>>PREVIEW
SMOTHER
Suzanne Franks
Runs until May 18
The Nickle Arts Museum (University of Calgary)
Smother is an exhibition of ambitious installations and sculpture by Calgary-based artist Suzanne Franks. The relationship between mother and child is a major theme of the exhibition – developed with great depth – but Franks's deft handling of obsessive techniques, storytelling and the formal play between materials are just as compelling.
Swarmed is a quiet, darkened fairy tale of a room, filled with hundreds of descending black mesh bear suits. The child-sized suits are protective garments that recall mosquito nets or bee-keeping masks with meticulously crafted fasteners, seams and tiny insect insignia all visible through their see-through fabric. Where a baby sleeper might be sewn of warm, pastel fleece, the empty suits only allude to the actual bodies they're designed to fit. Children are usually thought to be vulnerable, in need of protection from the perils of the world, but here these little workers are pressed into service as bug hunters searching by the cast of moonlight. This army of dream-time babies funnels down in a tornado shape, and the sheer number of them becomes a tad menacing like a swarm of flies or bees. The adult body is literally swarmed by this overwhelming pack of kids on a mission.
A few gorgeously confounding sculptures, Life Boat and Life Preserver, grab much of the attention in the next space. They're both sewn out of eye-catching neon orange nylon and snugly stuffed to bursting, the kind of rescue vessels you might scan the horizons for when lost at sea. The boat is a cushy looking, buoyant bed of small teddy bears, piled tightly into the shape of a rubber dinghy. All their arms, legs and snouts can't help but catch the light and stick out of the unified mass of colour, but it's the comfort of these cuddly little guys that makes this ship somewhat less than water tight. Life Boat arrives at a place where language breaks down around the object, where the metaphors of a leaky rescue boat and cloying masses of toy bears are particularly evocative of mixed emotions around protection, comfort and overbearing safety.
The bright orange, oversized life preserver also hangs nearby on the wall, ready to be called into action at sea, or perhaps the local pool. It recalls the shape of an old canvas flotation device with an open neck-hole and white canvas straps running down along the drowning body, except that Franks's version towers at over six feet. The illusion of the object's safety disappears as it floats overhead, with flailing nylon arms growing out of it as if to grab your legs and pull you off your feet like a swelling ocean undertow. The irony of these two works is that they so easily evoke the queasy dangers of the sea, while being exhibited on the completely landlocked prairies.
On the other side of the gallery is the brightly lit Fortress, a sharp contrast to the two meditative installations before it. The installation is a coiled tunnel circling around a tent made of transparent sheets of plastic. The entire structure is covered with thousands of shimmering silver grommets, provoking the texture of octopus tentacles, or perhaps the armour of a studded jacket. It first appears to mimic a kid's paradise camp-out pitched in a backyard for playtime, if only to arrive at the central fortress with an active imagination and grass stained knees. On one end, the entrance to the tunnel could offer the path to get inside this playful camping tent, but it is sealed off with more plastic punctuated by more grommet ventilation holes. Where the obsessive process of covering the entire tent in grommets creates a beautiful surface, it also makes the association between handwork and worrying. I begin to imagine that the tent is designed to keep kids inside: breathing, protected, but still seeing the world from inside this safely quarantined bubble.
Smother accomplishes complex understandings of motherhood in relation to contemporary culture. Franks cleverly avoids the binaries and stereotypes about mothering that are often so frustrating by creating multiple narratives and viewpoints around parenting, interdependency, fantasy and fear. |
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