In: Curators Picks
Jerusalem floor, 2012 | Larissa Sansour
March 22, 2022Jerusalem floor, 2012 | Larissa Sansour
Jerusalem floor, 2012 | Larissa Sansour, C-print (23 3/5 × 47 1/5 in / 60 × 120 cm)
On the flight from London I sit opposite a rumble seat where the stewardess places herself during takeoff. The stewardess is an Asian woman with a faraway look. I ask how often she makes this flight. Once or twice a month. Does she enjoy Israel? Not much. She stays in a hotel in Tel Aviv. She goes to the beach. She flies back. What about Jerusalem? She has not been there. What is in Jerusalem?
The illustrated guidebook shows a medieval map of the world. The map is round. The sun has a beard of fire. All the rivers of the world spew from the mouth of the moon. At the center of the world is Jerusalem. (Robert Rodriguez, The God of the Desert, Harper’s Magazine)
One can’t help but be thinking of the displaced, of refugees fleeing strife, with the situation in Eastern Europe right now; and let’s be frank – not all refugees are ‘equal’ with race and geopolitics rearing their ugly heads, as we see in both the history and present of Canada, and the wider world. I’m not often a fan of Ai Weiwei, but his work about Alan Kurdi touched a nerve that many of us may not have known – or my still deny – was exposed.
In light of that unpleasant reality, the works of Larissa Sansour, a Palestinian born artist were on my mind this week, especially her series Nation Estate. Jerusalem is not a neutral place, or an unloaded term. It may be the best example in ‘Western’ nation states – though in the Middle East – of a place that is intensely contested, an apex of Salman Rushdie’s notion of an ‘imaginary homeland.’
Even that tepid taupe of Wikipedia offers this: Given the city’s central position in both Israeli nationalism and Palestinian nationalism, the selectivity required to summarize more than 6,000 years of inhabited history is often influenced by ideological bias or background (please see Historiography and nationalism).
“In her Nation Estate (2012) series, Sansour conceptualizes an immense high-rise as a new home for her people. In each digitally manipulated photograph in this series, she places herself on a different floor of the edifice. We see her travel from the main lobby, to the Dead Sea, to Gaza, all in the space of a single building.”
“….Nation Estate takes place…in a mammoth high-rise that houses the entirety of the Palestinian people in one easy-to-navigate complex. Blurring the lines between utopian and dystopian realities, she paints a seemingly peaceful, albeit unfathomably sterile future where walls cease to function as barriers to human interaction.
“In a way there’s something positive about ‘Nation Estate.’ There are no check points and people can visit one city from another just by the use of the elevators. It’s an easy life that questions progress in general. Certain things are becoming easier, yet this skyscraper environment is completely inorganic,” Sansour stated. “It’s actually really a mockery when you think about it — living in a skyscraper. So it’s completely dystopian in the end.” (from here)
Who is a ‘real’ refugee? Who has a ‘right’ to live in a space, and to claim that they ‘own’ the land? Sansour’s works have often addressed this; we live in a world where to be Palestinian is often dismissed as illegitimate, if even ‘legal’, whatever that might even mean. Perhaps, as alluded to in Sansour’s work, the idea of ownership and wealth not only preclude but define / deform what it means to be a citizen, or even to be human.
In looking at this work, I also cannot help but consider the lament of Psalm 137: For how are we to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
You can see more of her work at her site, and her Instagram is @larissasansour.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Essay – Ron Hewson – Community Galleries
March 1, 2022Community Galleries
I’ve been putting a lot time and effort lately into a community gallery that I belong to. While doing this I’ve put some thought into why I feel it’s worth the effort. Here are some of my reasons to to belong to and participating in this endeavour.
I believe it’s important for local artists to have a place to hang their work. Putting my work on a wall in a public space means I feel that I have created something that is worthy of public display. This matters because the emotional investment in producing art needs that outlet. Showing in a gallery is the reward for the time and money put into our work. I know I would continue to work regardless of belonging to a gallery but knowing that I can share what I have made is incentive to keep working.
Belonging to the gallery means I have to finish things. Every couple months I need new framed finished work to display. As a photographer I can capture a vast number of images. However that really doesn’t mean anything if I don’t finish any of them. Sure I can do some quick editing and post them on Instagram or do some more careful work and post on a stock photo site but that’s not the same as taking the extra steps to print and frame something. The incentive to finish work is a big benefit of belonging to the gallery.
Preparing work for the community gallery on a regular basis is far less stressful that preparing for a major gallery show. I’ve done shows at “big” galleries. The thrill and sense of accomplishment that comes from that kind of show can’t be beat. But the investment in time and money can be overwhelming. Its not something that everyone is prepared to do or is willing to do and for most people its out of reach. The community gallery fills that need perfectly. It gives the opportunity to exhibit that is manageable for artists who want to exhibit without the stress of a solo show.
There are many other reason the gallery is worth my time such as the diversity of the art on display and the camaraderie of follow artists but what makes to gallery valuable to me is the incentive to keep working. I believe that everyone needs some form of incentive and that for me is to have my photography physically present in the world. While posting something online might get seen by lots of people we don’t paint or sculpt or create our art to be seen on a phone.
Visit uptowngallerywaterloo.com
~ Ron Hewson
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Put sunflower seeds in your pocket so they grow when you die | Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. 1889
February 26, 2022Put sunflower seeds in your pocket so they grow when you die | Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. 1889
It is an understatement to say that many of us have Ukraine in our thoughts, right now. Historians have commented that coverage of many past conflicts have been defined by technological advancements (such as Vietnam with television, or the first Persian Gulf conflict, with it’s almost video game style graphics); the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has already become one that is being seen – and perhaps shaped – by the internet, with streaming and social media.
A recent exchange between a brave Ukrainian woman and Russian soldiers brought to mind the work we’re featuring here (Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers).
From The Guardian: “A woman is being hailed on social media after she confronted a heavily armed Russian soldier and offered him sunflower seeds – so that flowers would grow if he died there on Ukraine’s soil. ‘You’re occupants, you’re fascists,’ she shouts, standing about a metre from the soldier.”
She goes on to command them to “take these seeds and put them in your pockets so at least sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here.”
You can see the video of that interaction here.
If it seems a bit crass to cite Van Gogh here, it’s good to remember his work has become a symbol of hope against adversity, of beauty in the midst of pain and suffering, and – possibly – that there is more good than bad in the world. Or, perhaps, it’s more about defiance in the face of difficult odds, and how history – against our trepidations – can be an appropriate judge of contemporary events.
There’s a number of ways you can support the people of Ukraine here, and it’s worth noting that Canada has the world’s third-largest Ukrainian population, so our neighbours and friends are surely watching this with hope and fear. ~ Bart Gazzola & Mark Walton
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Mia | Helena Hauss, 2015
February 14, 2022Mia | Helena Hauss, 2015
One of my favourite scenes from the television series Sense8 is when one of the main characters is about to step into the ring, for an underground boxing match; a match between a male and female fighter – and the referee, in response to the man’s bravado, his arrogant assurance of his victory, is that “smart money’s on the skinny bitch.”
And the “smart money” turns out to be right.
Helena Hauss’ images are definitively feminist, but with a forceful humour that amuses and fractures a simplistic reading of her work. The aforementioned exchange came to mind due to the shirt worn by Hauss’ Mia, proudly proclaiming ‘skinny bitch’, as she reclines amidst tasty decadent snacks, not just unmindful of our judgement but meeting our gaze straight on, provocatively licking her fingers with eyes that make it clear she couldn’t give less of a fuck about what ‘we’ think.
Hauss works in ballpoint pen: her skill and discipline in this unusual format is awe inspiring, and there’s an audacity required in employing this medium that is matched by the vivacity and authenticity of the players in her tableaux. Whether in Mia’s unflinching stare, or the energy of The Fight or the impressive minutiae and detailed renderings of The Bet or The Sleepover, Helena Hauss is awesome in her medium.
Her words: My works all explore a same running theme of Irreverence : challenging an imposed decorum and reveling in one’s own pre-established labels rather than having to apologize for them.It’s about self-acceptance through self-deprecation and satire.
More of Helana Hauss’ work can be seen at her site, and her IG: @helenahauss.
She often shares videos of her process, which is lovely to enjoy as well.
~ Bart Gazzola
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dream listener | karen elaine spencer, 2006 – 2007
February 4, 2022dream listener | karen elaine spencer, 2006 – 2007
In a dream I saw a way to survive and was filled with joy. (Holzer)
I have dreamed a dream, but now that dream is gone from me. (The Matrix: Reloaded)
i wrote my dream on cardboard, went out into the street and held the cardboard dream in front of me. at the end of the day i abandoned the cardboard dream. over the year one hundred and ninety-four dreams were written on cardboard and shared this way. (karen elaine spencer)
There is a poetic brutality to karen spencer’s dream listener porteur de rêves works, and especially several that she’s shared online recently, looking backwards at this series. (The image I’m sharing here is from 2007)
These are stark images, both visually and in terms of what spencer has chosen to present. spencer and I became acquainted when she exhibited a postcard/billboard project (using an image taken from her first invitation with ATSA’s l’État d’urgence) in Saskatoon some time ago; we joked about how both of us liked to walk in the frigid temperatures of our respective cities, and how that gave us a different sense of the place and the people. spencer often seems to notice things that others ignore, in these images: sometimes those are discarded objects. Often they are detritus, or indicators, of discarded people. spencer’s work is very political, and often in the public sphere, as well.
“Her work questions the hierarchy inherent in use values and investigates how we, as transient beings, occupy the world we live in. The widely held belief in a linear movement forward, or “progress”, is confronted through her repetition of actions that lead nowhere. Rambling, dreaming, loitering and riding the metro are all activities spencer has previously undertaken as part of her practice. Actions are sustained over time (often a year or more) rendering her artistic practice indistinguishable from her daily life. She works with what is near at hand, materials that speak of our day-to-day existence: cardboard, oranges, bread, chalk. Through a détournement of materials or intentions spencer intervenes into spaces; hoping to shift, even if only ever so slightly, our perceptions of what is possible.” (from The New Gallery)
spencer’s words are plaintive yet engaging. There’s a sadness evoked that seems to speak to you, on a very personal level. Her other texts in this series are equally melancholic: I dreamed my insides were falling out astride a pile of domestic discards, i dreamt i wanted nothing more to do with death, i dreamt i was waiting but i don’t know what for and i dreamed i lay in a puddle and watched the rain fall on me (the latter two both on wood that we all recognize as that used to board up windows, an arbiter of damaged, empty – unwanted – spaces).
More of the dream listener interventions can be seen here. More contemporary works by spencer can be found on her IG feed: @karenelainespencer
~ Bart Gazzola
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Zhang Xiaogang | Girl and Tree, 2007 – 2008 – December, 2021
December 29, 2021Zhang Xiaogang | Girl and Tree, 2007 – 2008
Several years ago, a friend suggested Jan Wong’s book Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now to me. It was a memoir that touched upon major historical events, but always with a personal stance of Wong’s experiences as both the child of Chinese immigrants to Canada, but also as a person who, as a teenager in the late 1960s, was enamoured of Mao Tse Tung, and lived for some time in China during the Cultural Revolution. Years later – as chronicled in the book – she would be in Beijing when the Tiannamen Square Massacre happened. It’s a good book: Wong is a meticulous narrator, and spares neither her young self, nor larger mythologies of the State (whether China or Canada) from an older, wiser voice of criticism.
When I first encountered the work of Zhang Xiaogang, Wong’s stories of the Cultural Revolution (which she was protected from, being a Canadian still too anaesthetized by ideology over reality) immediately came to mind. Zhang’s figures are grim: they also make me recall a ‘joke’ from another friend, whose family fled communist Poland, about ‘Soviet photo face.’ This is the idea – which any cursory review of official photography from the USSR, or any totalitarian state, really, will reveal – that you must offer a facial expression, in all images, that is neutral, lest it be used against you later, and you find yourself in the gulag or a re education camp.
“Inspired by contemporary tensions in China, Zhang Xiaogang makes grim, unsettling portraits that consider identity and heredity in a collectivist state. The artist draws on influences that include political iconography, Chinese charcoal drawings, distorted Surrealist compositions, and family portraits from the Cultural Revolution era. His paintings, often executed in grisaille with bursts of bright yellow or red at the center, explore how varied individual histories are flattened into conformist representations.” (from here, where you can enjoy more of Zhang Xiaogang’s artwork) ~ Bart Gazzola
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Leslie Hossack | Ribbon of Tears No. 8
December 13, 2021Leslie Hossack | No. 8
Leslie Hossack is an Ottawa photographer who created this image as part of a series of 11 pieces reflecting on the devastation of residential schools.
Hossack describes these works as follows:
“These photographs are my response to the ongoing tragedy of Canadian residential schools. The compositions were inspired by memories of my own childhood – ribbons, crayons, kaleidoscopes, pinwheels. I felt cared-for and carefree. That is what I wish for every child.
I hope these images will provide a starting point for conversations about the history and legacy of residential schools – conversations building towards truth and reconciliation. Ribbon of Tears is dedicated to all those robbed of their childhood by residential schools.”
Artist’s Note: These photographs are not for sale commercially. However, prints can be ordered directly through Toronto Image Works at a cost of 30% off the list price.
More images by this artist can be enjoyed at her Instagram account here and at her website ~ Peppa Martin
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Lara Vychuzhanina | The life of Barbie and Ken in the Soviet Union
November 30, 2021Lara Vychuzhanina | The life of Barbie and Ken in the Soviet Union, 2017
First as tragedy, then as farce, we were warned a long time ago by Marx, is how history will play out. That’s a bit damning, but as we make our way further into the 21st century, it’s to be forgiven if many of us also see a more black than bleak humour in all this, a dark comedy that still makes us laugh, inappropriately.
Lara Vychuzhanina (whose Instagram name is aptly @lara_art_dolls) is a Russian photographer from Yekaterinburg – formerly known as Sverdlovsk, during the Soviet era, which I mention as it intersects with some of the ideas present in her work here, where she’s created a tableaux of Barbie and her partner Ken living in the USSR in the 1980s.
There’s always an element of nostalgia in depictions of history, allusions to a ‘simpler time’, and it’s interesting to see one about the USSR, as in the West we’re usually inundated with this false trope about the 1950s, or 1960s: Lara Vychuzhanina is too young to remember the 1980s in the former Soviet Union, but this doesn’t stop others from offering caustic and contested interpretations of those eras, either. Employing Barbie and Ken for this is a nice intersection of mythologies of East and West, capitalism and communism, plasticity and reality – and it is also, in the inherent contradictions of its assemblage, very funny.
After all, “comedy is in act superior to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to grandiloquent reasoning” (which, fittingly, is attributed to Friedrich Engels by Karl Marx, back in 1862)…..
More images by this artist can be enjoyed at her Instagram. ~ Bart Gazzola
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Heather Franklin | Flu
November 22, 2021Context is everything.
I first saw Flu, by Heather Franklin, in 2010. Heather, the Director of The Button Factory, Waterloo Ontario’s Community Arts Centre, made this drypoint print in 2006, drawn from a photo of three men during the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918.
What drew me to the image was its strangeness. Three men, obviously out of doors (as indicated by the skewed horizon line, so likely to be farmers), in masks, facing an invisible, deadly threat. The title gave away the timeline and narrowed the reason for their masked anonymity to a necessity rather than a choice – they were not running from the law. But the masks still made them “others”, unrecognizable, in a situation I could not fathom. The print carried with it a sense of the uncanny, with a deep sense of foreboding.
In 2021, these men have become very knowable. They are us. They are simple people, dealing with a situation beyond their control in the simplest way they can. Now I find myself less concerned with the contagion swirling around them than with the economic straits they find themselves in, how their families are coping, whether or not they have lost loved ones. They have become human where once they were alien.
You can find more of Heather’s fine illustrations on her Instagram account @heathersphotophoto.
~ Mark Walton
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Diego Rivera | The Detroit Industry Murals
November 19, 2021Diego Rivera | The Detroit Industry Murals, 1932 – 1933
Diego Rivera’s work in the Detroit Institute of Arts, titled The Detroit Industry Murals, is one of the finest works of art of the 20th century, and easily one of the finest examples of a mural ever; it’s not inappropriate to appreciate it as the apex of the Mexican artist’s career, and it functions as a significant touchstone of not just the history of Detroit, but of North America and larger issues and ideologies that were dominant at the time of its creation but that still are prevalent now.
“Between 1932 and 1933, Diego Rivera completed this series of twenty-seven fresco panels entitled Detroit Industry on the walls of an inner court at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It was commissioned by capitalist Edsel Ford but conceived by the Marxist artist as a tribute to the city’s industries and labor force. Rivera used the Ford motor plant in Dearborn Michigan as the model for the industry murals. This plant, the Rouge Plant, spread all along the Rouge River, had a steel mill, glass factory, and auto assembly line. By the time Rivera visited these plants, the depression was in full swing but Rivera didn’t record accurately aspects of the Depression. Note, for example the predella panel where workers are lined up to receive their pay in front a parking lot filled with cars, a scene he would not have observed since the work force had been dramatically reduced. In addition to the automobile industry, Rivera chronicles the history and development of various other industries in the area.
At various times the murals have been controversial. Initially, some critics focussed on Rivera’s communism asserting that he had painted a communist manifesto. Others complained that the workers were depicted as dehumanized in the murals, even though most workers saw themselves as represented with dignity. Some complained that the nudes on the East wall were pornographic and saw the “Vaccination” panel as sacrilegious. Later, during the McCarthy era, a large sign was placed in the courtyard with the murals defending the artistic merit of the murals while attacking Rivera’s politics. More recently, a case has been made that the cycle is universal, reflecting “not only the essence of the industrial culture of Detroit but also a belief in technology and science that is operative today. As such, it is a history-making work of art in which the working class and industrialists both find affirmation.” And the aesthetic value of the series is no longer in doubt; many believe that this series of frescoes represent the best of Mexican mural art in the United States.”
This work also has to be seen as part of a larger series, including Rivera’s harsh Frozen Assets (1931 – 32) but also informing Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the U.S. (1932) by Frida Kahlo, as they were a duo who contested and completed each other in their painting and ideologies. It’s also good to consider that too often, when engaging with art we privilege interpretations based upon ‘where’ we stand; this work – and the other ones I’ve mentioned by Rivera and Kahlo – looks at the United States with the eyes of an outsider (as I did, too, when I first visited it).
As a 19 year old new to the city of Detroit (and having my first real experience of the United States), The Detroit Industry Murals awed me (both in seeing the skyscrapers and trappings of the downtown that was the legacy of those glory days, and in stepping outside that bubble to the wasteland and abandoned industrial plants like detritus of a ‘better time’). To stand in the middle of the room, and be enclosed by these works, was a defining experience regarding both the possibilities and responsibilities of art. I’m offering a sampling of images here, but more can be enjoyed at this site: but truthfully, you must see this in person, in the downtown of Detroit, with all of its intersecting and contradicting narratives, and stand it its presence….
More images from this seminal work by Rivera can be seen here (and the long quote in this essay is also taken from there). ~ Bart Gazzola
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