>>PREVIEW
PINK
Runs until June 16
Colleen Wolstenholme, Amanda Schoppel, Kristi Malakoff and Glenda Leon
Art Gallery of Calgary
Pink, the current exhibition at the Art Gallery of Calgary, is a compilation of four individual female artists working across a breadth of mediums, concepts and ideological formats. The artists in the show address notions of femininity in modern culture through a variety of guises, some overtly political, others subtly metaphysical and still others charmingly neurotic and obsessive. The exhibition flirts with incoherence, but effectively reveals commonalities amongst the artists. The result is a risky and thought-provoking show that is both sensuous and stimulating.
The first work encountered is the daunting Swarm by Kristi Malakoff. This large installation work consists of thousands of images of butterflies adhered to the entrance wall of the gallery. Each of these butterflies was scanned, printed and hand-cut by the artist in an arduous commitment to process. A wonderful paradox arises between the experience of the piece and the knowledge of the artists’s Sisyphean activity. In an analogous paradox, the wave of colour and pattern created by the butterflies seems to wash across the front space with both seductive and terrifying implications. It might be lovely being surrounded with these delicate creatures but nightmarish and suffocating at the same time.
After passing through Malakoff's butterfly storm to enter the main exhibition space, we find the work of Colleen Wolstenholme. Wolstenholme’s practice is primarily concerned with issues surrounding pharmaceuticals and female identity (particularly the relationship between Islamic and Western traditions) and this is evident in her work. The pill is a recurring theme in the exhibition, taking the form of sculpture and digital mosaic images. Much of the work is interesting, but feels overwhelmed in the large main gallery. Luckily, Wolstenholme’s pieces in the basement space are better resolved with the architecture. Particularly effective are her over-sized pills scattered about the basement floor. These objects resist literal readings while evoking socially minded critiques of modernist sculpture.
In the media gallery is the work of Glenda Leon. Leon is a contemporary Cuban artist working in film and video. Her two works in Pink provide a stark contrast with the rest of the exhibition, indicating an engagement concerned with the passing of time and its effects on bodies and desire. Leon's small video projection at the front of the space is particularly evocative of these themes, depicting a looped sequence of a hummingbird hovering up to the naked breast of a woman. Her video inside the Media Gallery has a calm sense of inevitability, showing ocean waves washing over a shore with the sound of a woman's breathing coinciding with the ebb and flow. The piece is unfortunately marred by the facile "hotel lobby" decorating that AGC has chosen to adopt for the interior of the space.
Finally, on the top floor are works by Kristi Malakoff and Amanda Schoppel. Malakoff’s work here is an expanded version of her installation Glade that she installed at the Stride Project Room in September 2006. Although perhaps not as mesmerizing as the original exhibition at Stride, Malakoff does successfully create a stunning fantasy forest scene using hand-cut flower images affixed to MDF cutouts. Across from Malakoff, Schoppel has installed a number of drawings and two sculptural pieces. The drawings consist of hand-drawn jigsaw puzzles that seem to pulse and flow with a rhythmic quality inherent to the repetitive process. This rhythmic quality is echoed in her sculpture/installation Growth, which is created with blue cloths and rye seed. As this piece progresses, the seeds will begin to grow and push the cloths apart, eventually covering and deteriorating them. The result is a movement from a human order to a natural one.
The entropic effect created in Schoppel's work mirrors a sensibility that runs throughout the exhibition. Each artist in their own way seems entranced by the seduction and fragility of order and control. Their works address an inevitable slippage of this order into alternative unsuspected orders, whether it be through our medicated bodies, the cycles of nature, the false idealism of fairy tales or the hallucinogenic properties of repetitive processes. In this way, Pink negotiates a space that is between skepticism and belief, but remains ultimately undefined. |
Copyright ©2007 FFWD. All rights reserved.