If an exhibition based on Canadiana, encompassing mock moose scenery and beer-littered battlefields, and titled after a song by a Kingston-based comedy musical trio, seems on the surface both lighthearted and cutting, then appearances are not deceiving with Newzones’ current exhibition, Wayne Gretzky Rocks!, on display until August 23.
From the gallery window, the sleek oval image of elk juxtaposed with a pink-outlined “Giddy Up!” beckons the meandering Stampede crowds to bypass the kitsch cowboy paintings and horse sculptures set out lovingly along 11th Ave., in favour of a versatile selection of pop-Canadian references by a confident stable of Newzones’ contemporary artists.
Dianne Bos, known for her pinhole photography, provides a memory-lapse mountainscape complete with hikers who blur through half-stopped images. The Holga toy camera illumes the iconic Canadian landscape as a static formation behind the temporary figures. Yechel Gagnon’s dodging and burning on plywood, reminiscent of Paterson Ewan’s carved paintings, makes the powertool manifest as a revealer, with a delicate and softening touch across an abstract landscape.
Newzones seldom takes on younger artists, but it snapped up Samantha Walrod right out of the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD), and it’s not hard to see why. Her pink-penned trees climb out of a wash of turquoise and teal, seemingly without roots or ground. Drips and spots of trapped pigment in gel medium bud on the slight branching.
Joe Fleming’s large-scale mixed-media paintings act like bookends through the space. At one end, there is a playful abstract painting with a skidoo printed onto it with acrylic, while a whimsical pop icon looms in black-painted pixilation in the other wall’s Hank, 2008. This cowboy is not Hank Williams Sr., but his whisky-drinking, beer-bellied son Hank Williams Jr., painted over newsprint with old ads for products like “Canada’s Finest” (Canadian Club). Egg-like splotches radiate from his head as a quasi-halo covered in wax drippings.
The elk image in the gallery window is Joshua Jensen-Nagle’s. Its formal twin resides at the centre of the current exhibition, as you first enter the space, and is a work of tremendous beauty and skilful craftsmanship. Entitled A Long Time Coming, it is a photograph of a diorama from the Natural History Museum. Jensen-Nagle has reworked the image in a photographic technique that photoshop could produce in a jiffy, but the artist has done it in a more painstaking manner, producing something that appears lifted from an aged and weathered historical document of a male and female moose.
An eerie nostalgia overtakes the viewer as he or she becomes aware that the animals in the image are of a taxidermied moose.
Colleen Philippi’s Help Yourself is the most directly hilarious and astute of the works in Newzone’s main gallery. While other artists deal with the Canadian landscape as a point of reference for national identity, Philippi’s piece beckons us to help ourselves to the pastoral, über-Canadian lake landscape and says so with gusto. Help yourself! Why not? We own this land, don’t we? We can do whatever we want with it, including painting an ironically dull blue sky, blue lake acrylic canvass destined no doubt for some southern Ontario cottage, and mount hand-routered, red-glittery words in exclamatory fashion: “Help Yourself!” across it. However, don’t tell the oil prospectors parading around in their white hats and heels — they might take this art seriously.
Jeff Nachtigall’s Battle of the Plains of Abraham #3 and #4 may have the most biting commentary. Reworking Canadian history, a “not-to-scale” sign cautions the viewer of these two smaller paintings that the mountain depicted could potentially be inaccurate. While a victorious rider raises his sword, figures marked “French” and “Highlander” stand among the soldiers. A battlefield is strewn with beer bottles and decapitated heads, and a horse utters a query about the “Thin King,” an aboriginal warrior inhabiting the cartoon speech bubble. A Kokanee mountain rises up in the background, while the other painting depicts Keith’s Pale Ale, and soldiers with gout stand like toys among errant arrows. Canadian history, here, is soaked equally in beer and blood.
The predominantly 2-D show literally flattens aspects of the Canadian identity as a banker rustling up dirt for his Stampede-week chaps. While many Calgarians and Stampeding visitors outfit themselves in false identities and mercilessly hose their gullets with cheap highballs, others can thoughtfully ponder the dynamics of “Canadian-ness” at Newzones, and what rocks about the current nation, and what, simmering beneath the lightheartedness of a litany of exquisite work, points to what necessarily does not.
