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Westward Ha! Visual Wit in the Wild West - Curated by Nicholas Roukes & Reinhard Skoracki
Museum of Contemporary Art Calgary
Friday, September 19 - Wednesday, October 29

More in: Visual Arts

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Museum of Contemporary Art Calgary

A deadly game of sheep and chess. A muppet creature seemingly coming to life through the screen of a villainous computer. A sculpture of the human form carefully twisted from coat hangers. The hybrid of a spaceship and George W Bush. The ways of seeing Westward Ha! Visual Wit in the Wild West are numerous. Reading an art review on this nonsensical, magical show is absurd. Writing one is even absurder than inventing a word; one may fear, as John Will’s painting suggests, "YOU APPEAR TO BE A BLITHERING IDIOT" could be very true in the case of this art critic.

Which is exactly why one must see this show. The latest exhibition at The Triangle Gallery includes 19 Western Canadian visual artists, and it may delight you, dear viewer, beyond words. Or you may find yourself questioning how something so silly can be found on the clean, white walls of an art gallery. The works themselves have been described as a sample of the spectrum of visual humour by exhibition curator Nicholas Roukes. If one was to ascribe labels to the works, they might include: ironic, witty, unconventional, comic, satirical… but that would also take the fun out of seeing the show.

Either their furry texture or a profound sense of nostalgia for Jim Henson’s creations drew me to Lisa Birke’s Techno-Beasts. Through rodent teeth, furry appendages and a great use of mixed media, Birke’s work comments on a society overfed and controlled by überinformation. Her works, as with many in Westward Ha!, are playful but also possess a darker side: look at these monsters from a few angles, and they take a life of their own.

Scot Bullick’s metal creatures look like they have morphed out of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are – ready to eat you with an axe, cellphone and briefcase in tow. Grotesque as they are beautiful, Bullick’s own monsters come to life through their disproportion: through giant horn and tiny goatees, deep wrinkles and menacing eyes.

Then there is Dallas Diamond’s whimsical miniature self-portraits: delightful, 3-D works in clay on the tiniest of scales. Whether we find a miniature Dallas caught in a jar, or changing into a cupcake, we can also discover something intensely personal and profound in each piece's depicted experience.

Jude Griebel’s anthropomorphic paintings evoke more contemplation than humour. Traces of memory and the influence of picture books come into play in often haunting images, such as the monochromatic Mice Listening to a Girl’s Regrets (2006).

Then there’s Elaine Brewer-White's funny ceramic sculptures, laced with political and social humour, that somehow appear to move. Or Victor Cicansky’s seemingly Technicolor tomatoes and a duck that presents a playful cartoonish ballet between form and heightened colours. Not to mention Jeff DeBoer’s enlightening spaceship landing on the nearest planet with an outhouse….

By far the most profound work was Roger Scrimshaw’s Argillaceous Simulacrum: Fiat Lux (2008) — a piece in clay and wood with a mirror that implicates the viewer in a tragic-comic parody created by humans with a herd mentality similar to the sheep in the piece. Scrimshaw’s work is really not a deadly game of sheep and chess; it becomes a commentary on the deadly game between our human fears and our own history.