In: Bart Gazzola

Michele Mikesell
October 31, 2021

 The Morrigan, 2017 by Michele Mikesell

Michele Mikesell’s characters peer back at you. Often, they seem to look through you. This is understandable as her inspiration is so often taken from mythology, with figures like this one (or ones, considering that the Morrigan is sometimes a trio, all sisters, called the three Morrígna) that embody larger ideas that dwarf the individual viewer. The imaginary portrait that Mikesell offers here is titled The Morrigan (but she / they are also called Mórrígan, sometimes named Morrígu, a powerful deity from Irish mythology. In Modern Irish she is Mór-Ríoghain, meaning “great queen” or “phantom queen”). A divinity of war and fate, often a harbinger who foretells doom, death or victory in battle, she’s often been depicted – as alluded to in the shadows here – as a crow (birds which still unsettle us as dark omens, or as scavengers of carrion, perhaps those who fall in battle….perhaps a psychopomp, even, waiting to escort the newly dead to their just reward…). 

She looks fittingly unimpressed. (“It is better to fall in with crows than with flatterers; for in the one case you are devoured when dead, in the other case while alive.” – Antisthenes / Ἀντισθένης, c. 445 – c. 365 BC)

There’s a sense of whimsy to many of Mikesell’s anthropomorphic figures, blending animal and human, often titled for old gods like Artemis or Bastet. Another painting is titled Huginn, one of Odin’s ravens – another foreboding bird, knowing and seeing much. She lives in Dallas, Texas and Spain, and “her paintings hone in on the connectedness between human ideas and animal instinct. Irony, contradiction, humor and tragedy are themes throughout her work.”

Many more of her fine paintings (as it was very difficult to select just one) can be enjoyed here. ~ Bart Gazzola

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Philadelphia, PA, 2013 from Last House Standing by Ben Marcin
October 10, 2021

 

Philadelphia, PA, 2013 from Last House Standing by Ben Marcin

I spent a significant part of my formative years in the Windsor – Detroit area. When I visited Detroit, stepping outside of the immediate downtown into the areas that still bore the scars of history, I was often struck by singular houses – occupied or not, officially or otherwise – that stood like sentinels, like final gatekeepers, of areas that were empty and desolate. At that time, living near the Ambassador Bridge in Canada, the neighbourhood was picturesque and somewhat historic if a bit leaning towards dereliction: now, nearly three decades later, that section of Windsor is rife with shuttered houses, boarded up and abandoned. 

Ben Marcin’s Last House Standing series is literally that: singular buildings, from Baltimore, New Jersey or – like this image – Philadelphia. These are all places with equally iconic stature as Detroit, and Marcin’s ‘figures’ alternately evoke gravestones or lone survivors, barely holding on, amidst the wastelands that have crept and grown up around them. Many seem like tombs; others bring an incongruous element of vitality with their vibrant colours, evoking T.S. Eliot’s ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’ (appropriately from his opus, The Wasteland). 

Marcin also revisits sites. Thus, buildings that were barely holding on in 2011 are now gone, like they’ve never been, in 2020. 

More of this series by Marcin can be seen here, at his site, or at his Instagram. ~ Bart Gazzola

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Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta
October 15, 2021

Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta by Robert Katz 

Considering the intensity around their relationship, the exponential growth of Ana Mendieta’s legacy and the fractious (perhaps overdue) repercussions resonating through the art world regarding institutional and more covert sexism, Naked by the Window: The Fatal Marriage of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta by Robert Katz (1990) is a concise, factual book that eschews sensationalism for clarity. 

A synopsis of the book offers a nod to this contested narrative: “In 1985, the charming, Cuban-born 36-year-old sculptor Ana Mendieta plunged to her death from the 34th-story Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her husband, the well-known and highly regarded artist Carl Andre”. Katz’ book “explores the turbulent personal and professional relationship between two highly regarded artists, drawing on numerous interviews and Mendieta’s papers to shed light on the mystery of her death.”

In 2015, Faheem Haider at Hyperallergic offered a response to the retrospective Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place 1958 – 2010 here that indicates how much – or how little – has changed in the four decades since Mendieta’s death. Haider is erudite but unflinching: Andre “was acquitted [of Mendieta’s murder], but the facts must be acknowledged in some way, whether as a curatorial position or a hard-line declaration. In the exhibition materials, in any statement related to this show, Mendieta — much less her death — is never mentioned at all.”

But art – like this book – exists outside galleries walls, too, and in 2010, a symposium titled Where Is Ana Mendieta? took place at NYU, marking the 25th anniversary of her death. This surely helped foment appropriate protest in response to Andre’s multi venue retrospective, as in May 2014, the feminist protest group No Wave Performance Task Force staged a protest in front of the Dia Art Foundation, ‘installing’ “piles of animal blood and guts in front of the establishment, with protesters donning transparent tracksuits with “I Wish Ana Mendieta Was Still Alive” written on them.” (Maria Crawford, from her article Crying for Ana Mendieta in response to the Carl Andre retrospective)

Katz’ book is well researched, well written and respectful of facts while not bending any of these truths to lead the reader (though he does offer an opinion, at the end, and it’s welcome in its lack of circumspection and resulting certitude).

Your local library or independent bookstore will surely have a copy, or can procure one for you.

~ Bart Gazzola

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Throooom (a spell to wish away most days) – Scott Sawtell
September 21, 2021

Scott Sawtell is a painter who straddles abstraction and symbolism, and the manner in which he applies paint means that repeated visits with his work may reveal aspects you missed previously. His works are often significant in size, and this painting is 3 feet by 5 feet, created in 2021 (I mention the size as often Sawtell offers scenes that we might step into, that although tumultuous and frantic, they have a vivacity and vividness that is inviting). One of a number of works currently installed at the Latcham gallery in Stouffville, his paintings offer the contradiction that they are individually seductive, and one can hold your attention, but as a group they create an environment, with pieces having a conversation, whether formally or with some of the narratives Sawtell alludes to, with rough forms or poetic, yet sly, titles. 

Recently I’ve been engaging with the work of another painter, Tony Calzetta, and an observation about his work is apt here: there is the possibility of narrative in this painting, but not the necessity of it. It’s also worth considering Julian Bell’s remarks from his book What Is Painting? Representation and Modern Art : ‘In other words there was no prior context to the painting itself. The viewer’s eyes would submit, and the painting would act.’

More of Sawtell’s work can be seen here, at his site, and on his Instagram~ Bart Gazzola

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The Mark – Olga Volgina
August 24, 2021

One of Olga Volgina’s more recent works that she’s shared on social media (as she’s a prolific artist) is a work that resonates in both an immediate and historical manner. Any (well made and meaningful) rendering of children has this power. Volgina’s children evoke a multiplicity of intersecting references: Goya’s portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga, who looks doll – like and innocent until a closer examination reveals several cats waiting to devour his pet bird, to the child’s indifference, is one. Delving even deeper into the worn faces and unflinching gaze of the children, I’m also reminded of Robertson Davies’ book World of Wonders. In response to one character relating his harsh yet essential childhood experiences, another defers that though he has experience “exploring evil” through his films, the evil of children is something that requires courage he lacks….

Volgina’s children must also bring to mind Ignorance and Want, from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and in that instance offer a more disturbing consideration of how a child is perhaps a larger reflection (or repository) for the world in which they live. Volgina commented that when this work – titled The Mark – was finished, “now I look at them and they look at me”, but what they see, or what they think, is opaque to us. We can guess; but the children in The Mark are silent and staring, offering no answers. Perhaps they’re indifferent to us, perhaps demanding, or perhaps simply exhausted and bruised. 

Volgina lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her digital portraits, as she describes them, are both a bit unsettling and insightful. This brings to mind how sitting for some artists requires a degree of courage (never mind being nude but what of the deeper self that the artist might excavate and present for the world to see?).

See more of Olga Volgina’s work on Instagram, FB and at Etsy, where she and her twin sister, Liza Volgina, have a variety of engaging works on display. ~ Bart Gazzola

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Annie Pootoogook | Life & Work
September 30, 2021

Annie Pootoogook | Life & Work by Nancy G. Campbell

The Art Canada Institute has produced a number of fine books (all readily available at their site) on various artists that have informed and challenged the larger Canadian art world. 

Nancy G. Campbell’s “Annie Pootoogook: Life & Work traces the artist’s life from her youth at the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative’s Kinngait Studios, where she began drawing in 1997, predominantly in ink and crayon, to her death in 2016. The book explores how in addition to depicting scenes of everyday life in the North—including people watching TV, playing cards, shopping, or cooking dinner—Pootoogook depicted such subjects as alcoholism, domestic abuse, food scarcity, and the effects of intergenerational trauma.”

There is a certain bluntness and brutality, at times, to Pootoogook’s scenes. Campbell’s engaging but also rigorous examination of Pootoogook’s life and work (as they were, frankly, one and the same) explores how “the life of Annie Pootoogook (1969–2016) tells an important national story, and her career marks a pivotal shift in the national consciousness around contemporary Inuit art. With a keen eye for detail and fearlessness in representing daily life—the celebratory, the frightening, and the mundane—she captured the attention of Southern audiences. Although imported culture and technologies have dramatically changed Inuit life, the North has also stayed true to tradition: community, food, and language remain sources of Inuit pride. In her drawings, Annie depicted what is still valued and unique in her culture and what is changing rapidly. She had a meteoric rise in the art world that was tragically cut short when she died in 2016.” 

I encountered Pootoogook’s work at the Mendel Art Gallery (now the Remai Modern) in Saskatoon in 2009. The simplicity and directness – the truth, both celebratory and unsettling – of her images resonated in that place. From the legacy of residential schools that dotted the prairies, to the Saskatoon police’s starlight tours, to the ongoing shameful dismissal of murdered and missing Indigenous women, Pootoogook – though from Cape Dorset – was very loud, in Saskatchewan, and even posthumously has a power to disrupt our assumptions and ignorance.

Annie Pootoogook: Life & Works, a publication from The Art Canada Institute, can be read here

More about Pootoogook can be read here

 

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Eric Fischl 1970 – 2000
August 25, 2021

Eric Fischl 1970 – 2000 (2008)

Fischl is a complicated, sometimes brilliant, sometimes less so, painter. In offering Eric Fischl 1970 – 2000, I feel that it has to be enjoyed in tandem with his biography Bad Boy : My Life On and Off the Canvas, which is unflinchingly honest about his life and his work. As you peruse the many fine images of his work in this book, I enjoyed the writings of Arthur C. Danto, was less impressed with Robert Enright or Steve Martin, but found myself more so considering Fischl’s own words: “Old-school curators and historians who attempted to predict the zeitgeist failed spectacularly. They underestimated or completely misunderstood our generation’s embrace of irony, nihilism, and the absurd sincerity of the insincere gesture….None of us knew what work would enter the lexicon, what would last. No one really knew if any of it was any good. All we knew was that we were the next generation.”

Fischl, in many ways, is one of the few American painters that were ‘stars’ of the 1980s whose work hasn’t lost some of its appeal over the nearly four decades since that unique and complicated era. From Eric Fischl 1970 – 2000:  “Eric Fischl emerged in the 1980s as one of America’s most important figurative painters. His paintings, many of which show a single intense moment, compel the viewer to participate in a world of middle-class suburban ambiguity and drama. In Fischl’s engaging distinctly American canvases, narrative, morality, sexuality, and psychology are preeminent.” 

The book can be purchased here, but if you’re like me and lucky enough to have an excellent library nearby – and would prefer to eschew those lumbering e-commerce monstrosities – then that is what I’d suggest (there are also many smaller, independent book stores that would be happy to order it for you, too). Fischl’s images require attention to detail and repeated considerations, and this book offers both that and some interesting, contrasting voices, as well.

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trunkdrunk
July 31, 2021

Perhaps you’re familiar with the story of Pagliacci, the clown consumed by sadness he hides to make the audiences laugh. I will admit it will always be tied, for me, with Alan Moore’s Watchmen. In that graphic novel, Rorschach offers something of a lonely graveside eulogy for the character The Comedian (who ‘evolves’ from a snide position of ‘Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense’ to a weeping lament of “I mean, what’s so funny? What’s so goddamned funny?”). Rorshach recites a ‘joke’ about Pagliacci’s visit to a doctor, decrying his despair, only to be told by the well meaning doctor to visit the ‘famous clown’ to be cheered up. Pagliacci bursts into tears, revealing to the well meaning but unaware doctor that he is, in fact, the clown, and an empty shell who can’t even help himself… 

The self described ‘comedian’ trunkdrunk occupies that same space. His Instagram page offers only that “I don’t even ask for happiness, just a little less pain.” An article on his work has the following spare and succinct comment: “trunkdrunk takes photos in Russia’s saddest places. As this was not sad enough, he takes pictures in full head overhead elephant mask. Images are captured in different places of Russia; mostly in gloomy and depressing surroundings.”

More of trunkdrunk’s images can be found on Instagram often accompanied by long swathes of text in Russian, that meld dourness, humour and memory. This image was originally posted to his IG account in October, 2016, with the following reminiscence: “Indian tea, the same – with an elephant. I remember him from my Soviet childhood. when my mother poured this Indo-Georgian mixture into a glass from a cardboard box, and then poured boiling water – the smell was stunning throughout the apartment!”

A previous Curator’s Pick of mine was a wonderful image by Alexey Titarenko: this could be said to have documented the fall of the Soviet Empire, in real time, with very real people as the unwilling players. Looking at trunkdrunk’s world, nearly forty years later, offers a new chapter to Russia history, perhaps attempting to laugh as one has no other choice, except to cry. ~ Bart Gazzola

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Fabulous Fictions & Peculiar Practices
July 31, 2021

Fabulous Fictions & Peculiar Practices by Leon Rooke and Tony Calzetta

My latest selection for From My Library again pushes some expectations, as it exists as a book proper, but also as a folio of prints with text, and – like a previous book I suggested – offers both the work of an artist (Tony Calzetta) and a writer (Leon Rooke). Fabulous Fictions & Peculiar Practices was a trade edition book published by Porpucine’s Quill in 2009 in conjunction with a limited printing of a livre d’artiste from Presswerk Editions. 

Both collaborators have an entertaining irreverent humour that combine and augment each other’s practice, while never abandoning their respective formal acumen and polish (I say this having recently read Rooke’s Shakespear’s Dog which won the Governer General’s Award for Fiction in 1983, and having offered some curatorial and critical advice for Calzetta’s current exhibition, Painting and Other Fantasies). Rooke’s words are often amusing but edged: “We were down among the strippy currents basking in the afterglow of having torn ourselves apart when when my true love said, ” You should let some of your feminine side out.” I said, “If I let it out it will most certainly be slapped into prison.” 

You can read more about how “Fabulous Fictions & Peculiar Practices is a fantastical literary experiment in which text and image collide to form an irreverent satire of society’s indifference to the artist” here (with another selection of the prints and accompanying text available for perusal here). If interested to purchase the book, you can do so here, and the lovely limited edition livre d’artiste (in this, the images are black and white etchings from copper plates created by the artist and handprinted by Dieter Grund at Presswerk Editions on Maidstone 100% rag 245 gm) can be obtained here. ~ Bart Gazzola

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The AIDS Project
July 18, 2021

The AIDS Project, General Idea, 1989

I’ve been having several conversations lately with people who have significant libraries of art and art related books. Most of these conversations have pertained to where they might reside, when these friends pass, or decide to divest themselves of these collections. There’s a shocking, willful poverty of places to donate these texts, and a disinterest in the history they contain, and manifest. My latest pick for From My Library is something that speaks to that, but also, in its subject matter, illuminates the forgetful vagaries of some Canadian cultural discourse, too. I’m reminded of Slavoj Žižek’s assertion that we are too often like the character in the film Memento, with lives defined by events we barely understand, can not remember nor truly desire to remember, yet are inscribed upon us in an undeniable manner. Too often, how HIV / AIDS devastated the Canadian and international cultural communities is one of those ‘forgotten’ landmarks, and is an idea I explored previously here

In 1989, General Idea produced a limited edition publication titled The AIDS Project. It was one of many of the trio’s works about HIV / AIDS. The slim, offset printed colour booklet furthers General Idea’s appropriation / realization of Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE images into AIDS, and has an accompanying text by Allan Schwartzman. This was produced as a project of the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation: and the colours and vibrancy of the images are just as striking now as over three decades ago, when it was published. What was once perhaps audacious in redefining Indiana’s LOVE is more iconic, more mature and significant, than the naive pop art which General Idea sampled. Finding this in my friend’s library was a reminder, and as she gifted it to me, is an encapsulation of memories and the past that perhaps at some point I’ll pass on too, to keep the stories and remembrance alive. ~ Bart Gazzola

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