A happening culminating on the steps of the Vernon courthouse titled Breast Protest
I began to work on SheShe seven years ago when a conversation was opened with Christian Bernard Singer who was the curator at the Tom Thompson Gallery. I had recently completed Awestruck Calendar of Ecology where the environment had been the focus, one of the major themes or threads that have run through my work, the other two primary themes being
1. gender - the trilogy of exhibitions and novellas titled Human Sacrifice: Quercia Stiories, The Revolving Door and Conscientious Perversity
2. spirituality The Buddha Composed 3 slides an exhibition from which the series Pass the Buddha showed in Kirkland Lake at the Canadian Museum for northern History many years ago.
Back to SHESHE …. because Tom Thompson’s works had been read within the context of a rugged male perspective, I determined that I would present a female take on the human relationship to mother earth. I decided to move inside, to the shelter of a home within which would be expressed a female sensibility built around family and particularly, the matriarchal line.
The concept was to create a home with a floor where elements of the sky was now grounded to mother earth. Three chairs would be a stand-in for family and there would be a table, a symbol of the human tendency to eat together with the assumption that all gathered at the table were in a circle of relationship that was safe, secure and a place of exchange. This was the impetus, the subject, but if there had been imagined a ‘goal’ that goal would have been simply to make something that would invite a conversation that would be opened by a phenomenal object. The message played a lesser role to that of aesthetics. The message served the desire to create a piece that would be unique and relational.
Another starting point was my longstanding interest in design - architectural and interior design. I have admired the parquet floors of historical buildings – those in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg are totally amazing - and ever since I used animal feet as a signifier of the animals embarking from the Ark, the animal feet in furniture design has particularly grabbed my interest.
I have never bought or owned a new chair or table; all have been handed down to me or bought from a second-hand store. I have made a lot of paintings. I decided that if I was to spend more time making things, it might as well be something I could use. The chairs originally were to be ladies’ chairs and before the table became a table, it was first imagined as a recliner with a moose antler as a head rest. The table seemed a better way to bring forward a new idea, that of the conviviality of the table, the idea of a dinner party. The large tapestry was to be a bedspread for a conjugal bed. It is the correct size.
I designed a chair but not knowing much about the balance and structure of a chair, I copied what I had at hand to guide my design. Carl St Jean (Into the Woods Cabinetry in Vernon) with whom I had worked before tutored me on structure and at some point in the making, the weight of the extensions and the engineering of the insides of the aluminum feet meant making changes to the my first impulsive designs.
I have had a history of working in large series with an exhibition venue in mind, creating for a space. SheShe was originally laid out for the Tom Thompson so that dictated the size. I like the idea of installation as a format for it allows for many chapters on a theme and the combination of materials is both liberating and constricting for components like the aluminum pieces, the tapestries and the cabinetry require my adhering to the rules of the disciplines, as if having to learn how to phrase an idea within an established sentence structure.
What is SheShe all about?
First, it is difficult to pin down the reason for making any art because art doesn’t readily connect to logic. It doesn’t add up. Much like life. To say that an aim has been achieved, that the original goal has been fulfilled, that the exercise in making has proved successful, that is too lassoed because art, like life, defies confines. It wiggles free the minute the work meets a new beholder. It exerts an independent appeal upon that singular relationship for art is a conversation more than a statement. The artist opens the conversation which might have already been in progress, linked to another idea, begun in the miasma of life. The piece gels the matter, but it doesn’t set entirely. It doesn’t set until it is tasted, viewed, and then it revives, it wiggles free to assume an individual meaning to that viewer. The initial task for the artist, if it must be pinned down, would be to offer something that is sufficiently unique and relational to be able to engage the interest of the viewer long enough to inspire the time needed to grant meaning to the work. For the viewer to grant it meaning backed by the personal knowledge and background of that engaged viewer. The artist has gone by now and the conversational potential lies only in that piece. That is why it is difficult to ask an artist to explain a work of art that they have made. The explanation lies in the object, in it’s ‘objectness’.
It might be easier to approach a landscape painting without asking that same question – “what is it about?” because the ‘reason’ for the landscape painting has sunk into our social and cultural lexicon. Even if that landscape carries tangential tropes of the trade – for instance we might say that abstracted it reveals the mind of the artist at those particular moments in which the painting was made - even in this kind of theoretical attempt to define, the essence of that work is more than likely watered down and misunderstood. Again, art is like life, open-ended once begun, once launched. There are just too many variables during the conception and making of a piece that lend themselves to the final work – emotional, social, technical, skill levels, clarity of mind, outside contingencies interrupting – to attempt to gauge whether or not a goal has been reached. Artists do this at one point only and even that point is ill-defined - when they determine that the piece is finished, when the work goes out as the stand-in for the idea to communicate with another human being just by being there.
Unique and relational.
Often the right place and time helps to further the conversation. An opportunity to present, like this, secures a certain respect in the impending conversations that the venue validates. The Temiskaming Gallery frames the conversation by acknowledging a level of worth as it offers the viewer the opportunity to engage.
Whether or not the work is successful? The decision is made by the viewer. The artist has already nipped the umbilical cord and declared that the piece, or pieces are ready to go out there and live. It may require some nurturing introductions but hopefully it is ‘speaking’.
In SheShe, I wanted to pull art away from an action that pushed outwards to engage and instead invite a movement towards the piece, to create a hospitable gesture. If the statement is dependant upon the accumulation of knowledge that an artist brings forth to a piece, then the act of hospitality, is one that proves to give back as much as it gives out. It is the beginning of that conversation and through conversing, a back and forth exchange, there is growth.
In order to be hospitable, one must have something to share, to invite the other into. Women have historically been the plant managers of the home, a role that grew from the biological fact that women carry the offspring within their bodies and then birth out into a corresponding purposefully nurturing space. It is a concept centric to the body, that has had the intrinsic realization of the work that the body has performed in making a new human. It is a concept that values life to an extent that women are not easily lured into the idea of war. They are not willing to risk the body produced, the human that was at risk from the outset. Child birth is is rightly called ‘labor’ and hurts. When women stand behind war is when protection of the home is factored into that will to engage.
SheShe is a room, an open space that is offered as a gift, a solution to conquest and a call of welcome. It is a ‘work’ that seeks to edify the trappings of generosity. It is a visual party that circulates closer to beauty. It is feminine, purposefully open to receive. Advocating co-operation and hospitality might be an answer to the wrenching tangle now in place between politics and sociological needs.
The scrolls were done after the pandemic had dissipated somewhat. We were able to travel, the exhibition in Poland had been edifying, wonderful to be out again.But then the reality of dealing with shipping SHESHE back to Canada set in as shipping costs rose five fold.
Also my environmental concerns became more critical.
I had completed a second novel, close to ten years in the writing process, titled Stellar Helly. Each scroll is a kind of portrait of one of the five major characters.
Stellar Helly is a literary novel that begins in the Danforth neighborhood of Toronto in the 1960s and travels between there and a marijuana grow op in the wilderness of BC with avant-garde scenes in New York and Toronto from the 1970s to 1990s. It is told from three voices –Rozandru “Rose” Olympia Voda, daughter of a Romanian immigrant and an aspiring dancer; Luca “Leo” Racota, an artist and marijuana grow operator who marries his high school sweetheart, Dotty; and Helen Marianne “Helly” Racota, Leo and Dotty’s teenage daughter recently extracted from the cult in which she grew up with her mother. Vivinni is an impresario who enables their progress and Duco, Rose’s younger brother, Helly’s age is her dearest friend. As they tell their own stories, they become entangled in the others so that their individual stories become impossible to extricate from the complicated strands that tangle them together.
The scrolls have a far smaller footprint but still deliver an impact because they have scale. I complete them in sections and don’t get to see them until they are hung so that the complete picture is a surprise, even to me. I can’t be over controlling, the images themselves have a significant influence, determining the next step as I work my way down.
The last scroll is The Saskatchewan Scroll and is designed to be hung vertically or horizontally.