| Curated
Exhibition Catalogue, Guest Curator: Wendy Peart |
| Art Gallery of
Regina, Regina, SK |
| January 23, 2008
- March 4, 2008 |
| |
| |
| "There is
perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this
distant image of our tiny |
| world. To me,
it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another,
and to preserve and |
| cherish the pale
blue dot, the only home we have ever known."1 |
| |
| Carl Sagan,
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994. |
| |
| It is a matter
of fit. After all, we have already been placed, located by a dot - a
pale blue dot - by NASA's |
| space machine
Voyager 2, in 1990.2
Stealthily taken from beyond the orbit of Neptune some 3.7 billion miles |
| away, this
highly circulated photograph visualizes for us Earth's distinguishable
presence in a cosmic sense. Not |
| only does this
image exemplify our frontiersman-like drive, it incites us to respond to
the urgent predicament of |
| our ecological
situation here at home. We are keenly aware of the role that humans
have played in the demise |
| of global
health. For instance, rampant chemical usage, rainforest reductions and
fossil fuel burning have |
| hastily
increased the greenhouse effect, putting global warming on the centre
stage of most international |
| agendas.
(Incidentally, the greenhouse phenomenon was initially identified
through space exploration of lifeless |
| conditions on
other planets.)3
We are all looking for answers, or even mere suggestions, as to the
reversal of |
| current
debilitating processes on our planet. |
| |
| If we are to
improve our relationship with our earth, where do we begin? According
to authors William |
| McDonough and
Michael Braungart in Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make
Things, change begins |
| simply in
recognizing our own negligence by, "doing things over and over even
though we know it is dangerous, |
| stupid, and
wrong."4
Recognizing how we created our circumstance is crucial. Like the
fantastic and |
| enlightening
images from outer space, the work of the artists in the exhibition, Pale
Blue Dot, make our |
| condition more
visibly poignant. This exhibition call for restorative action, urging
us to consider better ways to |
| exist within our
natural world. |
| |
| We have become a
materialistic and disposable culture, fixated on objects and mass
production. Ironically |
| artists
typically work with materials to make objects. Negotiating this
contradictory position are artists, Griffith |
| Aaron Baker
and Twyla Exner (Regina / Montreal). Their work directly employs
objects we consider offensively |
| emblematic of
the technological age. Refusing to merely recycle bits of plastic,
rubber and wire, Baker and |
| Exner employ a
type of "upcylcing," by refashioning them into intentional ideas,
cultural objects that are equal |
| to or exceed the
value of the materials' original functions. |
| |
| Griffith
Aaron Baker's Raft of the Medusa is gregariously constructed of
thousands of discarded cola bottle |
| caps. He has
arranged troops of caps into one singular magnified cap raft caught in a
squall; its destination |
| unknown. Baker
recognizes the futility in the cap's path as it travels from the bottle
to the landfill, into the |
| natural
environment and, inevitably, into the food chain. Ironically, existing
recycling programs do not |
| reprocess caps
and there is no current method of properly managing these small bits of
plastic which clearly |
| do not fit in
the biological world. Through his work Baker considers not only how and
what we consume but |
| also the
destination of our consumables and their dubious misplacement in our
ecology. |
| |
| The Exhibition,
Pale Blue Dot, indicates that our relationships with the world and
with each other need devoted |
| attention.
Presented here is an opportunity to embrace our inventiveness, our drive
for originality and love for |
| prosperity so
that our work will someday "imitate nature's highly effective cradle to
cradle system of nutrient |
| flow and
metabolism" eliminating waste altogether and becoming even beneficial to
Earth's biological mass.5
Our |
| connection with
the world can be more than just sustainable, it can be stimulating,
eloquent and emphatic. We |
| need not
establish ourselves on other planets, as Carl Sagan had suggested, but
take care of our own. We can |
| be like ants,
dovetailing in every possible way with Earth's dense abundance. |
| |
| |
|
1 Carl Sagan,
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of Human Future in Space, Random House:
New York, 1994, p. 9. |
|
2 Carl Sagan, ibid. p. 4. |
|
3 Carl Sagan, ibid. pp. 222-223. |
|
4 William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to
Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. |
| North Point
Press: New York, 2002, p. 117. |
|
5 William McDonough and Michael Braungart, ibid, pp. 103-104. |
| Newspaper
Article, Critic: Jack Anderson |
| Leader Post
Newspaper, Regina, SK |
| February 7, 2008 |
| |
| |
| Pale Blue Dot is
a well-intentioned exhibition broadly scanning artists' responses to the
timely issue of our |
| sorry and
frankly abusive relationship to the earth. Clearly a hot topic in the
media and an "apple pie and |
| motherhood" one
in the corridors of power, the moral and ethical debates swirling around
this issue are vast |
| and complex.
There are also often debates that can, and do, lead to didactic
speechifying and finger- |
| wagging. |
| |
| While there is
little of that in evidence here, I am unconvinced by this very large
exhibition, which tries |
| to touch on many
of these multiple issues in one show. The result is that we come away
wishing we had |
| either seen an
exhibition with a more restricted theme or seen a tighter selection of
artists who had each |
| been given more
space to exhibit their specific concern to greater effect. |
| |
| There are,
however, several individual outcomes here that make us want to see more
on these topics from |
| these artists. |
| |
| Saskatoon artist
Iris Hauser steps positively into new territory with her apocalyptic the
Machine Age, a no- |
| holds-barred
painting that is part cynical soft-core boy-fantasy heavy metal album
cover and part soft-focus |
| children's book
illustration. Brimming with both humour and horror, this take on 1970s
van-art pits the |
| American myth of
freedom against nature's own dynamics, loading a dollop of
Hummer-esqueme-ism
|
| on top. A
surprising and welcome new direction for her work. While I would like to
see this particular |
| piece executed
on a larger scale and with more technical finesse, Montreal artist
Arshin Matlabi's quirky |
| colour
photograph, Cuba II: the Fatman, not only speaks to individual
privilege, but to global economic
|
| and political
dynamics as well. With his figure dallying in the ocean waters off a
beach resort -- a cipher |
| really -- he
brings into the mix not only questions of the abuse of privileged
individual and national power, |
| but reminds us
that our own Americanized comforts not only come at someone else's
expense but have
|
| global
environmental expenses as well. |
| |
| Satellite
Bureau, a collective which includes local artists Jen Hamilton and
Christopher St. Armand and
|
| Jen Southern
from the United Kingdom, offers up a full-size satellite dish that seems
at first glance to |
| deconstruct our
'science-izing' of the earth. But, glittering like a constellation seen
in the night, a tracery |
| of small lights
in the center of this dish actually maps a walk that Southern took in
her home town. Glance |
| at the reverse
side of the dish to find a small-monitor looping the video image of a
person flying a kite. |
| Collapsing here
into there and small into big, this work is less about either science
than self or location, |
| than being
located: it is about acts of communion and community that fuse identity
with place, in the
|
| broadest sense
of the word. |
| |
| Although I
mentioned both Griffith Baker's water bottle cap sculptures and Twyla
Exner's small wire |
| botanical forms
in the context of another recent exhibition, their works continue to
fascinate. While I
|
| prefer Exner's
unpredictable sci-fi-ish blobs where she continues to abstractly mash up
the morphologies |
| of both biology
and technology, Baker's humorous new work here is a smart step forward.
Referring |
| directly to our
phobic North American pathology for cleanliness and its effects on our
waterways, he
|
| also
metaphorically references French Romantic artist Theodore Gericault's
famous 1819 painting, the
|
| Raft of the
Medusa -- itself an journalistic work depicting a real maritime disaster
in which sailors who, |
| stupefied and
afloat on a raft churned by turbulent waves, wait helplessly for someone
else to rescue them. |
| |
| And, in the end,
Joan Scaglione's video projection of a figure floating weightlessly
under water is |
| mesmerizing in a
Bill Viola slo-mo kind of way. I wonder though whether the rubble of
bricks |
| foregrounding it
is more distracting than contributive to her overall theme of a rebirth
into a 'real' |
| more sustaining
than the physical world we occupy. |
| Student Run
Newspaper Article, Journalist: Hailey Greke |
| University of
Regina Carillon, Regina, SK |
| December 6, 2007
- January 9, 2008 |
| |
| |
| Once you enter
the doors and turn the corner into the Sherwood Library Gallery, the
first thing you see is |
| a ten foot tall
Coke Zero bottle. |
| |
| The exhibition
titled, Abnormal Growth, is based on the theme nature and technology
coexisting. The main |
| question asked
is, "Has modern-day technology created abnormal growths in nature?"
Three Quebec-based |
| artists -
Griffith Aaron Baker, Twyla Exner, and Tricia Middleton - contribute to
the exhibition, and they each |
| try to explain
in their own way. |
| |
| Baker, who made
the giant Coke bottle, takes mass produced items from the cycle of
production, consumption |
| and waste and
gives them a new opportunity to exist as meaningful items. Not only did
he make the Coke bottle |
| but he also made
an Evian water bottle. Both of these pieces were made out of pop bottle
caps and didn't feature |
| the product
name. The coke bottle said, "Con-cern Zero" and the Evian bottle said
"Naive," though they were |
| completely
recognizable. |
| |
| Exner's pieces
also stood out because of the incredible intricacy each one entailed.
She imitates plant pods, root |
| systems, and
human physiological forms, reproducing hybrids of technology and nature
by using the materials |
| that allow us
our fast paced life. One piece called "Invasion" consisted of a full
desktop computer, taken apart |
| and with foliage
made up of wires woven together growing out of it. Some of the letters
on the keyboard |
| were popping out
and there was a flower growing out of the mouse. Similar works of hers
were called "Bacteria," |
| which was made
completely of woven wires, and "System," which looked almost like yarn
from far away. |
| |
| Middleton was my
least favourite of the three. the only piece of hers that was
intriguing was "Response," which |
| looked like a
fake coral reef made of paper and plastic. It is supposed to be her
response to the effects of dragnet |
| fishing. By
building fake reef on the bottom of the ocean, fish would still have a
place to live and it would |
| deteriorate over
time with little or no pollution. She calls into question the
evaporating meanings and values |
| of the objects
that make up our human environment. |
| |
| Overall, the
exhibition had a very strong message tied with an obvious environmental
conscience. All of the |
| works were
beautiful but ugly in their own way, especially Middleton's work.
Everything was very
|
| meticulously
done and had an organized yet chaotic fell to it as well. Baker's
bottle cap pieces were very |
| aesthetically
pleasing and Exner's wire-weaving techniques are incredible and her
pieces were very intricate |
| and slightly
creepy. As for Middleton, her pieces were very odd and messy. |
| |
| Abnormal Growth
is on at the Sherwood Library Gallery until January 6, 2007. |
| Newspaper
Article, Critic: Jack Anderson |
| Leader Post
Newspaper, Regina, SK |
| December 27,
2007 |
| |
| |
| Abnormal Growth
arrives on the cusp of hurly burly consumption surrounding us at this
time of year. |
| |
| Conceived as an
oppositional proposition to all forms of capitalist excess, this
exhibition examines our |
| relationship to
the environment and to the problem of sustainability, understanding that
the word
|
| 'environment'
itself has morphed over the last century over modernism to not only
describe the natural |
| world that
surrounds us with its own models, patterns and imperatives, but to
include culture and
|
| technology's
models, patterns and imperatives as well. The three artists included in
this small exhibition |
| un-entwine the
subtle partnership of media and technology to capitalism and
consumption, hinting at and |
| even declaiming
on the viral and perhaps malignant trajectory we seem to be following. |
| |
| Starting with
what looks like a cartoonish clipart illustration of a dump truck
sourced from the high- |
| Modernist 1950's
or 1960's when naive notions of commercial and industrial progress
reached some kind
|
| of apex, Twyla
Exner and Griffith Baker's wall installation depicts the disgorging of
post-consumer waste -- |
| here made from
discarded water bottle caps -- into an apparently endless hole. Moving
from wall to floor, |
| this flood of
caps assembles into a 3D sculpture resembling a colourful flower -- here
mired in a pool of black |
| sludge -- which
is, instead, a sculptural rendition of the molecular structure of a
specific plastic, which |
| will of course
eventually leach back into the waterways. From the transformation of
impure water to pure, |
| our consumption,
in the end, leads from purity back to impurity. |
| |
| And speaking of
naive, Griffith's himself exhibits a monumental replica of a plastic
Evian water bottle executed |
| not only bigger
than human scale but made of -- you guessed it -- plastic Evian water
bottle caps. This ironic |
| inversion --
using the thing to critique itself -- is effectively developed as a
strategy throughout all of his |
| work, especially
here, where we recognize the word 'naive' is Evian spelled backwards.
Indeed, rather than |
| eschew plastic
as one would expect an environmentally concerned citizen to do, plastic,
in various incarnations, |
| takes up a lot
of space in his work perhaps mimicking its ubiquity in our environment. |
| |
| Tricia
Middleton's strange mountainous mounds of debris speak to our delirium
of consumption. recycling not |
| only her own
earlier work but materials sourced from post-consumer waste, her
simultaneously amusing but |
| purposefully
unappealing garden folly -- consisting of a bench, a classical column, a
bird bath,. numerous |
| garden gnomes
and so on -- is virtually unrecognizable under a vomit of dripped and
slathered paint she |
| disguises and
deforms them with. Resembling a drug induced dream of mindless
overindulgence, her work |
| also speaks to
debates the hand made object over those mass produced, finding in them
more than simply
|
| some aesthetic
high-mindedness but a deeper concern with the problems of local versus
global, minimal
|
| versus maximal,
and autonomy versus dependence. |
| |
| And with the
delicate hand and eye, Exner knits and binds technological debris such
as coloured electrical |
| wire together
into some kind of technological macramé which climbs the wall like
electronic ivy. Her |
| biomorphic wall
works remind us of the nature versus culture debate. Beyond that
though, in another |
| piece we find a
computer terminal overgrown with the same kind of technological
'growths' -- a miasma |
| which remind us
that at a certain point, technology will (or has already become)
'natural' to us.
|
| |
| This energetic
show reveals that, despite environmental urgencies demanding immediate
action on both
|
| personal and
social levels, there is much more for all of us to discuss regarding
these complex issues. But, |
| as an
exhibition, it is guilty of a different kind of excess itself: we are
overwhelmed by the amount of work |
| in this small
gallery. This might have been an interesting thematic gambit had the
gallery literally been |
| overflowing with
'stuff.' But I am sure this is not the case here. With some tighter
editing and less repetition |
| of both forms
and ideas, what is an interesting show could have been a fascinating
one. |
| Newspaper
Article, Journalist:
Gregory Beatty |
| The Prairie Dog,
Regina, SK |
| December 6, 2007
- December 16, 2007 |
| |
| |
| "I
just want to say one word to you. Just one word... Plastics. There's a
great future in plastics." |
| - The Graduate,
1967. |
| |
| Upon attending
the opening of
Abnormal Growth at the Sherwood Village Branch Gallery on
November 24, |
| an exhibition of
sculptural works by Griffith Aaron Baker, Twyla Exner, and Tricia
Middleton curated by the |
| Dunlop's Amanda
Cachia, I couldn't help but think of the above quote from the classic
counter-culture flick |
| about a
disaffected college graduate named Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman)
who, while trying to decide |
| what he wants to
do with his life, is seduced by and embarks on a short affair with the
wife (Anne Bancroft) |
| of his father's
business partner. |
| |
| In the movie,
the advice Benjamin receives from another of his father's business
associates to consider a |
| career in
plastics is rife with metaphorical significance. Initially regarded as
a miracle substance that by |
| virtue of its
relative abundance and versatility on comparison with natural materials
like wood, stone, brass |
| silk, and rubber
would usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity, plastic, by 1967, had
come to be seen |
| as a symbol of
all that was wrong with America -- sleek, colourful, and infinitely
malleable, sure, but lacking |
| substance,
tactility, and soul. |
| |
| Ironically,
while the scene in
The Graduate was intended as a slag against plastic, it actually
had the opposite |
| effect, boosting
the stock of companies in the industry and legitimizing the sector as a
viable career path for |
| budding business
executives and scientific researchers alike. |
| |
| Thanks to The
Graduate
(and ignorance, and unsustainable consumption, and a dysfunctional
economy), in |
| 2001 the average
American used an estimated 223 pounds of plastic, with that figure
expected to rise to 326 |
| pounds by 2010.
A recent
Los Angeles Times article (from which I cribbed those stats)
discussed the growing |
| problem of
plastic as a pollutant in the worlds oceans. |
| |
| Before I go any
further, I'd like to emphasise that plastic isn't the sole subject
matter of
Abnormal Growth. Yes, |
| there is a lot
of the material on display in the various sculptures and installations.
But that's simply one facet of |
| a broader issue
that Cachia and the three artists are intent on exploring here --
namely, how our growing |
| dependence on
technology is impacting on environmental sustainability. |
| |
| "Issues of
environmental damage have always interested me as a curator," said
Cachia at the opening. "All |
| three artists
are obviously very different. But there's strong links between them.
They work with recycled |
| material.
They're very passionate about consumer waste, and what happens to an
object after we buy it." |
| |
| For Baker, who
obtained his BFA at the University of Regina in 2004 and is now studying
for his MFA at
|
| Concordia
University in Montreal, bottled water is a particular bugaboo. For
several years now, he's been |
| collecting
discarded plastic bottle caps and using them to construct giant versions
of popular brands of |
| bottled water
and, more recently, soft drinks. So what is it about the industry that
bothers him? |
| |
| To begin with,
most urban residents -- in the developed world anyway -- already have
access to a safe supply |
| of drinking
water. But through skilful marketing preying on consumer worries about
the purity if tap water |
| and extolling
the virtues of their product as a status symbol, companies like Evian,
Aquafina and Perrier have |
| carved a
significant -- and growing --- niche for themselves. |
| |
| In Evian Bottle,
Baker tackles the challenge this consumer trend presents to the
environment. Three meters |
| tall and
composed of over 13,000 bottle caps, the sculpture is an exact replica
of an Evian bottle save for one |
| small detail:
the company name is spelled backwards, and thus reads "naive". |
| |
| To Baker, who
spoke at the opening, consumers are naive to pay a premium price for
bottled water which |
| scientific
studies reveal is virtually indistinguishable from ordinary tap water.
Indeed, concern has recently |
| been expressed
about phthalates, a chemical that is added to plastic to make it supple,
leeching into the bottled |
| water. In
laboratory tests, phthalates have been linked to birth defect and liver
cancer. |
| |
| Also problematic
for Baker is the amount of waste that the industry generates. While the
bottles themselves |
| are made of type
one plastic and are recyclable, the caps are made of type five plastic
and aren't. Sure, they're |
| tiny. But when
you consider that millions of bottled drinks are sold each day, it
quickly adds up. |
| |
| Once discarded,
these caps, as the Times article tragically revealed, are often washed
out to sea where, along |
| with tons of
other waste plastic ranging from cigarette lighters and toothbrushes to
toy soldiers and all manner |
| of cargo lost
from ships at sea, they are pushed by ocean currents, called gyres, into
massive patches of floating |
| debris that
create dead zones and poison marine animals on the periphery who mistake
the plastic its for food. |
| |
| Even is they're
disposed of properly, the caps become another stream of non
biodegradable waste clogging |
| our landfills.
It's that reality that Baker, in collaboration with Exner, addresses in
Consumed -- a wall |
| mounted bottle
cap mural which depicts a truck dumping tons of bottle caps in a
landfill, where they morph |
| into a model of
the molecular structure for type 5 plastic. Beneath the mural is the
pseudo corporate slogan / |
| admonishment:
materials that last, objects that fail. |
| |
| The irony of
this industrial practice, in which goods that are intended to be used
once and then thrown away |
| are made of a
material that, once disposed of, will endure for millennia, is explored
more fully by Exner in her |
| solo work. Like
Baker, she's a University of Regina grad who's also currently enrolled
in Concordia's MFA |
| program. Living
in Montreal, where garbage pick-up is done largely from the street,
she's reminded |
| constantly of
how wasteful we, as a society are. |
| |
| Particularity
troubling for Exner is the amount of electronic trash we produce. While
not disposable per se, |
| relentless
innovation in terms of improved performance and tweaks in style quickly
render computers, monitors, |
| MP3 players and
other digital devices functionally obsolete. When she spots something
in the garbage she grabs |
| it and
cannibalizes it for her art. Internal wires, for instance are employed
as weaving material in place of the |
| grasses, roots
and tree bark that weavers traditionally use. |
| |
| In System,
she explores logistical and aesthetic similarities between the nervous
and circulatory systems of |
| plants and
animals and non-organic electrical systems in computers. Similarly, in
Invasion, she presents |
| a desktop
computer and printer seemingly gone to seed, with woven wire growths
sprouting fungus and
|
| pod-like forms
from various cracks and crevices. |
| |
| Like Baker and
Exner, Middleton also makes use of recycled materials in her
sculptures. A 2005 |
| graduate of
Concordia's MFA program, she presents two works here: Help! Final
Home and
Ether Frolics |
| that critique
the sustainability of domestic living arrangements in North American
society, where our |
| largely
non-communal mindset requires a heavy expenditure of resources to build,
furnish and maintain |
| the dwellings
which we inhabit.
|
| |
| In Ether
Frolics, she showcases a line of garden furniture like a fountain,
bird bath and bench that, consistent |
| with their hand
made origin , are somewhat rudimentary looking, but nonetheless possess
a frothy ornateness |
| suggestive of
self-indulgent excess. Help! Final Home, meanwhile, consists of
a hand-built structure with |
| wooden
floorboards which contains a steep staircase. At the top, Middleton's
installed a small LCD panel |
| which displays
video of her in her Montreal apartment calling plaintively for help. |
| |
| Can you hear
her? |
