Western Canada's art magazine since 2002
26 February 2019 Vol 4 No 5 ISSN 2561-3316 © 2019
From the Editor
Portia Priegert
Is contemporary art moving from its cool intellectualism into a more emotive space?
I found myself mulling this over in bed this morning in response to a review by Sandee Moore. She looks at Are You My Mother?, a show at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina that considers the human need for connection and nurturing.
Sandee begins in a simple and direct way. “Three years ago, I touched my dad’s hand. It was as cold, hard and pale as the plaster Saskatchewan artist Heather Benning has used to model the likenesses of her parents, reclined stiffly on cloth-draped plinths. Titled Sarcophagi: Rosalie and Larry, Benning's sculptures are slightly larger than life. The body of a dead parent is already monumental.”
I’ve only seen a photograph of Benning’s work, but Sandee's opening chokes me up. I remember the cool, pale hand of my mother in the hospital bed where she died in 2010, and my immense sense of futility and foiled love. I cared for my mother over the last decade of her life. It is one of the hardest things I have ever done. It challenged my patience, pointed to my own deficits with emotional labour, and forced me to confront the family patterns and dysfunctions into which I was born.
It took me years to process her death – or to think I processed it – because, here, now, as I write, I again feel the need to weep.
Is this the most important role of art – to help us feel?
Or is it to make us think, to revel in clever abstractions and formal relationships, difficult structural inquiries and critical debates?
Throughout art history, the pendulum has swung back and forth between the cool head and the expressive heart. The intellectual symmetries of Neoclassicism arose in response to the gaudy excesses of the Rococo and the Baroque and gave way to Romanticism's subjective explorations of the imaginative and the intuitive. More recently, the reflective objectivities of Minimalism responded to the emotional immediacy of Abstract Expressionism. Again and again, we see one tendency ascendant in the culture of the day, yet the other never entirely extinguished.
Here at Galleries West, we've written recently about other artists who work in emotional terrain, such as Jennifer Rose Sciarrino and Kasia Sosnowski. I have just edited a story about Riisa Gundesen’s self-portraits for a future issue. She exposes the distortions of depression by juxtaposing the beautiful and the grotesque in a glaringly open way, speaking to the deep splits that can occur in our personalities, the light and the shadow.
It’s interesting that the artists I think of are female. Is this another product of our historic moment, with the rise of #MeToo, the willingness, finally, to hear women’s voices? Is there a critical mass of women in the art world who are forging a path with work that, at one time, might have been dismissed?
I need to do more research and ponder this further. I worry that my thinking is overly simplistic. Perhaps I am seeing a pattern where none exists. Or perhaps artists of all genders are becoming more emotive in response to the growing woes facing the world.
I'm curious what you are noticing. Is something astir? Do drop a comment below about your thoughts – and feelings. It would be great to start a conversation.
Until next time,
CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE: Stacey Abramson, Dick Averns, Amy Gogarty, Diana Hiebert, Sandee Moore
