentality but real and unflinching and difficult.
Although I have approached Doherty’s work while standing in the sphere of literature, I would indicate that when you look at his painting, that visual art has a significant advantage when exploring familial spaces with the inherent entanglements and contradictions: the multiplicity of interpretation, the possibility for injecting your own experiences into the works, is more rampant and possible. There is a vagueness – a subjectivity – to visual narratives that aligns with the vagaries of family history. The manner in which figures overlap and are constructed by other characters in the story acts as a visual depiction of how they are ‘knit’ from their ancestors. Some figures are just shadows in the background : and painting is the creation of a moment moreso than how photography is capturing one, and that is instrumental in what is presented here, which is perhaps dependent on facts but is also more demonstrative of feelings.
From his site : “Curtis Doherty is a Canadian painter who works primarily in oil who currently resides in Ontario. His work explores themes of history and the modern world through the complex relationship of the tangible and the intangible. He has studied at Sheridan College of Art & Design and abroad, as well as teaching at all levels.”
More of his work can be seen here.
The header image for this essay is titled Shule from the Scut : the images shared here are just a few selections from this series and were all created between 2019 and 2024. The full body of work can be enjoyed here.
Who Knit Ya? is on view at Westland Gallery (in London, Ontario) until the 9th of March 2024.
~ Bart Gazzola
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