Lorne Roberts, art critic

Saturday, September 1, 2007

From Galleries West-- web reviews

MANITOBA: Cliff Eyland: Cameras, Cellphones and Hard Drives, Sept 21 to Oct 21

http://www.gallerieswest.ca/Manitoba/Winnipeg/Departments/ExhibitionReviews//6-107283.html

MANITOBA: Cliff Eyland: Cameras, Cellphones and Hard Drives, Sept 21 to Oct 21, Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg


Girl.tif, Cliff Eyland, 2003 - 2004, digital Photoshop file, 12.7 cm x 7.6 cm

Since at least 1981, Cliff Eyland has been working in tiny, file-card sized paintings, mostly on board. He’s exhibited widely with the style, including an ongoing installation project in the Raymond Fogelman Library at the New School University in New York, in which he's slipped thousands of painted library cards into library books, to be checked out by unsuspecting patrons. He recently installed a two-storey stack of over a thousand small works at Winnipeg's Millennium Library.

But in spite of its consistent medium, Eyland's work has always defied description, falling somewhere between abstraction and figurative work, seeming to combine the recognizable with the baffling.

In his latest exhibit, showing at the University of Winnipeg's Gallery 1C03, Eyland has given us a gallery full of fictive cellular telephones, cameras, and computer hard drives, all as paintings on board or as combinations of paint and stuck-together objects. And as always, the work defies easy description or categorization.

In addition to a quiet electronic track that fills the gallery with sound—a new addition for an Eyland exhibit—the walls are adorned with useless technological devices, creations that somehow claim or aspire to be more than what they are. In Eyland's world, two pieces of board stuck together with some yellow paint between them and a useless power cord dangling beneath, becomes a hard drive. Useless cameras, stationed near the gallery's ceiling, become useful for photo shoots which Eyland's written guide tells us would probably go more smoothly, since the model knew that no pictures were being taken. The cell phones are often blobs of paint on board, or use chewing gum packets as keypads, and all make little claim to be functional as anything other than art—wherein lies much of the show's deadpan sense of humour.


	untitled (cellphone), 2006, acrylic, enamel spray paint and gum packet on MDF board, 12.7 cm x 7.6 cm

For example, the guide explains drily that other works are "imaginary cellphones that are only useful for talking to oneself or someone within earshot", or that "the keypad on this phone doesn't work because the buttons are made of smeared paint."

In addition to works spaced evenly across the walls, Eyland has made the room's actual electronic components—light switches, thermostat, and alarm keypad—the centrepieces for groupings of his own works.

There's been discussion for a while now about a specifically Winnipeg style of art, exemplifed perhaps by the recent Supernovas exhibit at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. The suggestion is that it's work by serious artists that still manages to avoid taking itself too seriously. Think of this idea, and names like Marcel Dzama and the Royal Art Lodge, collage artist and gallery owner Paul Butler, or members of the 2-6 collective immediately come to mind. It's interesting that Eyland has been writing about these artists for years, since that particular style often seems to be so present in his own work.

It's no coincidence that, under another hat—that of fine arts professor at the University of Manitoba—Eyland has taught painting to an entire generation of Winnipeg's young artists who, to some degree or another, could be thought to be bearing his influence.

In this latest exhibit, with its useless technology imposed around the real, so much of what's made the "Winnipeg" style can be seen—it's work that's seems playful in tone, but raises questions about perception and images, and is the product of a relentless and determined practice of art-making.

— BY Lorne Roberts

From Galleries West Magazine, Spring 2007

(www.gallerieswest.ca)

Paradise On The Prairie


Detail from The Paradise Institute, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, 2001. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Anonymous gift, 2002.

Contemporary Art Draws a Crowd in Yorkton, Saskatchewan

In the past, selling tickets in small-town Saskatchewan may have involved the traveling circus, or an itinerant preacher passing through on horseback. These days, it’s more likely to involve a big game for the local junior hockey team. But in the Yorkton region recently, contemporary art has been bringing in the crowds. The Paradise Institute, an internationally celebrated video and audio installation with a strong prairie connection, was in town for three months in the fall of 2006, proving that smaller centres can sustain interest with special exhibitions that are unusual, challenging, and Canadian.

“The reaction to it has been absolutely fantastic,” says Brenda Sherring, former director of Yorkton’s Godfrey Dean Gallery, which brought the show in as a touring exhibition from the National Gallery of Canada. “We’ve had people come in saying they heard about it on the country music station, while they were out combining (the fields).”

Part of the key to the Godfrey Dean’s success is the work itself. The Paradise Institute, created by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, won the Special Jury Prize in 2001 at the Venice Biennale. But the Gallery also had the foresight to position this work as a must-see in their community. Taking a work of art highly recognized within visual art circles, but not widely known among the general public, could have been a gamble.

The Paradise Institute requires the audience to enter a small, three-dimensional replica of an old movie theatre and put on a pair of headphones. From there, they’re taken through a film and audio spectacle that questions the very notions of how we view movies—whether we’re simply passive viewers, or we actively participate in the fiction of movies by bringing our own ideas and expectations into the theatre with us.


	Outside the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery in Yorkton, Saskatchewan.

After its debut, The New York Times said the work “moves installation art to a different plane,” and explores “the unstable relationship between what seems real and what is.”

While Cardiff is from rural Ontario, Bures Miller hails from the prairies —he grew up in Vegreville, Alberta. Both also worked for many years in Lethbridge, Alberta, teaching and exhibiting at the University of Lethbridge and at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. But this work’s connections to western Canada go much deeper than that. The original installation was a co-production of Winnipeg’s Plug In ICA and The Banff Centre’s Walter J. Phillips Gallery, and its success in Venice launched the prairie provinces back onto the world’s visual arts map.

As co-commissioner of the project for Venice through Plug In ICA, Wayne Baerwaldt played a key role in the original creation and promotion of the work, and says that while its success may have been surprising, everyone involved knew before Venice that they had something special. “Our feeling was that if it fascinated us—and it did—then it should be able to move other people too,” he says.

Early in its exhibition history, Brenda Sherring, now the executive director of Saskatchewan Museums in Regina, first viewed The Paradise Institute in Banff. At that point, Sherring was working with a group of people who were committed to turning the Godfrey Dean Gallery into a true public art space. She correctly foresaw that bringing The Paradise Institute to town would help do just that.


	Detail from The Paradise Institute, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, 2001. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Anonymous gift, 2002.

“I contacted the National Gallery, and asked why it coudn’t just stop here as it went from Banff back east,” she says. “They said no, but I kept writing to justify why it should come out here to the prairies. Finally, about a year ago, they wrote and said they were going to release it on tour.”

So, a work that had been the toast of the international art world, and had shown in high profile museums and galleries across the country, was suddenly coming to small-town Saskatchewan.

Once it arrived, the ideas behind promoting the show were relatively straightforward, Sherring says. “We really focused on the spectacle of it, the fact that it was like the circus coming to town and that we had this piece of art that people all over the world would love to see.”

A promotional package aimed at schools proved to be a big success. More than 1,000 visitors saw the exhibition in October—with nearly 500 of them from local schools. Sherring adds that the show was such a hit that some of the kids came back to see it again on their lunch hour.

Some of the major themes behind The Paradise Institute—including the disruption of the normally comfortable movie-viewing experience —provided a perfect educational tool for reaching kids in a media-savvy culture.

“When the school groups came I would introduce the exhibition, talk about how, in art, you’re an active participant, especially with a work like this one,” Sherring says.

In addition, Sherring says that the exhibition pulled in artists from around the region, who were eager to see this celebrated work. “For (artists) here in a fairly isolated and rural part of the country, it’s so important to be able to participate in any kind of dialogue or exchange,” she says.

Baerwaldt, who grew up in Regina, has worked at major galleries in Winnipeg and Toronto, and is now the director and curator of exhibitions at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. He agrees with Sherring on the benefits of making this type of ground-breaking contemporary art accessible to people in all parts of the country. “It shows that the National Gallery can meet its mandate of bringing art to a wider audience,” he adds.

Judging by the enthusiastic public response at the Godfrey Dean, the lasting impact of The Paradise Institute in Yorkton can’t be overstated, Baerwaldt says. “For an artist who hasn’t been to Toronto, or a place where The Paradise Institute is showing, it gives them a sense of what’s possible,” he says. Its success in Yorkton, then, may eventually prove to be just as important to the future of Canadian art as its success in Venice.

— By Lorne Roberts

review of "From To"--Canadian Art Magazine, winter 2004

From/To

by Lorne Roberts

Plug In ICA, Winnipeg

In the math of the exhibition's title, "from" is lesser than "to." While this could be an allusion to a regional inferiority complex, the work itself centres on themes of transmission, movement and distance, all of which form a distinct, if unconscious, part of the prairie dweller's identity. In this case, the transmission consists of an exchange between Winnipeg and Minneapolis/St. Paul, cities linked by their isolation as major centres in overwhelmingly rural areas.

Kevin Friedrich's oil paintings use a deliberately bizarre mix of characters and ideas, combining neo-gothic excess with a wry sense of humour. In Hot Rod, a car is about to turn a blissfully ignorant cow into hot-rod jerky, and a physics-class line diagram of the car and driver gives the work a sense of movement and speed.

Piotr Szyhalski's work Your Time is Up!, painted directly onto the gallery wall, combines an image of a house tilted on its side with a projection that alternates between two phrases drawn from leaflets scattered by the U.S. Army during the first Gulf War: "Flee and preserve your life" is followed by "Or stay and face certain death." Here, the idea of movement is expressed by the juxtaposition of peaceful domesticity with terrified flight in the face of war.

In Mike Marth's Still Life, five telephones sit encased in concrete blocks. Marth dials their numbers intermittently, and each time one rings, the viewer is made aware of distance and disconnection, and of someone, hundreds of kilometres away, connected to the same impotent sound.

The work of Paul Zacharias complements Marth's. In his piece Information, paint has been applied using graffiti-style stencil patterns, and we see a bright window in a shadowy room, with a phone cord stretching towards the viewer and running off the canvas. There is a sense of the viewer holding the phone to their own ear, as though whatever information is being conveyed is intended for them directly.

If from is truly less than to, the origin less than the destination, then perhaps the transference that matters most in this exhibit is that which occurs between the artist and the viewer. The prairie-centred themes of the show are often concealed, and a closer look is required for a sense of how the artists engage with ideas of distance, movement and transmission. The artists have provided the from of creation, and the viewer completes the equation by providing the to of interpretation—a journey, it would seem, that is ongoing.

Winter 2004