ART SEEN: Flopping, slumping figures suggest migrants caught between worlds
Credit to Author: Kevin Griffin| Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2019 00:03:08 +0000
Anything that flops is usually considered a failure. Curves and bends are geometries that don’t measure up: they’re soft, weak and don’t know where they’re going.
Straight lines, on the other hand, are the exact opposite: they’re clear, direct and definite. They’re strong and confident.
In Those Who Wait, sculptural forms made out of foam and plaster are shaped to resemble legs and torsos of human bodies but not individual persons. Many of their flopping forms have relationships with chain link fences. In Accompaniment, a form flops on the gallery floor, the upper part of the torso bending through a hole in the geometric grid of the chain link. On the opposite side, the top of another torso nestles underneath another form as it too flops onto the gallery floor.
Seeing the curving forms made me feel compassion towards them. I was also affected the odour of plaster and how it collapsed the distance between the figures and my response to them. The smell got inside me in a way that usually doesn’t happen with art. It made the whole experience much more personal.
I kept thinking of refugees and migrants on the way to a new life. It’s easy to imagine a political situation where they’re forced to leave and set out as lovers or friends or partners, joined together in their journey, only to be separated, corralled and blocked by fences, both legal and physical, as they near their destination. Some make it through, others don’t. Some even get trapped between worlds, the unlucky ones caught for years in legal limbo in refugee camps and other non-places.
The white curving forms sharply contrast with both the gallery walls and the formal grid and frame of the fences. They look like gestures of human frailty and support confronting physical structures of separation and regulation. There’s no romantic resolution. They don’t get to the promised land. Instead, they’re caught in a static limbo between one state and another.
The fences include panels of reflective material so that the viewer’s image gets included in the works. But the reflections are soft and diffuse and slightly out of focus. We’re part of the picture but not in starring roles: we’re in the background as this drama unfolds in front of us.
Accompaniment by Sreshta Rit Premnath, detail, installation view, in Those Who Wait. Photo: Kevin Griffin
Accompaniment, Squeeze and Slump are a powerful group of works by Shreshta Rit Premnath. The essay accompanying the exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery points out how Premnath’s work is informed by his own observations. His studio in Brooklyn overlooks the Metropolitan Detention Centre, the notorious waterfront U.S. federal jail that holds more than 1,600 inmates. It must not be easy to work as an artist beside such a modernist nightmare of a building when you know it holds all kinds of prisoners, including migrants and immigrants.
The reading of the works as relating to refugees and migrants is reinforced by the paired text works in the form of custom exit signs such as Exile/Exhaust and Support/Separate.
As I looked at the slumped sculptural bodies I wondered why they’re all in white plaster. What would the work have looked like if the plaster and maybe even the foam were in different colours? Using white reinforces the whiteness of the white cube. Colour might make the work more deliberately gestural and human.
Stand by Olivia Whetung, detail, installation view, in Sugarbush Shrapnel. Photo: Kevin Griffin
In the next gallery space at the CAG is Sugarbush Shrapnel by Olivia Whetung.
The main part of the installation consists of five long, thin panels of wood veneer – maple, birch and cherry – hanging from the ceiling. They’re rooted to the floor by bright flagging tape tied to grommets and smooth river stones. They’re all covered in on one side with scenes from indigenous life among the Curve Lake First Nation on Chemong Lake, Ontario. Scenes from daily life of the Mississauga-Nishinaabe are burned into the wood veneer and highlighted with beads in a way that suggests personal events lovingly remembered.
Each sheet of veneer has a front with an image and a back unmarked except for the reverse of the bead work. With only one side used to hold the drawings, the empty side makes them look like something’s missing. They’d look better if they were hung closer to the wall like two dimensional works.
The one hanging that caught my attention shows a squirrel climbing up a maple tree trunk, a beady eye looking out at the viewer. It looks like it was caught in the middle of a stride. Lower down on the right is a spigot and a bucket underneath to catch the outflow of maple syrup. The idea of such an incredibly wonderful food such as maple syrup simply flowing from a tree ready to eat has always amazed me. I can’t but think of it as a wonderful gift from maple trees to humans.
The title comes from a collection of five packets of beads that sparkle like jewels in the sun. Displayed in a vitrine, the beads wrap around nuggets of exploded stone – the shrapnel – that are the products of the intense heat from sap-boiling fire lit by Whetung’s family. But the shrapnel of Sugarbush Shrapnel isn’t only from the exploding stones. The future of daily indigenous practices such as harvesting maple syrup may be threatened by the random affects of flying shrapnel from global heating and other climate catastrophes.
Those Who Wait by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Sugarbush Shrapnel Olivia Whetung are at the Contemporary Art Gallery until Sunday, Jan. 5, 2020.
Stand, detail, installation view, from Sugarbush Shrapnel by Olivia Whetung. Photo: Kevin Griffin