Category Archives: Julian Gunn

Video night experiment succeeds

Video Art @ Garrick’s Head Pub, Victoria, BC
Featuring works by Rick Raxlen, Janet Rogers, Scott Amos, Carolyn Doucette, Pamela Millar, Alejandro Valbuena, Constance Cook, Carrotkid Films, and Morgan Tams.

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

I recently attended an experiment. There were no electrodes involved, though electronics played a key role. Open Space Gallery, MediaNet, and the Garrick’s Head Pub hosted a showcase of local video artists.

The Garrick’s Head expansion crowns Bastion Square and has a friendly, over-scale feeling, with a mixture of ordinary seating and enormous banqueting tables attended by stools. Our party of three occupied a corner of one such edifice, facing the large screens arrayed along the south wall above the bar. Another filmmaker (not part of the show, but very friendly) and an artistic associate sat down across from us, and another pair of viewers joined us further down. There was a general sense of creative camaraderie. The evening was a little ad hoc, in that there were no printed programs, but Doug the MC very kindly lent me his script so that I could make notes on the titles and creators of the works.

The night began with Morgan Tams’ Killer’s Crossing, subtitled “A Pacific Northwestern”–a surreal cow-metal rock opera in miniature, with words and music by Brooke Gallupe (of the late lamented Immaculate Machine). Richard Raxlen‘s playful envisioning of Jane Siberry’s “Everything Reminds Me of My Dog” followed. Raxlen showed two pieces; the second was a visual accompaniment to “Mumbles,” the jazz tune known for its cheerfully incomprehensible vocals, a kind of virtuoso glossolalia. Raxlen’s jumpy, layered lines and half-seen figures worked similarly at the edge of interpretability.

The pub noise sometimes presented a challenge during the quieter or more verbal pieces. Victoria Poet Laureate Janet Rogers‘ contribution, Just Watch, used a simple juxtaposition to powerful effect. Tiny silhouetted figures crossed an unstable surface that seemed to rise and fall above a brightly coloured static scene. I won’t explain the trick of it here, since I found the disorientation so effective, but it’s worth seeking out. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really hear what the speaker in the video was saying.

Scott Amos‘ highly textured experiments in Primordial Soup stirred O’Toole to comment wistfully that it was “Very NFB,” and it did have the exploratory feeling of the golden era of NFB film-making. (A YouTube description notes that Primordial Soup is “an experiment with acrylic paints, India inks and drain cleaner on an old 16mm film.”) In contrast, Paul Whittington‘s L19 Disposed is a bleakly funny dystopian animation that accomplishes a lot of (non-verbal) storytelling in two and a half minutes.

Originally shown on Bravo!, Alejandro Valbuena’s Caffeine uses a cafe and the delicious drug it dispenses to frame dance sequences. My favorite segments reminded me of the risk-taking momentum of Québécois dance troupe La La La Human Steps. Caffeine was followed by Carolyn Doucette’s Little Plank Walk, in which live-action foraging to chanted vocals gave way suddenly and delightfully to experimental saxophonage and edgy animation. Pamela Millar’s Blue Minute Bridge is a metallic noise poem, a visual and auditory dissection of the Johnson Street Bridge, previously screened as part of the BC Spirit Festivals. The evening ended with Constance Cook‘s Anarchist Footwear, a playful depiction of a community’s feet that filled me with reminiscences.

Even with minor sound issues, the night was a success. Many of the video pieces shown are available online through YouTube, Vimeo, and other sources. I recommend that you look them up.

Julian Gunn is a local writer with eclectic tastes.

 

 

Painters inspire new perceptions

On Friday, March 15th, Deluge Contemporary Art (located at 636 Yates Street) hosted the opening of Drama of Perception, an exhibit of the work of three contemporary painters: Stephanie Aitken, Katie Lyle, and Shelley Penfold, all former students of the University of Victoria Visual Arts Graduate Program. Deluge, located in the upper story of Victoria’s original fire hall, sponsors the Antimatter Film Festival and aims to represent “a vanguard of visual and media arts in Victoria.” The curator for the exhibit is Sandra Meigs, a visual arts professor at the University of Victoria; Julian Gunn interviewed her about the artists and the show. Drama of Perception runs until April 15, 2013.

Sandra, how did the exhibition come about? How did you come to hang the work of these three painters together, and what kind of context do they create for each other?

I’ve been teaching painting at UVic for twenty years. I’ve known Deborah De Boer, the gallery director at Deluge, over the course of that time and I’ve always admired the way she supports artists in Victoria. Her gallery space is lovely and a really good focused space for viewing art.

About a year ago Deborah asked me if I’d curate a show of painters. She said she’d be interested to see what paintings I put together because I “have an interesting mind.” All three of these painters work in a way that is free of referential structures and strategic methods of construction. By that I mean that they form their images from something other than direct referencing of things in the world. Stephanie paints from her head, using her own made-up drawings to paint from. And Shelley leaves her canvases outside and lets nature take its own course on them before bringing them into the studio and then reads herself into them. Oh sure, Katie Lyle paints women, and may have stacks of magazine images and photos of women in her studio, but she rarely paints directly from them. It is more like she has digested the world, and then transferred it into herself.

Stephanie, Katie and Shelley were all in our Grad Program at different times. They are living in Vancouver and that also interests me. The art scene in Vancouver is not overwhelmingly supportive of painting, but I know there are a lot of great painters living there, so I thought this might be a way to get to know some of what’s happening there in painting. And that certainly worked, as I went twice to visit the artists’ studios. One of the artists is going to arrange for me to do more studio visits with other painters over there soon.

You note that when you look at these paintings, you “have total conviction that the forms . . . exist in the world.” I found that particularly true of Stephanie Aitken’s paintings, which often seemed haunted by real-world perspectives–partially occluded views–flattened into a plane, which makes me think immediately of photography. Although the forms themselves have a genuine immediacy and are not mimetic, can you speak to the subterranean role of mediated viewpoint in Aitken’s paintings?

That’s an interesting idea. Yes, they do seem occluded, one could say looked at through one eye because they lack spatial depth, also altered, as though looking through a fish-eye lens. I think of them as totemic heads that have no back or sides but that are nonetheless authoritative. Their flatness is their virtue and strength and everything good about them. Like a veil that has all the power of the kingdom behind it. I don’t see them as mediated viewpoints. On the contrary, I think they are completely unmediated. That is, they exist without the intervention of any other Thing.

On a similar note, your discussion of Katie Lyle’s portraits was fascinating. At a cursory glance, her paintings might appear to be rather inexpertly rendered portraiture. However, in your monograph you describe Lyle’s long process of “working in” these images, and closer examination shows evidence of careful relationships among the small geometric forms, the lines and arcs, that compose the features of these faces. So Lyle’s paintings are, in a sense, performative works–she is performing a certain kind of painting and also undermining our assumptions about it. How might you advise a viewer to approach this performative element in Lyle’s work?

I guess. Sure, you could say they are performative. Her work is a recording of its own formation. I imagine a beautiful portrait, an at-once captured likeness in paint, and a genuinely radiant young woman showing all her heart and soul, free of touch ups and fakery, at her most absolute real. Then I imagine Katie having made that portrait and repainting it over and over, trying to capture some fleeting essence of the young woman. I imagine that as Katie paints, Katie is also thinking about painting and about all we have seen of painting. I imagine Katie wants to kick painting, to rock it, to destroy and challenge all of our assumptions about beauty in art so as to get closer to the woman’s essence. So, the paintings are a mash-up of radiant young woman meets painting, full on. The geometric forms are new. I think those are very new paintings. I think that is Katie’s way of pushing the painting back even more into a kind of formal depravity that begs for its own beauty.

Actually, all of these questions may be about process and its relation to final form. It seems that there are two distinct stages to Shelley Penfold’s process of creating her paintings. First, there is the phase of putting the canvas itself into situations where it will become weathered and altered–an object with a certain independence. Second, there is the phase where her own gestures become important as she adds marks. Both stages contain random and chosen elements, but can you speak about the relationship of the two? Or if we want to shed the temporal aspect, the relationship of the marks on the surface to the features of the surface itself?

Yeah. I don’t actually think much about those paintings is random. I think Shelley has a lot of control over where she puts them outside, what the weather is going to do to them, what colours she put on them first or adds later. That is the main attraction of the work to me, which is that I can’t figure out what is random and what is chosen, so I choose to think it’s all chosen. Who knows why a sailboat got into that scene in “Fountain of Youth”. Or, why “Blue Lightening” looks like it has a turkey drumstick in it. Or why there’s no man in Mr. Mister. How lovely! That’s how the imagination works. No explanation needed. Also what I find fascinating about them is the play between the marks and the surface. Which is which? A pour of brown enamel is equally a surface and a mark. A scratching of distressed dye on fabric is equally a surface and a mark. Sometimes there is the odd gestural line as in “Blue Lightening” which is very much a mark, but there aren’t many of them. Just ones you could count on one hand. And that makes these grouping of paintings seem most basic or base to me, of essence to humanity.

“As I persist in doubt and knowingness, I am closest to my living perceptual experiences of the world.” That’s your comment about viewing these works, and it comes close to a Buddhist statement about using meditation to achieve an immediate relationship to the world. Is this a goal of artistic production for you? A goal for you, as a viewer of art?

Absolutely! For me, working in the studio is a state of mind that is focused on the moment. Making art is having freedom from thought and an engagement with the world through each and every breath of movement in space between the canvas, the palette, the brush, and the hand, the being. To get in that zone is to set the thinnest possible membrane of separation between the world and me. We become one, you see. Think about the studio as a giant meditating mind. The Artist is in there kicking stuff around and trying to get rid of chatter to make the one form that essential in that moment.

Looking at art can be meditative if the art doesn’t try to complete too much for me. If it is me who is completing it, then it works. That allows me the engagement of doubt and knowing that makes me aware of myself completing it and of not completing it.  A constant, endless meditation.

Leonard Cohen delivers unique holiness

By Julian Gunn

My plan was to see the exhibition of Leonard Cohen’s prints at a leisurely hour on Saturday morning, after some strong coffee and a wander up Oak Bay avenue. I knew that the Avenue Gallery resided there, theoretically stuffed with the evidence of Cohen’s vision, tucked between a Starbucks and Ivy’s Bookshop. I’d asked my friend J. to come along, but his schedule was less flexible than mine, so he called the gallery Friday night to see if he could run by after work (the sneak!)—and they told him the show was over. The newspaper and the website showed the wrong end date.

He texted me the news. I railed against fate in a few brief bursts of angry typing, and then J. updated me: the gallery owner had revealed that there were still a few stacks of prints standing up against the walls. We could see them if we wanted to, provided we arrived before five-thirty. It was almost five. We bolted to Oak Bay in J.’s car, Poncho.

It was true: the show was down and the gallery folk were in the midst of redecorating for the next exhibition. The whole room smelled of fresh paint and thwarted longing. The remaining works of Cohen stood on the floor in three close files of matching frames. The large and medium prints rested against the back wall, and the small ones were almost under our feet near the cash desk. J. knelt down and with reverence parted the frames. There it was, Leonard’s sigil and stamp, the Unified Heart: two interlocking hearts in a circle, a modified Star of David.

I’ll level with you, friends. I believe that Leonard Cohen is a saint. I don’t adhere to any faiths with saints in them, but I know a holy fool when I see one.  If  you were at his concert with me on Wednesday night, you saw him too, frail as a bird in a black suit, tipping his hat to us and the beautiful, terrible joke of mortal life. (That Voice. Inimitable. Sinking over six decades from a quavering tenor into an almost subsonic bass tremor rolling through the flesh of the earth itself. That Voice, now beginning to grow ghostly. It frightened me, but it made him laugh.) I say frail, yet he played three encores. We didn’t leave the Save-on-Foods arena (which Cohen described as “this difficult space”) until almost midnight.

Still, we are here to talk about Art. In parallel with Cohen’s gig, the Avenue Gallery exhibited a travelling display of his work. Or so I surmise—I never actually saw it on the walls. The question I was asked to contemplate was a reasonable one: was it Leonard Cohen’s great gift for visual art, or only his massive fame, that merited a display of his prints? We know he can write a song, but can he draw?

It is an article of faith with me (I have faith in any number of things, if not a central bureaucracy of divinity) that anything made with true attention, honesty, and compassion will produce beauty. I think you can tell. I think that it shows.

I think it shows in Cohen’s prints. There’s skill in the execution: a thick calligraphic line that twists to form a face, slightly abstracted Grecian forms for beloved women. There’s clumsiness too–the same lumpy pixellation that confused me in the art for his album Dear Heather.

The visual art’s precise analogy is his music. I think even we who love Leonard above rubies can agree that Mr. Cohen didn’t start out as a great musician or vocalist. He began instead as someone with a profound gift of attention—to the sudden flaring of the sacred in the ordinary world, to the nuances of desire and longing, to his own internal states. There’s a kind of narcissism in his work, but it is a wrenchingly humble self-contemplation that deserves a better name. Likewise, his visual work is full of self-portraits, but these are not self-aggrandizing images. Quick tracings of the deep canyons in an old man’s face, they bear wry inscriptions:

yes
always somewhat
off balance
but peaceful
in his work
peaceful
in his vertigo
an old man
with his pen
deeply familiar
with his
predicament.

That gift of attention, worked on by years of effort and humility, has produced something more than artfulness, though I think his songs are great art. The only word that comes close enough is holy, if there were some version of that word that insisted on only precisely the feeling of bliss and peace and mutual surrender. The songs have been transformed further by the musicians Cohen brought together to tour with him. The liquid violin of Alexandru Bublitchi, the incredible fingerwork of Javier Mas, the playful and sure percussion of Rafael Gayol, the golden vocals and songwriting gifts of Sharon Robinson—these would all be worth a ticket in themselves. We had all those, and we had him too.

“It kind of fits, though, doesn’t it?” J. pointed out as we rushed to the Gallery in pursuit of the remaining fragment of the art show. “Somehow it’s better this way, to come too late and to almost miss it. It’s like something from his songs.” And he was right.

 

Julian Gunn is a Victoria writer and music lover.

Cenote auctions art to resist Enbridge

Art Against Enbridge 2
Cenote Restaurant and Lounge,
768 Yates Street

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

Last Friday night, my friend Beet and I attended Art Against Enbridge 2, a benefit art auction for the Unis’tot’en Action Camp and the Forest Action Network, hosted by Cenote Restaurant and Lounge.

Our first problem of the evening was finding Cenote. Google Maps put it at the site of the former Office lounge in the Dalton hotel, but Google Maps lied. Finally, we ventured into the hotel lobby, where we found a grizzled concierge who had never heard of the place but obligingly looked it up on his computer.

Cenote is a below-decks lounge with a relaxed DIY feel. (It’s the former Whitebird Lounge, if that helps. And the polenta fries are supposed to be great.) Three hosts greeted us warmly at the door and took our suggested donations. Beet and I captured a table in the back.

Presently, the other two members of our party arrived—Beet’s boyfriend S. and his friend X. They had just come from an intervention and were feeling a little shaky. Cenote didn’t have a fixed drinks menu. Instead, X. described the uplifted mood she wanted her drink to embody, and our server brought her a mojito. Then we approached the art.

Artists at all levels of experience—from student to autodidact to professional—had donated pieces. Most of the works either celebrated the natural world or measured the depredations of industry, and were realistic in approach. This wasn’t a show of academic defiance, technical play or formal rupture, but of passion and craft—sometimes mastered, sometimes still in progress.

I liked Eli McGinty’s “The Scourge Heads Westwards,” with its Cthulhu-Illuminati vibe. Alongside were traditionally rendered West Coast works by Wes Walkus and Blake Norman Lepine; a graceful drip watercolour by Judy Kozler; and a scattering of other media, including my favourite thing ever: purple fairy wings by Amira Abdel-Malek. Abdel-Malek has been organizing an art group at Camosun College using reclaimed materials. Beet bid on a forest print and Amira’s wings. I bid on a small print, Neurozyme, by Mokii Glyphix, with a soft bronze sheen and a pattern both organic and geometrical.

Every so often the organizers stepped up, cheerfully exhorted us to get our bids in, and gave away more door prizes. Over the evening, they closed the auction one wall at a time, like the Sybil burning her scrolls.

By ten-thirty, the event was winding down. I wandered up to check our bids. Beet did not win the print, but she won the wings. Someone named Martin, my new arch-nemesis, outbid me on everything. When I turned to see if Beet was ready to go, she was carefully affixing the wings to her head.

“Do I look like some kind of demented rabbit?” she asked eagerly.

“No-o…” said her boyfriend. “Just a rabbit.”

It seemed fitting. The grassroots improvisations of artists and activists, both foolish and sublime, have sustained us for a long time. This is the second Art Against Enbridge that Cenote has hosted, and we’re looking forward to the third. Especially now that we know how to find it.

Julian Gunn is a Victoria writer completing his master’s degree in English

Barton’s new book embraces 30 years of writing

For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Collected Poems

By John Barton
135 pages, $19.95
Published by Nightwood Editions

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

The late-September launch of John Barton’s new collected poems, For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin, was so packed that one latecomer had to crawl in behind my seat. I’d just finished browsing the wall of local authors, my favourite part of Cadboro Bay Books. I was sitting down to consume an enormous rum ball when this stranger lay down behind me. I felt suddenly shy and oddly responsible, as though only the uprightness of my posture could prevent this extra person from being flung out into space.

There are two great stops on the Greyhound route of a poet’s published work. (Forgive me – I just got back from a trip up-island.) There’s the Selected Poems and then there’s the Collected Poems. John Barton’s a little young for a Collected, but he’s a major Canadian poet, and For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin, his selected poems, is certainly due.

Boy is drawn from nine earlier books and four chapbooks spanning more than thirty years of published work. Barton’s reading explored his career-long commitment to the fearless expression of what we could call a homo-aesthetics, exploring bodies of land, of water, and of flesh. He opened with “Watershed,” from 2001’s Hypothesis, then moved backwards to “Hidden Structure,” an early poem in which the speaker struggles towards an authentic expression of his desire for men.

Between poems, Barton told us he often advises other poets that they “repeat too much.” Yet John himself has a knack for arresting repetition, a kind of imagist insistence on a particular utterance and its echo: “I arrive at the sea. It repeats me / repeats me” (“Hidden Structure”). This gift found a powerful expression in the one new poem Barton read. The poem, a meditation on the circumstances of Omar Khadr, is a variant on the sonnet. The word “know,” initiated in the first line, recurs in each line that follows, beautifully unravelling our confidence in knowing itself.

Some of my favorite Barton poems are in this collection. “Ecology,” from 1994’s Designs from the Interior, is almost an ars poetica for Barton’s particular merging of landscape and eros: “I loved you / with a passion I could not call love, // instead called ecology.”
There is also less sublimated eroticism in Boy. There are stories of pickups, brief affairs, tenuous loves, often wryly described. In “Aide-Memoire” the speaker caustically lists former lovers like self-marketed products. Yet the language of the poems is infinitely tender, so that they seem less like gritty documentary and more like sacred texts. Transcendence constantly threatens to break through. So a poem about a one-night stand, “The Man from Grande Prairie” ends with the admonition that we “must learn / to stop, learn to carry this darkness / toward each other with unblaming hands / of light.” Barton chose not to include any new poems in Boy, so this collection has a kind of finality, but we can expect this dual offering to continue, transmuted into new forms.

Julian Gunn is a Victoria writer of both poetry and personal essays.