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Down the Rabbit Hole - Group Exhibition
Art Gallery of Calgary
Friday, February 10 - Saturday, April 7

More in: Visual Arts

Until recently, pop surrealism was pooh-poohed by the “high art” elite as too crude to be taken seriously as a legitimate movement. In contrast to much of contemporary art’s abstraction, the genre, which emerged from graffiti, tattoo, comic book and zine roots, placed an emphasis on illustration, with its adherents opting for a strong narrative — often realist — approach.

Down the Rabbit Hole brings the works of four diverse surrealist artists to the fore at the Art Gallery of Calgary — Calgarian Landon-Jon Ference and Vancouver-based Eric Louie, Pilar Mehlis and Heather Watts.

Of the four, Louie, formerly of Calgary, displays a style more akin to abstract surrealism than its pop cousin, though his art defies easy categorization.

“I see my work as an unplanned concerto and let it happen on its own,” says Louie. “It’s opened up since moving to Vancouver, and I’m using more colours now compared to the solemn darkness of my last body of work.”

Indeed, there’s a playfulness emanating from Louie’s contributions — “Initiation,” for instance, is a lively piece brimming with optimism, while the ethereal “Periphery” possesses golden tones and electric, spark-like projections running through it.

Watts and Ference, on the other hand, address darker themes and stay truer to the narrative symbolism common to pop surrealism. The central theme underpinning Watts’s work, she says, is the idea of characters facing adversity and discovering previously unknown inner strengths.

“Ultimately the hope is that they are able to somehow transcend that adversity,” she says.

“Tree of Life” depicts children playing in an autumnal forest — a dying tree blooming with dancing figures. The painstaking level of detail in Watts’s art creates rich narrative and enigmatic qualities — her iconography both familiar and alien.

Also infused with symbolism and storytelling are Ference’s selections, which were influenced by his battles with depression and anxiety and his faith as a Christian. For instance, “Man and the Pigs” relates to the New Testament story of a possessed man whose demons are driven into a herd of pigs by Christ. Ference describes the making of the piece as “therapeutic and a portal for creating a relationship that’s supernatural.”

Mehlis is perhaps the most whimsical of the bunch as she explores the possibility of redemption through introspection. “The Ties that Bind” is a particularly poetic piece that addresses the notion that our nature is tied to unconscious — and possibly dangerous — elements that permeate our being. In her world view, balance is achieved through accepting the strange and hitherto unknown qualities of our consciousness. Prominent symbols that figure in Mehlis’s work are fish and wolves (the unconscious), sheep (the “good” side of our nature) and roses (marriage, fertility or union).