Mark Neufeld & Julie Oh | Icecreampowerpinkyswearlater?

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Mark Neufeld, “An excerpt from a history of painting,” 2016

video still (courtesy of the Gallery)

This exhibit presents works by Winnipeg-based artist Mark Neufeld and Newfoundland artist Julie Oh. It is an opportunity to bridge critical and unforeseen connections between their respective works. They are both collectors of objects, often seemingly innocuous assortments from different contexts that are given new ones within a painting, a video, or a spatial arrangement. Typically, as a starting point, Neufeld’s practice employs painting as an idea, a philosophical framework, or material, even when the resulting work is a video projection like the piece featured in the exhibit titled 'Excerpt from a History of Painting'. This video, like the suite of paintings on canvas featured in the exhibit, comprises a variety of objects as part of its subject. Oh, on the other hand, maintains a practice that predominates through sculptural installations made of carefully culled ordinary articles of life ostensibly with low semantic charge. In this exhibit, they include dog toys, t-shirts, a toilet dispenser, and a sealed can of fog, among others. Beyond their spatial configuration in the exhibit, the majority of Oh’s collection of objects is minimally modified by the artist, if at all. She mostly re-presents them, unassumingly, as they would exist in the world.

In Neufeld's work, the objects abet the self-referentiality of the paintings, highlighting a sampler of various painterly vocabulary from the medium’s history. This includes the form of a digital brush, airbrush, realism, illusionistic depth, figure-ground, loose brushwork, flat colour, texture, trompe l’oeil and still life. Still-life is especially a useful type of painting through which Neufeld’s works can be considered, including his video work. As still life paintings have traditionally done, Neufeld's works assemble a curious array of objects—either of fascination or distaste. They serve as a formal exercise to talk about painting and its antecedents while also narrativizing—consciously or unconsciously to the artist—a compressed image of the discursive cultural environment these objects emerge from. 

One way Oh’s found objects can be regarded is through this lens of still lives. Although not quite inanimate, their everyday function has been paused for the time being of the exhibit. By being selected, the artist suggests that there’s something more to be attuned to, beyond the function these objects were designed for. Through her instinctive experience of these objects, she directs us to angle our view toward its subtexts, subtleties that might be peripheral to our primary reception of the object.  

​The window is a recurring motif in art history and an object as part of Neufeld’s still-life pictorial spaces. Neufeld considers the various inferences a window can suggest in an artist’s life and practice. That is, as a threshold for artistic discovery, a bridge between the interior and exterior worlds and for embracing new knowledge. In the same vein, they are passageways that shape perception, creating confinement around what we can see and know. The very space of his canvas is as much an access to creative freedom as it is a physical barrier to a larger complexity outside this frame. This dichotomy is further emphasized by the intersecting lines that create a grid for the window’s design. The grid is another art historical device and symbol. They serve a function for many painters and drafters in achieving a level of representational precision. The grid throughout art history has also been a plane for several artists to traverse beyond as it influences or dictates the level of artistic liberty they are bound by. The network of woven threads that make up the canvas upon which Neufeld creates is a grid of its own. The artist’s lively paintings here are conscious of and contend with this history. In the ways windows are openings for new possibilities, I like to think of Oh’s sparse sculptural propositions as portals to a latent generative polyvalence. They are anthropological artifacts of experience—bearing whispers of social and cultural histories. 

Icecreampowerpinkyswearlater? is the title of the exhibit. It is a word and question containing multiple words that refer to objects and gestures influenced by the artists’ playful, lyrical, and spirited works. Neufeld’s creamsicle colours called to mind flavours of ice cream melting into one another, an image which, to my mind, suggests an unfettered playfulness I see as in both artists’ works and one of many qualities that give it their power. One of Oh’s more discrete sculptural objects in the show is titled 'Pinky Swear'. It consists of two metal grips of a ratchet tie-down locked together like two pinkies making a promise to each other to collaborate and securely journey a piece of equipment to a final destination. I like to think it represents the collaborative occasion of realizing this exhibit. Each artist's work is a layered coalescing of parts like the collaged exhibit title. Their work builds together fragments of knowledge, and whatever meaning accretes therein is less finite and more of a question for later. - LUTHER KONADU, curator.