From Make Believe

At first glance, all is well in the exhibition of monochromatic black-and-white figure drawings by Vancouver artist Angela Grossmann. Her portraits of boys, girls, the occasional dandy character or strumpet-type and their puppies are nostalgic, almost kitschy. They have serene expressions and relaxed postures. One young fellow sits and sips tea, while a little doggy looks up at him lovingly.

Looking beyond these contented gazes, each drawing reveals a subtle narrative — clues that lead away from mere representation. The drawings themselves are formally dirty, worked up with layers of paint that look like smudges of soot, photocopied collage and scavenged, discoloured canvas, all hallmarks of Grossmann’s well-established style. The figures are composites of photocopies and other found images. Her portraits and photos of various body parts have been torn up, sectioned into parts and re-configured on the canvas. Then the phantom hand appears.

All is not well. The phantom hand rests on a young girl’s shoulder, but it’s cut off at the wrist and it becomes tempting to fill in the figure using the powers of imagination. She looks to be posing for a picture, but who is disrupting this otherwise pretty scene? Is it a menacing daddy figure? In the drawing titled Time for Tea, attention focuses on the boy and his dog, but there is also a ghostly face floating behind a vase of flowers in the background. Even the silhouette of a paper cutout figure ripped off the canvas looks like another ghost in Dancer. These disembodied faces and hands add up to a more macabre narrative than is first apparent.

Dogs figure prominently in this series of drawings, as they have through many periods of art and portraiture from the Renaissance through to modernism. The canines of art history are often read as a symbol that portrays death or unmeasured lust, and in Grossmann’s work this reading could fit, too, given the other ominous clues that she drops.

While the stories take time to tease out and hinge on which path the viewer’s mind wants to go down, there’s no attempt on the part of the artist to deny the evidence of her process. Close up, the portraits dematerialize into smudges, strokes of paint and abrasion marks left after scraping off the accumulated paint or obscuring an image.

These physically and conceptually messy works seem a little out of place in such a pristine white gallery space, but there, the pinholes, torn photocopies and dirty canvas that accompany these lost figures seem all the more deliberate. The canvases are far from pristine. The panels are securely double-stitched with thick, waxed thread, and each bears deep creases, stains and burn marks. Grossmann confirms that they’re old tents used by surveyors from British Columbia who were exploring and mapping the Canadian North. The origin of this material is one of the most captivating parts of the work, and the backstory of her salvaged canvas certainly adds to the abjection of her figures. Imagine the surveyors frostbitten and shivering in these flimsy temporary homes.

The feeling of unease that pervades in Make Believe carries over from Grossmann’s past series of work. Her use of images and stories that are scavenged from fraught personal and cultural histories are the mainstays in her drawings, those of Parisian orphans, historical mug shots of prison inmates and the lives of young girls. This suite of portraits doesn’t delve into the deeply emotional, but again, provides compelling evidence that something dark lurks just out of view.