Preview
SUPER MODERN WORLD OF BEAUTY
Curated by Diana Sherlock
Runs until April 19
Walter Phillips Gallery
The Banff Centre
What exactly does it mean to be a curator of an art exhibit? What does it take to bring artists and institutions together? Diana Sherlock, an independent curator based in Calgary, reveals some of her approaches to the process of curatorial work in her latest project, Super Modern World of Beauty (SMWB).
Sherlock believes that the curatorial strategies are their most effective when they work in unison with the artists’ practices – for her, it is a collaborative, complementary discipline. Sherlock says that there wasn’t a loss, but a shift when she recently left her artistic practice behind to commit to full-time curatorial work. Her commitment to the work satisfies her longings to be both a writer-researcher and a visual culture creator.
"With Super Modern World of Beauty, I had lots of freedom – though space, budget and timeline are considerations in all exhibitions," she says.
SMWB is the first show since Sherlock became an independent curator in 1999 that has allowed her the freedom to address a topic of substantial interest to her own research. Sherlock was approached by Walter Phillips Gallery curator Melanie Townsend to research an exhibition about beauty while participating in a residency about the same topic at The Banff Centre last fall.
For the exhibition, Sherlock ended up incorporating work by Daniel Barrow, one of the artists at the residency, as well as pieces by Robin Arseneault, Shary Boyle, Elizabeth LeMoine, Naomi London and Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke. They were chosen because they each address beauty with genuine sincerity, but also with an awareness of its current contexts.
Through playfulness, these artists address ideas that Sherlock says are either devalued or not acknowledged very often. It is through this light-hearted treatment that the subtexts in their work become accessible. The physicality of Naomi London’s six-feet-high three-dimensional letters spelling "hope" in English, Arabic and Hebrew seems absurd, yet metaphorically, says Sherlock, they are quite serious.
"The playfulness is a way for us to enter into the dialogue and ideas presented," she explains.
As the concept of beauty evolved in Sherlock’s mind, she found the need to redefine the exhibit’s subject matter as "critical sentimentality," a term originally coined by Russian poet Sergei Gandlevsky. The presence of the word "critical" in the term distinguishes it from pure sentimentality, particularly in this age of cynicism.
Sherlock describes this sensibility among the artists in SMWB as a movement away from cynicism. Working with these artists to pose a redefinition of sentimentalism is a creative and satisfying critical experience.
Yet an irony exists within Sherlock’s use of beauty as subject matter. She explains that she has always been more comfortable with the seeming safety found in an objective, authoritative voice and that she resists all things pink and expressing her emotions. Surprisingly, Daniel Barrow’s performance, The Face of Everything, triggered a unique response.
"I noticed myself seeping into this story," says Sherlock, describing her reaction to Barrow’s overhead-projector live-animation storytelling performances. "He completely disarmed me – it’s like having a bedtime story read to you in public."
Fascinated by her reaction, she says, "It is a rare experience that visual art takes me to that realm." She also reiterates that her identity has been shaped by an objective, authoritative, modernist, rationalist existence.
"That’s what I was brought up in and that’s what I understand and it was what I was comfortable with – but I am less and less comfortable with this now," she says, amused that the subject of SMWB is a complete counterpoint to how she has understood her own identity and relationship to art. |
