Mark Dicey

From Resonant Voyage

Mark Dicey’s double painting and performance this month at Paul Kuhn Gallery and Shelley Ouellet’s semi-private artist-run space Carpet ’N Toast (C’NT), respectively, couldn’t be more different.

Resonant Voyage and Chair Painting are extremely different. The first exhibition, Resident Voyage, is hosted by a commercial gallery, and the second, Chair Painting (which took place on March 8), was Dicey’s performance at C’NT, a gallery whose owner describes the space as “part exhibition space, part hostel and part rumpus room.” An instructor, painter, performance artist and collaborator, Dicey has also served on the boards of many of Calgary’s arts organizations, including a long stint as president of The New Gallery. “When you’re working on a few things at the same time, it makes you reflect back on all your work in the studio and art community,” he says of the timing of these two shows.

At C’NT, a painting by Dicey hangs at the very end of the long, narrow gallery, as a backdrop to the performance by tokyosexwhale, his noise band. He’s decked out in a costume of work overalls with pink piping and a badge inscribed with the name Larry, topped off with a black headband. This conceptual halo is his “Order of the Black Belt in Thinking” from artist and longtime Calgary art community mentor Chuck Stake (a.k.a Don Mabie). Dicey and his drum kit are the central figures flanked on either side by his collaborators and dueling sax players Lyle Pisio and Dan Meichel. Props and performance noisemakers include a simple kitchen chair that has appeared in many of his paintings, a bucket of metal findings, tools, scraps and pot lids. Most of these props are spilled, flung around and amplified by microphones hidden under the chair as they crash on Carpet ’N Toast’s lino floor.

Dicey’s bursts of skilled drumming are short, intense and loud — he’d be at home and on pace with a hardcore or scrappy noise-rock band. Thankfully, it’s not so deadly serious as seeing a stage show. Instead, gallery-goers laugh at particularly epic drum solos or toss improv instruments that have rolled toward the audience back into the performance melee.

Working between painting, sound art and music, Dicey endorses what’s going on in the local noise scene: “I really like Bug Incision and the work that musicians like Peter Redekopp and Chris Dadge are doing. These are grassroots people who complement their professional projects with free shows that are really about gathering people together.”

Organizing free shows is not unlike what Ouellet is doing with C’NT, Dicey says. “She has such a passion and commitment to grassroots principles like CARFAC fees, and the Artist-Run network, but also believes that her new space and galleries like 809 offer important social places for the art community.” Indeed, C’NT is one in a long history of off-the-map spaces that aren’t often written about or visited by the broader public. Dicey asserts that the connections and conversations that happen at these spaces are a little-acknowledged but important fuel for his work.

It’s precisely what happened when Calgary media artist Tom Andriuk, who was in attendance that evening, reminisced about an early appearance of Dicey’s emblematic chair in a 1991 performance at Paul Kuhn Gallery. Dicey later confirmed that the same old chair that has appeared in his paintings and performance works echoes American painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, as well as famed conceptualist Joseph Bueys, who have all used images of chairs within their work. Dicey laughs that the “powder puff” shapes that appear in Chair Painting, among others, remind him of General Idea’s poodle. The chair is also a metaphorical stand-in for the stationary artist sitting in contemplation. He’s not alone with his interest in Beuys. Joanne Bristol’s 2003 M:ST performance also referenced many aspects of the German artist’s work: his overalls, chair and all.

After the frenetic performance attended by a close-knit group of chatty artists, curators and art community stalwarts, Paul Kuhn’s white-cube gallery seems an awfully sterile place to see the paintings that are so much more than what appears within the confines of the canvas.

The “official” gallery show at Paul Kuhn is a cohesive group of seven large paintings, with brush strokes, marks, motifs and circles of a similar character carrying through each of the works. The largest painting in the show, Untitled #1071 (Resonant Voyage), is most suggestive of the images that Dicey draws from his daily walks and runs. Fences, clouds, curtains, buildings and especially sounds appear as abstracted details from the cityscape and his neighbourhood. He calls them comic abstractions and finds humour in a series of black Ls that look like “black socks moving across this stage.” A window of dark indigo sky is splattered with white stars, and luminous floating circles suggest planets.

Through the back of the gallery are several more of Dicey’s canvases that show curious deviations from the careful selections out front. Together, they add up to even more evidence that his cross-disciplinary practice is hard to narrow down to just one media, style or set of themes.