Feigned Memories

Main Gallery
Curated by Curtis Joseph Collins.

Explores how postmodern cultural strategies in Canada are determined by a re-invention of the past, and highlights artistic practices ranging from painting to installation. Features new work by David Hoffos as well as several artists and collectives in the U of L Art Gallery’s holdings including Carl Beam, Chris Cran, General Idea, Rita McKeogh, Joanne Tod, and Jin-me Yoon.

Curator’s Statement

“Feigned Memories” celebrates the interdisciplinary quality of contemporary art in Canada, through works produced from the 1980s onward and selected from the University of Lethbridge Art Collection. The range of thematic strategies employed by the artists under consideration here is indicative of an ongoing postmodern obsession with memory. Two Lethbridge-based artists, Jennifer Crane and David Hoffos, have been commissioned to create new pieces for this exhibition, which will confirm how a deliberate feigning of the past continues to determine our cultural present.

The art of General Idea can be said to mark the considerable push of a postmodern condition in this country. The 1982 work by the Toronto-based collective entitled “The Unveiling of the Cornucopia” (see image above) is composed of five four-by-eight foot plywood panels that support a supposed wall fragment. This fake artifact makes reference to the commonly known archeological finds of Imperial Rome, more specifically a circa 50 B.C. fresco mural in Pompeii at the “Villa of the Mysteries.” By substituting the images of ancient Romans for that of three human-like poodles, the trio’s highly touted signature motif, the past and the present are artificially fused. The grand narrative of Western society’s ascendancy to the height of civilization, through visual proofs such as the Pompeii murals, is thrown in doubt as General Idea’s deconstructive effort takes a very physical form.

Upon entering and exiting Feigned Memories, viewers are also confronted by General Idea’s work via a monitor situated over top the Gallery’s doorway. The collective’s 1985 video “Shut the Fuck Up” critiques the never ending democratic chatter of North America’s mass media. Television turns upon itself in the hands of AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal as they quote a variety of 1960s programming including the Batman series and a documentary on the abstract painter Franz Kline. These emissions mark the modernist epoch in the United States, a time when the republic set out to achieve global domination. Hence an underlying claim to cultural superiority is undercut by the threesome whose interspersed broadcast news-style commentary implores the media to: “Shut the fuck up!” What’s more, these talking heads convey an everlasting immediacy to General Idea’s objection, which seems almost more poignant today as American television has swamped the world through satellite technology.

Painting and video are of equal importance to any history of art in Canada from the 1980s forward. Yet, undoubtedly the most engaging practice in such a lexicon of postmodern aesthetic impulses is installation, for it allows the orchestration of all techniques into architectonic productions. Rita McKeough, a Nova Scotia-born artist, has been making ephemeral spaces in galleries since the mid 1970s. The two oversized plush dogs with skyscraper bodies in the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery’s holdings are the vestiges of a 1984 installation for the Banff Centre for the Arts called “Urban Scroungers.”

The dogs function as symbols of multinational corporate greed in Calgary, where McKeough resided in the 1980s and watched urban residential neighborhoods get eaten-up by office tower developments. Each dog is positioned on a bed of shredded documents and accompanied by a sound track featuring ringing telephones, the tapping of keyboards, and rolling office chairs. However, the re-situating and re-broadcasting of this installation has changed it in 2003, as McKeough’s art becomes an anti-modern testament to the impossibility of stability or closure. The present can never be completely known and one should constantly question all claims to a full understanding of the past.

McKeough’s dogs take a graphic form in the 1984 etching “Urban Uprising,” (see image below) as she moves from three to two-dimensions along a singular thematic trajectory. Such a practice reveals an interdisciplinary approach that emerged in North American art from the mid-twentieth century onward. Like the crudely built dogs, her cartoon-like canines exist by ravaging the places where local people live to make way for faceless and often foreign corporations. Thus these activist oriented creations relive a particular instance in the artist’s personal history and speak to a micro-politics of social resistance.

Perhaps the most definitive shift in Canadian society over the past twenty-five years has been brought about by the political activism of Aboriginal, Inuit, and Metis peoples. Their respective claims to inherent North American rights and territories is gradually being recognized by Canada’s parliamentary and judiciary systems. This break down in the exclusive Western knowledge-power couplet continues to be affected on a cultural front by artists such as Carl Beam. The Anishnabai painter-ceramicist-printmaker from Manitoulin Island splices photographs and illustrations in “Rulers” (1995, see image – below left) as a means of questioning modern authority. Using a lithographic printing technique, the artist has placed his personal and collective sovereignty at odds with the origins of foreign control on this continent. Beam’s self-portrait, in which he holds a wooden ruler, seems to stand in defiance to the playing card images of a European king and queen. There can be no escape from colonialism’s brutal legacy as long as the original peoples of North America flourish, for they are permanent reminders of an immoral history that spans from the Enlightenment into our times.

One might say that it is postcolonial remembrances which confer a sense of urgency upon the postmodern situation in Canada and the United States. In the 1994 photo-screen and acrylic on Plexiglas work entitled “Fragile Skies” (1994, see image – above, right), Beam situates a portrait of Sitting Bull, the nineteenth-century Sioux chief who resisted American expansionism, against a newspaper headline and photograph of a noxious late twentieth-century industrial site. Both are images of loss issued from a subaltern voice that does not separate humanity and the environment. Moreover, he demonstrates a key oppositional method, within North American artistic vocabularies since the late 1970s, by quoting visual and textual material across disparate times.

If the multifaceted productions of the artists discussed thus far evoke a polyphonic value, then the large acrylic on canvas by Joanne Tod (no image available) in this exhibition represents a central and exclusive modern Western cultural tradition. The Montreal-born painter’s 1983 work “Melancholia” also slides back in time to remark on the present. A woman seated in the canvas’ foreground is dressed in a turquoise evening gown and long white gloves. While this 1940s style clothing recalls an era of North American glamour, this dated archetype of feminine beauty seems immersed in a meditative sadness as suggested by the paintings title.The woman’s longing for the Scottish bagpiper, depicted in a thought bubble over her head, bares an unknown psychological relationship to the barren room in which she sits. Could this work be a sign of bourgeois emotional emptiness or inherent depression brought on by the patriarchal underpinnings of Western society? Postmodern directives in Canada and the United States, which include feminist cultural advocacy, have not yet supplanted male oriented master narratives as much as they have forced them underground. As a woman, Tod takes hold of art history’s most vital practice to suggest an everlasting possibility for a problematic return to modern subjectivity.

Similarly, Vancouver-based artist Jin-me Yoon addresses subjectivity, but in relation to the landscape as a symbol of national identity. Yoon places herself in front of various scenic locations in Banff National Park for the 1991 postcard series “Souvenirs of the Self.” This photographic narrative hinges upon how Yoon, as a woman of Korean ancestry, occupies an invisible space in modern definitions of Canada. Postcards featuring picturesque views of the land date to the late nineteenth century in Europe and North America, and like landscape painting in Canada, they have served a singular concept of nationhood. Such images speak to the conquering and parceling of the natural environment from a Western male perspective, a dated model that will not yield to the multi-cultural differences of Canadian society today. Thus the artist demands to be recognized as a citizen of this country, in the face of a totalizing visual tradition that has held fast through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In 2001, Yoon transformed the “Souvenirs of the Self” postcards into six large scale C prints subsequently purchased by the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery. The first image in this self-portrait series entitled “Banff Park Museum,” depicts Yoon standing in front of a diorama containing a stuffed beaver. This rodent’s ever present association with nationhood, due to its economic importance during the European colonial era, can be said to visually outweigh the numerous contributions that Asian-Canadians and other immigrant communities have made to the country’s formation. A sign over the artist’s head reads “Cabinet of Curiosities” and indeed one is left to wonder how an officially multicultural nation can dilute its elite Anglo norms to counteract an ongoing internal alienation.

Irony may be the most pervasive thematic strategy discussed thus far in reference to postmodern advances, and much of the Calgary-based artist Chris Cran’s work turns on such a sentiment. His 1988 “Self-Portrait Accepting a Cheque for the Commission of This Painting,” (see installation image below) offers a wry twist on cultural commodification at the very moment of its determination. Peter Boyd, a prominent Calgary businessman and art collector, is depicted by the artist presenting him with a cheque while shaking his hand. Cran thus creates a perpetual present mediated by the painting’s ever-increasing history in real time. The politics of subaltern identities as examined in the aforementioned self-portraits by Beam and Yoon give way to an ironic humour drawn from within the patriarchal structure of Western society. Hence Cran, like many painters active during the 1980s, takes on the task of pulling painting out of a modernist abyss dominated by American-style abstraction through a return to the figure.

The wry suspension of time evoked by Chris Cran’s painting can also be traced via the internet on www.vanitygallery.com, accessed by visitors to the exhibition on a computer terminal set up next to the work. The artist’s web page features a three second video clip of him actually shaking hands with Boyd in front of “Self-Portrait Accepting a Cheque for the Commission of This Painting.” Such a reenactment adds yet another layer of satire to the original work which is, by its very nature, a fallacy. A notable difference between these active and static self-portraits can be found in the painting’s background where the curtain behind Cran and Boyd takes the form of a computer bar code of the artist’s favourite shampoo; yet another revealing twist on capitalism’s production of desire and ceaseless demand for consumption.
The spectacle of “Self-Portrait Accepting a Cheque for the Commission of This Painting” has parallels with Jennifer Crane’s performance entitled “Poise,” commissioned by the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery for the opening reception of Feigned Memories. For this version of “Poise,” the artist has organized a group of local young women to attend the opening wearing high school prom dresses (see composite image below).

Such a display of feminine pride illustrates the manner in which women are observed in public as objects of desire, but does not deny their power to be observers as well. Crane worked in a purely directorial fashion at this performance thereby allowing her art to take on a theatre-like quality that recreates a nostalgic yearning for the care free days of high school life in North America.

Lethbridge-based artist David Hoffos regularly calls upon his personal memories to produce multi-channel video-audio installations. For this exhibition, a component of “Scenes from the House Dream, Phase Two, Scene One, 65 Footers,” involving a mysterious cruiser in a ghostly marina scene, occupies a small curtained-off room in the Gallery (see large image below). Hoffos’ fascination with nineteenth-century parlour displays, twentieth-century North American theme park attractions, and Western museum presentation methods are all brought to bare on the viewer who also becomes a participant in this work commissioned for Feigned Memories. A human projection on a life-sized silhouette is positioned in a darkened room, and as visitors become engrossed with the effects of his diorama-like creation, they may be fooled into thinking they are not alone. The observer is suddenly transformed into a player in the artist’s world and joins images of the people from Hoffos’ life that appear throughout his oeuvre.

At the conclusion of Feigned Memories, the cinematic space of David Hoffos’ installation will cease to exist in its current form and the performance directed by Jennifer Crane will become an unrecoverable moment. This ephemeral state of cultural affairs in Canada needs to be understood as a necessary historical lack of closure or knowledge. References to both the immediate and distant past, via practices ranging from painting and printmaking to video and photography, are strategically feigned by the artists featured here. Perhaps it is these overt and latent acts of resistance to the master narratives of modern Western hegemony which must be remembered at a time when contemporary American democracy has come to resemble the ancient empire of Rome. Such an eternal vigilance could save the postmodern condition from stalling out in the present day.

Curtis Joseph Collins
Guest Curator

Curtis Joseph Collins extends a special thank-you to the following individuals for their professional and moral support: Josephine Mills, Adrian Cooke, Fred Greene, Lucie Linhart, Jon Oxley, Siri Kramps, Jennifer Crane, David Hoffos, Edison del Canto, Cliff Eyland, William Eakin, and Korey Williams.

The accompanying catalogue for this exhibition is available by going to the U of L Art Gallery’s PUBLICATIONS PAGE.

North American Indian Printmakers

Helen Christou Gallery
Curated by Curtis Joseph Collins

Featuring work from the Native American Studies Collection, and The U of L Art Collection.

Absence or Presence

Main Gallery
Curated by Curtis Joseph Collins

“The presence or absence of a recognizable image has no more to do
with the value in painting or sculpture than the presence or absence of
a libretto has to do with the value of music.”
– Clement Greenberg, “Abstract, Representational, and so forth,” Art and Culture
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) p.133.

This exhibition from the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery’s permanent collection focuses on abstract painting in Canada from the 1950s to the 1990s. The absence or presence of discernible subjects in such a body of work represents a key fluctuation in modernism’s cyclical nature. Each artist’s manipulation of colour, texture, form, and space appear as immediate solutions to the problems of image making, when in fact they are part of an aesthetic tradition that has existed for over a hundred years in Western Europe and North America.
The show’s signature work by B.C. Binning entitled Black Island (top of this page) is indicative of the central position abstract art had gained in urban Canadian cultural milieus by 1960. While the Vancouver-based painter’s reconstruction of a seascape is undoubtedly a summarized image in the modernist sense, it does not completely depart from the recognizable. Such an approach by this artist speaks to the influence that the mid twentieth-century British figurative sculptor Henry Moorehad over him. Ultimately Binning maintains the ancient Western tradition of treating the canvas as a window onto a receding natural space, which enables viewers to share a common associative experience.

Harold Town’s 1974 oil on linen Snap #78 (see Image 1 above) provides a fitting contrast to Binning’s piece for it completely releases easel painting from its primordial link to an observable reality, and evokes an incredible surface play of colour and line. The image now becomes a screen rather than a window, that has been produced by loading lengths of string with unmixed oil paints and snapping them across the stretched linen. Town along with William Ronald, Jock MacDonald, and Jack Bush, who are also represented in this show, were members of the Toronto group Painters Eleven from 1953 to 1960. Their respective experiments with non-objective imagery through the 1960s and 1970s carried the increasing authority that the New York art scene has exerted over this country’s visual arts since the Second World War’s close.

Undoubtedly the most highly regarded supporter of Abstract Expressionism and Post Painterly Abstraction in United States through the 1950s and 1960s was the New York City art critic Clement Greenberg, whose visits with artists in Central and Western Canada were considered monumental events. The unpremeditated rendering processes and juxtapositions of colour fields that he championed, with regard to the work of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, would reverberate in Canada for decades to come. Ron Martin’s employment of preconscious gestures to create Dioxidine Purple (see Image 1 above) appears as yet another innovation in the practice of non-objective imagery. However the lasting immediacy of action that the London artist’s 1971 acrylic on canvas displays is related to strategies employed by the Automatistes in the late 1940s. Paintings by Marcelle Ferron and Paul-Emile Borduas (see Images 2 and 3 below), who were members of the aforementioned Montreal collective, in this exhibition encourage viewers to embrace an idiosyncratic understanding of artistic impulses which stemmed from Surrealist manifestos published in Paris during the 1930s.

Montreal artist Rita Letendre’s oeuvre exemplifies the constant oscillation between the absence and presence of the subject in modernist Canadian painting. Her work of the 1960s is rooted in automatic methods and thus lacks any decipherable references, however by the mid 1970s she was producing paintings which were more firmly connected to natural incidences. The bold colours and sharp diagonal lines of her 1974 Istar (see Image 4 at right) suggest a radiating light source from beyond the canvas. Letendre’s membership in the Non-Figurative Artists’ Association of Montreal, which was established in 1956, served to inform her practice for decades as it did for fellow members Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant. Although their respective paintings in this show from the late 1960s demonstrate a more complete rejection of Euclidean space in favour of hypnotic optical effects

Subtle variations of blue in Roy Kiyooka’s 1967 acrylic on canvas are used to differentiate two large oval shapes, and while the image does not proffer an overt bond to the world around us it is dependent upon a celestial occurrence. His title Eclipse (see Image 6, left) thus reveals the phenomenal basis for such a seemingly non-objective painting. Kiyooka’s early involvement with the artists who came to be known as the Regina Five in 1961 also articulates how abstract art’s reach extended beyond Canada’s metropolitan communities to impact regional urban centers.

Ron Bloore, a member of the above Regina group, became famous for his white on white paintings which includes the untitled work in this show that lacks both colour and subject. Among the artists featured in Absence or Presence who operated outside a collective setting is Alex Janvier. In the Dene painter’s 1972 acrylic on canvas As Strong As A Bull Skull (see Image 7 below) negative white areas take on cranium-like shapes that are offset by whiplash lines and pools of pure colour. Such an interplay links this work to that of another Alberta artist in the exhibition, Marion Nicoll, who taught Janvier at Calgary’s Provincial Institute of Technology and Art, and her manipulation of positive and negative space infers but never confirms a mountainous landscape (see Image 8, below).

By the late 1970s abstract painting was slowly losing its primacy of innovative place in Canada to practices such as installation, photography, video, and performance. Artists including Gary Neill Kennedy (see Image 4, above) who resided in Halifax, began to push the application of pigments on canvas in a more conceptual direction. However his meticulously created 1978 piece in the exhibition is not wholly unrelated to the mesmerizing colour field works from the 1960s mentioned earlier. Despite the apparent avant-garde failure of modernism through the 1980s, Toronto artist Gershon Iskowitz’s 1986 painting on display here (see Image 1, above) forcefully renews the investigation of key aesthetic problems. His flattening of the canvas’s traditional illusionary space and utilization of brilliant red, yellow, blue, purple, and green oils is part of the same project that the French Impressionists initiated during the late nineteenth century.

Perhaps Canadian art historian Mark Cheetham’s understanding of post-modern art’s compulsion with memory can explain why non-objective painters over the past decade have begun to revisit works by the Automatistes, Painters Eleven, Non-figurative Art Association of Montreal, and Regina Five. Edmonton-based artist Graham Peacock’s 1992 Aaron (see Image 9 above) boldly looks to the past in its unadulterated celebration of colour and texture, while his use of styrofoam supports, glass beads, and reflective plastic strips on an organic shaped canvas breaks into the future. Peacock is a member of the Canadian-American collective called the New Painters, and they are reasserting the ebb and flow of a subjective absence or presence in contemporary art making.

“It is not unusual to read about modernism’s absence of memory, its amnesia within a putatively pure self-presence.”- Mark Cheetham, Remembering Postmodernism: Trends in Recent Canadian Art (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991) p.24.
Curtis Joseph Collins
Associate Curator

The accompanying brochure for this exhibition is available by going to the U of L Art Gallery’s PUBLICATIONS PAGE.

Helen Christou Gallery
Curated by Curtis Joseph Collins

This exhibition of works from The U of L’s Art Collection offers a glimpse of how Inuit artists have comprehended the growing presence of Euro-North American social, technological and political standards in their homeland.