A High Horizon

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Kristy Gordon, “Planetary,” 2021

oil on canvas, three panels together 20" x 36.5" (courtesy the artist)

A high horizon line allows for a vast playing field where multiple scenes can be layered simultaneously. Bruegel and Bosch used this device in paintings depicting multiple narratives. This spatial shift broke the Renaissance’s firm hold on linear perspective, allowing for a gathering of dissimilar events to coalesce within one painting. The innovation would later be adopted by artists of the mid-20th century. 

For Kristy Gordon, whose exhibition Planetary is on view until June 6 at the Langham Gallery in Kaslo, B.C., a high horizon line similarly affords space to unfold dramatic and complex narratives. Her contradictory and enigmatic scenes unravel centuries of power relations and imagine a new future. With urgency, she refers to art historical precedents as far back as classical Greece, embedding them in non-linear compositions that evoke what she calls “the return of the repressed.”

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Kristy Gordon, “The Cosmic Lotus,” 2019

oil on canvas, 60" x 96" (courtesy the artist)

We could barely enter these compact imaginary worlds if not for the artist’s deft hand, honed by years of portrait painting. Gordon, who is based in Nelson, B.C., can readily conjure both ominous and virtuous imagery ranging from the repulsive to the euphoric. The pastel palette she uses to depict an abundance of feminine motifs – flowers, goddesses, unicorns and butterflies – as symbols of female sexuality and generative power clashes with aggressively darker monsters, murderers and arsonists. Here, amid this gender dichotomy, is the work’s emotional anxiety.

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Kristy Gordon, “Liminality,” 2019

oil on canvas, 52" x 64" (courtesy of the artist)

Gordon’s self-described aim is to "dismantle gendered hierarchies long embedded in visual culture" and imagine a new world. Guides to this alchemical death and renewal come in the form of an army of helpers – hybrid creatures, slithering reptiles and the walking dead roam freely, as if plucked from a Bosch painting. 

In Planetary, a small triptych gesturing to Bosch’s fantastical Garden of Earthly Delights, Gordon sets out her thesis most clearly. As if reading a book, viewers can move from hell to paradise as a vision of a new world, purged of rationalist and technocratic realities, takes shape. 

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Kristy Gordon, “Whisper,” 2020

oil on canvas, 24" x 20" (courtesy of the artist)

Whisper, a self-portrait that echoes Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s work, is the show’s most straightforward piece. Gordon’s gaze is direct, the composition uncluttered. Two hares, which remind me of Albrecht Dürer’s Young Hare, climb up the front of her leopard-skin garment. A burning landscape forms the horizon, where a lone figure flees. A helicopter hovers in a cerulean sky. Is this the mythic end of the human species? Or can we hear the plea of nature as she calls on us to respond? ■  

Kristy Gordon: Planetary is on view at the Langham Gallery in Kaslo, a small community in the B.C. Interior, from April 9 to June 6, 2021. 

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