From Colour Sense and Sensibilia
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Triangle Gallery
Thursday, July 3 - Friday, August 22
More in: Visual Arts
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In her exhibition text on Colour Sense and Sensibilia — New Edmonton Art, curator Caterina Pizanias traces a myriad of ideas about colour. She points out philosophers, scientists and thinkers who have attempted to theorize colour through the ages, while artists have wrestled it back from the grips of such analysis by maintaining the poetic and pleasurable uses of colour. She laments the many “isms” that governed art-making, especially of the 20th century, suggesting that colour is one strategy that each artist in the exhibition has used to question modernist ideals.
In Allen Ball’s uniformly sized works, flooring tiles and strips of linoleum are laid down like a patchwork as the ground to be painted on top of. This provides a solid foundation for drawing associations with the Modernist ready-made, however, Ball’s project is routed in interpretation of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, and each panel is titled as Blake’s poems are. There is a particular joy in not being able to immediately determine how his works are constructed or what their materials are, as layers of paint overlay the original flooring with bright decorative patterning. The gridded linoleums look like milky blue swimming pool tiles do underwater, heavily spot-sanded surfaces in The Little Black Boy reveal dark brown wood underneath, and a dense foliage in yellow and cream in The Blossom is overpainted with vertical stripes. The richness of the works is just as much about the almost never-ending palette of colour as it is about texture and dense patterning.
There’s also a joy in seeing Ball spar with imagery primarily borrowed from modern art history: Jasper Johns’s iconic target paintings, the grid, hard-edged stripes and a diagram of the golden mean. These references are layered amongst patterns that recall tapestry and surface design, but the formal seams indicate that this leap between two different esthetic periods has been collaged together deliberately. There’s nothing forced about the combination of the disparate chunks of visual and material culture because they work together visually, whereas Carolyn Campbell’s way of breaking up her canvas with stripes of colour occasionally seems clunky.
In Campbell’s portraiture, the details of her figure’s faces and hands are clearly rendered in almost photographic detail. Each model looks as if she has been picked out of classical portraiture, and details like their heavy eyelids, crooked noses and determined expressions keep attention fixed on their faces. Thick directional paint frames each woman’s face as she is slowly obscured by washed stripes of colour that eventually break up the portraits. These vertical stripes break the canvas into sections, to move beyond portraiture and again hint at modernist compositional structures.
A few of Campbell’s portraits are studies for the other works. One such study hangs unfinished on the wall with raw canvas edges and brilliant colours not yet layered over. The effectiveness of showing Campbell’s process here is diminished by the fact that there aren’t many of her other works around to compare with. They’re located around corners or on other walls. The exercise of showing colourful layers exposed seems a tad heavy-handed as an illustration of the curator’s thesis on colour. Instead, larger groupings of Campbell’s paintings may have better established her relationship with subversion of the multiple image through colour.
At first, Ken Macklin’s roughly hewn blocks of concrete and curvilinear steel shapes dominate over his interest in colour. Yes, there is a sense of airiness in Macklin’s works that is uncharacteristic of Edmonton-school formalist steel sculpture, but if the exhibition claims to shed the city’s reputation of being an unyielding vista of hulking welded blob-sculpture, his work points towards this lineage, not away from it. His orbiting spheres, pressed patterns, spirals of steel and the combination of these elements into “baroque compositions,” as Triangle director Jacek Malec calls them, are much more elegant nonetheless. Ceramics embedded in the sculptures are glazed with the aqua blues, earthy reds, warm yellows and acid greens that are Macklin’s contribution to the palette of the show.
Pizanias’s writing on Ball’s interpretation of William Blake’s poetry and use of ready-made materials is the most convincing discussion of her exhibition’s thesis on disavowing modernism through beauty. Placing works by Campbell in the murky intersection between Renaissance portraiture and Warhol’s highly pigmented pop-portraits doesn’t serve her work well. Macklin’s sculpture seems caught up in a different dialogue entirely, on the use of formalist steel sculpture (which only partially reveals why this survey on colour is focused on Edmonton artists) that he has deviated from through the introduction of more organic, playful forms in ceramic, steel, concrete and, of course, colour. Ultimately, the conceptual weight of Colour Sense and Sensibilia rests heavily on Allen Ball’s shoulders, and his suite of gorgeously complex works carries the exhibition.
