Andrew Dexel

I wondered if I had prepared too many questions around the topic of his First Nations heritage as I walked towards Neubacher Shor Contemporary for my meeting with Andrew Dexel, a BC artist visiting for the week of his opening. The questions seemed impossible to get around. Sometimes, his boldly coloured works are meditative mandalas that appear more Tibetan than Aboriginal. At other times however, they reek pleasantly of the stylized shapes and animals distinctive of North West Coast Indian art.

As it turns out, I needn’t have worried about following this line of questioning. Dexel’s pride in his part-heritage (he’s half German) is evident and unavoidable in most of his answers. At one point in the conversation, he proclaims, “I’m so happy to be First Nations, I love everything about [it] my culture.”

Dexel is bridging the gap between contemporary Canadian culture and indigenous culture through his persona as well as his art. His appearance belies the fact that his art is borne primarily through traditional spiritual rites such as sweat-lodge. Dressed in black skate shoes, jeans, a simple grey jacket and a vintage trucker hat; he looks as though he may have stepped off the pages of a skate-boarding magazine. In parallel with this cultural paradox, his large scale canvases, covered in brightly hued contemporary acrylics, share motifs prominent in traditional First Nations art.

Dexel’s relationship to tradition becomes the focal point of our exchange. Musings on my own assumptions about his culture are prompted not only by the answers this young artist provides, but by the way he answers my questions. His responses to my queries fail to evolve into the flurry of theoretical discourse that I have become accustomed to artists feeding me. Instead, I want to call his replies monk-like, as they are often steeped in thoughtful silences and stories told to him by his elders.

When explaining the significance of the circle, which figures prominently in Dexel’s work, he recounts a story his dad told him about a dream in which he was living in a city, surrounded by squares, until he had pancakes for breakfast. Asking if I can understand the implied wisdom of the story, he apologizes for his crude retelling and clarifies some of the ways that the circle represents balance in his culture.

From what I can piece together of his personal history, it’s easy to see why the dream is significant for him. Dexel’s artistic pursuits began in Vancouver, as a graffiti artist. Around 8 years ago he started developing his skills as a painter, gaining acceptance to New Mexico’s prestigious Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). He spent little time in school however, citing that “he never wanted to study anything in depth to be limited by it, or to know more about life so that he could feel trapped by knowledge.”

Eventually, he moved away from Vancouver in order to make art and spirituality his complete focus. The one thing he made very clear to me was how for him, these two things are very much one in the same. When questioned about his art, he quotes another artist who deemed it Neo-Native Symbolist. He repeatedly stresses the importance of his use of colour and composition, inarguably the strongest elements of his work. The idea of pursuing a theoretical or conceptual direction within his art seems to ring as a moot point for him. The art is the spirituality, and his spiritual growth is the direction.

After dashing out of the gallery for an accelerated smoke break, he returns to our interview to tell me a final story. In it, there is a chief who is consumed by his desire for power. He traps a medicine man, who creates a deity to serve the chief  The medicine man warns him to keep the deity busy, or it will grow bored and evil. The chief gets the deity to build him houses and gardens and all sorts of items of pleasure, but he is unable to continue to entertain it and it evolves into a powerful demon.   Frustrated, the chief returns to the medicine man asking for help. The medicine man plucks one curly hair from his head and hands it to the demon ordering him to straighten it. As the demon repetitively pulls the hair, it only becomes curlier, and eventually the demon shrinks until it is almost out of sight.

“Do you understand?” asks Dexel. “The act of straightening the hair, that is my art.” Andrew Dexel’s paintings are on exhibition at Neubacher Shor Contemporary until April 30, 2013.

Rachel MacFarlane

It started in Ed Pien’s drawing marathon class at OCADU. The intensive drawing class forced students to come up with a new subject every three minutes. This exhaustive schedule pushed Rachel MacFarlane to find new inspiration. In a moment of desperation, she constructed a flimsy paper sculpture to sketch. Five years later, the artist is celebrating her second solo show at Nicholas Metivier gallery in Toronto (the first being a sold out success) of paintings based on only slightly more substantial maquettes.

Listening to her describe the initial paper constructing moment as a kind of physiological and perceptual fusion, I couldn’t help but envy MacFarlane’s successful inculcation into artistic rhetoric. Sitting across from me at one of my favourite mat-leave haunts, Crafted Coffee house on Ossington, the young artist looks mature for her age. Her appearance is somewhere between hipster and professional. Curly brown hair is neatly pulled back and she’s wrapped in a warm grey sweater, a comfortable accoutrement for her purple and gold striped vintage blouse and sharply drawn black eyeliner.

I’m ill prepared for this meeting, which works in my favour. MacFarlane seems to experience another level of this kind of pre-described fusion because at one point she remarks “wow, I’m realizing things about my work that I hadn’t thought about before…”  She begins by discussing her interest in the human preoccupation with the construction of space. As children we construct simulations that eventually lead to the development of our psychological schema, and as adults we allow ourselves the suspension of disbelief that gives us the freedom to enjoy all forms of entertainment media. Having left my home under the care of two industrious cleaning ladies this morning, I can’t help but muse upon my own banal preoccupations with my personally constructed surroundings.

MacFarlane’s constructions however, are decidedly non-precious. Making them out of a combination of recycled detritus and model making materials, she concentrates on using these models as catalysts for her paintings rather than works of art in themselves. The artist feels that painting gives her the freedom to explore the interaction between truth and perception in how we record information. Unlike a movie, or a sophisticated 2^nd life video game where the line between reality and fiction is temporarily forgotten, the artist is asking us to explore our preoccupations with the simulated environment without forgetting their artificiality.

Looking at the work, still on exhibition for a short time at Nicholas Metevier, the subject’s dissolution into artificiality is unabashed.  Classical painting techniques are paired with a blatant avoidance of convention in her work. Describing herself as “passionate about colour,” and her choices as “hedonistic,” MacFarlane combines unabashed use of pattern and texture (beyond impasto, at times paint looks as though it has been applied using a cake frosting tip) to push the work just past representational into the abstract. Just. Amid the vibrating whimsy, evidence of her still-life framework is still brazenly obvious.

The crudeness attempts to remind us that despite the increasingly believable illusion available in technology, these virtual scenarios remain immaterial. The discussion reminds me of a book on Buddhist philosophy I just finished, and interestingly MacFarlane reveals a goal for the future- to self-construct a rough habitat in which to paint. The idea is based on monastic shelters she witnessed while doing an artist residency in Ireland. She claims her art is based in reality and without spiritual undertones, but I wonder if maybe there’s something deeper lurking in that  experience of “fusion” that will continue to surface as her work evolves. I can’t wait to talk to her after she’s spent some time in her future habitat…

Until then, Rachel MarFarlane’s work is on show until January 26, 2013, at Nicholas Metivier gallery in Toronto.

Katie Pretti- Pareidolia

I think it was the organic lemon yerba mate drawn from her extensive tea collection that got Katie Pretti and me on the topic of Buenos Aires.  Having been charmed during two previous visits, Pretti returned to “the Paris of South America,” to complete a six week residency at Nigel Nolan’s  broken down mansion in the neglected Constitucion area of the city last February.

After painting gallery white over his muraled walls, Nolan opened his doors to artists to “Come!” to the house and make art inspired by the luxe space within the notoriously decrepit neighbourhood as a sort of independent artistic social reform project.  After six weeks of living in the city’s roughest neighbourhood, Pretti’s once idyllic notions of living touristic luxury within Buenos Aires were subsequently transformed into layers of negative emotions surrounded by nagging sensations of “white” guilt. She needn’t bask in it. Upon leaving the country with a hefty stash of her grand canvasses, Pretti was stung by bureaucratic corruption. In possession of paintings completed within Argentina, and without any sort of work or export permits, she was unable to bring them out of the country. She left without them, as well as any desire to return to the city.

oil stick, watercolour, pastel, acrylic paint, graphite on canvas

The experience caused her to reflect on the “latent issues of ownership” she experiences after the creation of her work. Translating her emotions into large scale works she describes as “expressionist for lack of better terminology” she inevitably creates “this thing that you can buy.” As an artist, she muses on how hard it is to let go of pieces which embody specific moments in her own life. Pretti reflects on the point at which she ends and her work begins. She describes exhibitions as symbolic moments at which point the work no longer belongs to her.

A self-admitted sensation junky, Pretti endeavours to make emotionally evocative work. “I love making art. That someone sees something of value in these things that I make- that in itself is a moving concept.” She admits that it’s “cheesy” to say that she is working from her own sadness, “but what am I going to say?” While she says that she is not trying to use her work as a way to “get the emotions out,” she sees the works as translations of the vivid human sensations she feels. They are efforts to remove the step between her inner and outer worlds.

oil stick, pastel, acrylic, watercolour, graphite on canvas

Using the title as a starting point, she tries to funnel the feelings evoked in the piece of text she has chosen (one of the pieces she spoke to me about, “Mother’s Sons” made reference to an old Portishead song) onto the surface using a collection of paint and drawing media. When describing her work she is more than hesitant to make reference to herself as a painter. “I have too much respect for painters” she says. “Using paint makes them paint-ings but that doesn’t make me a painter, a painter is a different kind of animal.”

I highly recommend you watch the video on this link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNxYzzWsGGI

Charming self-deprecation aside, not everyone is so critical of her creative abilities. Especially not Manny Neubacher, with whom Pretti is scheduled to have a show opening October 11. She ended up on the unnofficial roster at Neubacher Shor after meeting with his mother, Gerda Neubacher, the artist behind the Femme Art Collection. Already represented within the collection, Pretti decided to enlist Neubacher in her search for creative direction after she left the roster of Le Gallery. A moment during a casual coffee date turned into a scene of whirlwind spontaneity that one would expect to see in a movie about the life of an artist. Gerda insisted she return to Pretti’s studio to view her work and upon seeing it proclaimed it to be “fantastic yet scary” and promptly deposited the artist in the hands of her son.

The body of work that will be shown later this month is the culmination of Pretti’s recent artistic evolution during her travels over the last two years in Argentina, Europe, Los Angeles and a residency in Montreal. Having decided to reject an offer to do her Master’s of Art at London’s renowned Slade School of Fine Art, Pretti has been on a personal mission to push herself past her limits as an artist. While her current work definitely remains recognizable to her signature style, all her emotional digging seems to be evident in a dark dynamism that wasn’t there before.

60 Painters

If you haven’t made your way to the 60 Painters exhibition at the Humber Arts and Media Studios, you should take the time to make the trek. The exhibition aims to show a comprehensive overview of contemporary Canadian painting by both emerging and established artists. At times the definition of “painting” seems a bit loose with the presence of mixed media and sculpture works, but it definitely succeeds in presenting a broad range of current Canadian talent.

Toronto painting is well represented, with some fantastic pieces by artists I have written about in the past including Tristram Lansdowne, Dorian FitzGerald and Bogdan Luca. The show offers a convenient opportunity to see work from elsewhere in Canada also.  Below are some highlights.

From Douglas Udell Gallery in Edmonton and Vancouver comes Natalka Husar’s eerie portrait The background that follows you. It’s painted on vintage Soviet lenticular (that kind of picture covered in a ridged plastic that moves when you shift your viewpoint). The sharp realism of the figure against a comparatively stark natural background prevents the image from reaching novelty proportion.

In Melanie Authier’s large acrylic work, Scavenger, the viewer’s perspective is prompted to constantly shift to make sense of the intense movement and abstract materialism of the piece.

Martin Golland’s oil painting, Perch, offers the viewer a similar kind of surreal abstract material frenzy.

For some reason, Nicole Vogelzang’s delightfully realistic Sloth hangs from a cluster of ghostly crystals.

60 Painters runs until June 19, 2012 at the Humber Arts and Media Centre in Etobicoke.

Header image from Bogdan Luca‘s painting The Crossing.

Julie Gladstone prepares for the Artist Project

I took advantage of a grandmother’s love and a spring-like day this past Tuesday to take a break from my new addition and visit Julie Gladstone in her new studio in downtown Toronto’s east-side. The Walnut Studio alumni is busy preparing for tomorrow’s start of The Artist Project as well as a group show coming later in the spring at Walnut Studios.

Gladstone admits that her work is possibly in a somewhat transitional phase. For some time, she has been working to near compulsive levels adding checkered patterns striping and spiraling over the layers of her work. To Gladstone, the checkers serve as a motif representing the man-made, which she layers over the existing organic abstractions of her previous style.

Like her earlier work, she remains concerned with topography, but has been focusing on the idea of maps as allegorical representations of life. With no routes planned out, Gladstone explains that maps are no more than labyrinthine projections of possibilities. Her current mammoth works seem to serve as Gladstone’s projection of not only random physical topographies, but also mazes of life’s moral challenges within one’s own spiritual quest.

Though the work she will be displaying at the Artist Project will be smaller in scale, Gladstone has been pushing the boundaries of her creativity by creating massive paintings (ie. 7’+). It’s not surprising to see a personality such as Gladstone’s working on such a formidable scale. Her explanations behind her abstract concepts reflect the constantly wandering mind of a philosopher.

Please note that a previous comment regarding Walnut Gallery has been removed, as it did not accurately reflect the intentions of the project. Sincere apologies to the directors and owners of Walnut Gallery.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,700 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Linda Martinello

It’s been a proud month in the galleries on Queen West for my alma mater, with two graduates from theSheridanCollege/UniversityofToronto Artand Art History program showing within steps of each other. Clint Roenisch was packed last Friday with onlookers cooing over Dorian FitzGerald’s glossy images of luxury.  A general giddiness surrounded those lucky enough to get a look through FitzGerald’s imported stereoscopic spectacles to view two smaller identical paintings at the back of the show pop into 3D.

Across the courtyard, the walls of Edward Day Gallery are filled with the work of young artist Linda Martinello, a current master’s student at University of Waterloo. We met over coffee to discuss travel, the exploration of self, the sublime, and of course, art. Probed by her mentor, Denise Thomasos, to fully explore the timeline of her artistic inspirations and resulting practice, Martinello was well prepped to reveal to me the biographical and esoteric roots of her work.

Simplistically, her work is an effort to recapture the sublime sensibility and temporary ability to discard one’s sense of self that can be experienced during travel. This kind of rhetoric comes after years of the artist questioning the validity of landscape art as contemporary practice. The doubts are unsurprising given the highly conceptual framework of her art education, but unfortunate considering how landscapes were the animus for Martinello’s choice to attend art school in the first place.

Sipping on her black coffee and becoming increasingly more inspirited, Martinello took me back to her first trip abroad to a small village inItalyfor her grandmother’s funeral. The surreal experiences of meeting family with whom she could hardly communicate, visiting a foreign cemetery filled with ancestors’ graves, and seeing her lifetime in framed photos in an unknown grandmother’s home introduced the artist to the addictive experience of exploring one’s identity while immersed in the unfamiliar.

Though this excursion fueled the artwork of her OAC year of high-school, leading to a scholarship in visual art, Martinello virtually abandoned the panorama as her muse until her next trip toItaly3 years later. A trip to her mother’s homeland,Mexico, the following year, and an entire year spent inItalythe subsequent year led Martinello back to landscape exploration. It wasn’t until her brother graduated from architecture school however, that the artist happened upon her current method of working.

Inheriting from him a large roll of mylar, Martinello was finally able to produce work with the same abandon that she was feeling during her journeys abroad. Let go from the all-to-common fear of destroying the perfection of a primed canvas, she began to experiment on seemingly disposable reams of the acquired roll. Large scale mylar works remain as Martinello’s signature style. After laying down a quick ground with oil paint using colours noted in extensive non-visual reference made during travel- mostly words jotted within streams of consciousness- Martinello retells her feelings of that place, and within that moment in time, using graphite on the wet paint.

Her increasingly abstract sketches cause one to imagine the graphite twirling through her fingers as she draws. The surface of the paint is scratched away to varying thicknesses by lines alternately undulating and slicing through her almost random colour palette. Though she approaches the initial space with a vision of the geographic surroundings within her imagination, she makes no attempt to match the black graphite lines with the accompanying background. The artist encourages the viewer’s mind to wander along with her own, as her lines stray onto the uncharted blank spaces of the page.

Increasingly, her motivations; inspirations and research are embedded in musings on perception and consciousness. Her process continues to spiral further into a sort of meditative automaticity and absorption into memory. It’s debatable whether these works can even be called landscapes in the traditional sense, when so much of their creation relies on the artist’s visceral experiences. Ironic really.

Linda Martinello’s paintings are on exhibition at Edward Day Gallery until Saturday, November 26, 2011.

With just five weeks until motherhood, and the wintery silence of the art world nearing, I am expecting this to be my last post of the year. Thanks so much to everyone for reading and I look forward to sharing my conversations again in the spring.

Feel free to become a follower to avoid the anxiety of having to check in anticipating my next  post…;) And most of all, happy holidays!