Jeffrey Spalding’s Marketplace, part of Third Quarter Correction at Stride

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Third Quarter Correction by Jeffrey Spalding
Stride Gallery
Friday, September 4 - Wednesday, September 30

More in: Visual Arts

After the controversy surrounding his unexplained departure as president and CEO from the Glenbow Museum, Calgarians will want to know if Jeffrey Spalding’s own recent art has any coded or implicit meaning about what went down. There’s an obvious link in the exhibition’s title, “Third Quarter Correction,” which implies a decided move or transition before nearing a final phase, that will lead many people to question again what happened to the shared dream of situating a leading institution for contemporary art in Calgary.

Spalding’s works in the show are part of an ongoing exercise he started about 20 years ago, when he ran out of alterations to make to his own works. At the time he had been known for austere monochromes and was situated among Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s roster of conceptual painters. But when most of the artists of that scene were trying to make objective, process based works, Spalding and his studio mates Eric Fischl and Tim Zuck were trying to find ways to put the personal back into austere abstraction. Spalding’s layer paintings spoke to the value of time, labour and consideration put into the artist’s process. Lucky for us, some of these early works are included in the show at Stride.

After exhausting his “pinnacle of purity” with the black paintings and coloured checkerboard works from that time, he began collecting “junk store paintings” which were selling for 50 cents as a last resort before being canned. In the past he had scraped away, painted over, or continually added layers to his own paintings. He similarly modifies the disregarded pieces by layering camouflage-like patterns of dots and squares of bright colour over the originals.

Rather than a high and mighty exercise meant to prove his superior ability to make successful paintings over amateurs, he works with the original intentions of the artist who never quite made it work. “It’s about ‘I am who I am,’ apparently, in the art world and I’m apparently good at what that is, but now I’m coming face-to-face with something I would never have initiated,” he says.

As each rescued object presents a different problem, from cheap attempts at romanticizing a landscape to a way-too conservative colour choice, Spalding responds with a different tactic of collaboration.

In one particularly overworked junk store original, replete with a reference to gender trouble and power dynamics, a boy pumps water while a girl is bent over to drink it. Geese and a dog look on. Spalding used an old multiple photo frame template as a stencil to break apart the image into shapes, highlighting the passages of interest the way an art history analysis would do. In others, Spalding uses a dot stencil, paying homage to fellow abstract painter Gerald Ferguson and making reference to impressionism and nature.

Spalding admits he is somehow bothered by the gulf between high and low art. Coming from a working class upbringing where art “was tolerated but unnatural,” he found ways to relate the dissimilar experiences of work and artwork. These early negotiations still inform his style of writing. “I’m personally obsessed with the idea that a regular person with regular abilities and intelligence should be able to pick up an art book for the first time and you should be able to help them understand why you’re curious, intrigued, and why it matters to go through it…. It has become my style to express why I don’t get it. I try and puzzle my way through it so that the reader is actually ahead of me thinking ‘you goof, I see the answer, I get it already.’”

Whether people find the “Salvation Army paradigm” elitist or not, Spalding says it is part of that edge artists have to find between doing something uncomfortable and having a totally fresh and unexpected outcome in the work. He talks about the original reception of his seminal black paintings from the early ’70s when people would walk into the exhibition and think: “Really? I came all this way for this?” But over time most people agree that those black paintings, made up of 250 layers of transparent primary colour, have a contemplative presence and actually glow. He also cites Canadian superstar artist Shary Boyle, whose work he found at first “too cute and too clever.”

“So I put the wall up… but kept encountering it and thinking ‘Well, that’s OK and that’s OK. And then well darn, if I don’t have that in the world then I don’t have anything else like it. And gosh darn it it’s really good, too,’” he says.

As a former teacher, Spalding is careful about telling students that something they’re doing and deeply care about isn’t working, for fear they’d stop trying. He admires in the same way the audacity and bravery of the amateur works and what they were aiming for.

By contrast, the art world too often hesitates and preplans their moves by being “too bright to make mistakes.” He says artists are sometimes too resistant to fluff and easy gestures and that the resurrected works are about “sweeping away cynicism about failed things and trying to find their value.”

Another aspect of his idealism-cynicism pendulum, referenced in Eric Cameron’s exhibition text, plays out in his feelings about art’s higher meaning. “Art is the most important thing to me in my life. And I can’t have it be that without really thinking it has the chance to change people. What’s interesting is that I even know what the trick is and I still let it work on me and every time I could cry,” he says.

To someone who has such an honest relationship with what is personally meaningful, worrying about what other people think is not as much of an issue. In the same way, he says, Calgary artists are making the mistake of worrying that other people are somehow holding us back. Throwing in a Canadian metaphor to illustrate, he says, “In hockey, when you’re on a breakaway, somebody slaps at your ankles. What you can do is stop, turn around and punch them, but then you’re in the penalty box. What you should have done is ignore it and keep going.”

“There are a ton of conservatives in Germany but they have an extraordinary art scene because the people who are interested in art do keep talking to each other and they have enough. You don’t need everybody.”

When the conversation finally reaches the sticky question of the Glenbow, Spalding is enthusiastic about discussing the complex problems with art in Calgary.

“For decades we’ve all been trying to solve some things about Calgary and I was very hopeful that it would be solved through the Glenbow since I have a long history there,” he says.

During his time as president, he aspired to remind people inside and outside the museum of the original mandate by founder Eric Harvie. Spalding found Harvie’s mandate to be full of clarity and aspiration — to bring the advantages of contact with the world to an Albertan audience. He says it is not a forgone conclusion that the Glenbow will not again be a leader in bringing the rich experience of art from other countries to Calgary, mirroring what Documenta (one of the world’s foremost art events) was able to do for German artists. “The forum for world art created by German art institutions brings German artists in direct contact with international colleague artists and into the company of curators from across the globe. Naturally enough, the truly gifted rise to the occasion and use this opportunity for dialogue as a passport to display their work far afield, and thus the regional becomes the global.”

Spalding is not interested in offending anyone or placing blame in regards to his departure from the Glenbow, but for his part is encouraging people to “find other mechanisms and try to think outside of institutions.”