>>PREVIEW
AIN’T NO SHELTER
Mikhail Miller-Lajeunesse
KIM NEUDORF
Kim Neudorf
Runs until June 2
Opening reception Thursday, May 17
+15 Window Project Space (Epcor Centre)
Ain't No Shelter by Mikhail Miller-Lajeunesse, on display in the TRUCK +15 window space, addresses how Alberta's affordable housing crunch and sky-high rents are hurting the cultural sector.
Miller-Lajeunesse's imagery is focused on simple, recognizable and dilapidated domestic dwellings that are gradually disappearing from the urban landscape as a result of planning and design developments. Miller-Lajeunesse depicts dwellings floating in the air or sitting on stilts, a Mountain Equipment Co-Op sleeping bag with a faint outline of a body curled up in the fetal position – all as metaphors for a deplorable societal situation. To Miller-Lajeunesse, they "visually relate to the feelings people might have when they cannot quite make the rent or when someone is stuck in a position of poverty." Sharing an icy palette of cool greens, greys and browns, these paintings refer to both the harsh environmental conditions that most homeless people have to contend with, and their equally astringent treatment by society.
The addition of numerous cityscape paintings within this window space links homelessness with Canada’s need for more affordable cultural spaces. Miller-Lajeunesse does this by alluding to the shortfalls in Calgary's catalogue of arts facilities and lack of resolution when it comes to outlining effective solutions to the need for social housing and affordable rent. Addressing this issue couldn’t have come at a better time, as Calgary Arts Development has recently reported that Calgary's city council has unanimously approved a recommendation to include capital programs for arts spaces worth up to $150 million in the city's Culture, Parks and Recreation Infrastructure Investment Plan (CPRIIP) over the next seven years.
In addition, The Alberta Affordable Housing Task Force chaired by Len Webber, MLA for Calgary-Foothills, presented a final report outlining effective short and long-term housing solutions to Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Ray Danyluk, in March 2007. Implementing these changes is a slow process.
Kim Neudorf’s recent work in the Untitled Art Society +15 window space is from a larger series of paintings involved in an ongoing "physiognomic research" of iconic images in various states of both physical and narrative-based transformation. Kim describes her subjects as being "informed by my fascination with visual phenomena of the found image, as well as its withholding nature as visual information. I am interested in what can be fabricated (and associated) from the inaccessible, wherein what you see is partial information which denies a certain performance of context."
Neudorf’s mythologized identities are haunting, fatigued, stained and toothy subjects. Monochromatic layers of glazes and mediated textural surfaces become wrinkles, blemishes and skin discolorations. The two paintings sit side by side as if related, but the language spoken between them (or the communication between) seems much deeper than what exists on the surface. The fact that many of us may have seen these faces in nightmares does not make them feel familiar. They appear as though once human, but only in the most fleeting impression.
Her paintings are naturalistic images that are memorably strange. It is no surprise that she lists Brothers Quay along with Juul Kraijer, Nathalie Djurberg, Aida Ruilova, David Altmejd and Rezi van Lankveld as her current influences. One could also cite the influence of camp and B-movie horror and vampire flicks of the ’70s.
Also in the +15 window spaces are Peter Redecopp’s Spiral Series: Masking Tape Drawings 5-7 (The Marion Nicoll Gallery), Ryan Wolters’s Unnatural History (The New Gallery) and Ryan Ford and Tyler Los-Jones’s State and Lake (Stride Gallery). Reviews of these artists will appear in next week’s issue of Fast Forward. |
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