Crossroads

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Janet Shaw-Russell, “Luna’s Curse (detail),” 2015

coloured pencil and pins on a dress pattern, 46” x 42” (photo by Kevin Bertram)

Swept along by daily life, we teeter on a fine balance between endings and beginnings, caught between the reverberations of what has just passed and all the promises and uncertainties of the future. These everyday moments of transition, which have fuelled Janet Shaw-Russell’s art practice for the last nine years, are palpable in Crossroads, on view until Jan. 19 at the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery in Winnipeg.

Shaw-Russell, a multimedia artist based in Brandon, Man., experienced major personal changes during that time, including the sale of her childhood home and the death of her parents. While many people experience the later years of life as negative because they coincide with a period of loss, Shaw-Russell thoughtfully examines the art of aging and how the tenacious relationship between fragility and resilience can teach us to “draw the shape of change” and reimagine hope.

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Janet Shaw-Russell, “I remember how glad she was to see us,” 2011

graphite pencil on vellum, 19” x 24.5” (photo by Doug Derksen)

Crossroads amalgamates three related bodies of work that offer distinct points of entry to her meditations. For instance, I remember how glad she was to see us, an exquisite 2011 representation from her Traces series, is a provocatively rendered architectural drawing of her childhood home, measured and planned mere days before the house was sold.

Unlike the sharply detailed blueprints Shaw-Russell made during her 40-year career in interior design, it’s drawn with graphite on vellum. Those textures allowed Shaw-Russell to shade and obscure the home’s features, imbuing it with ethereality. Simply put, it is a portrait of a place that vanished as she drew it, but still pulses with the life and vitality of a cherished memory.

Shaw-Russell’s second body of work, This Fragile Dwelling Place, was completed between 2012 and 2015 and is also inspired by the aesthetics of loss.This large collection of drawings dialogues with work by American artist Joan Semmel, Newfoundland artist Barb Hunt and Toronto’s Spring Hurlbut.

Making this series inspired a critical shift in her creative focus from aging architectural structures to human bodies. As well, her decision to draw on an unfamiliar surface, antique tissue paper, was not only technically challenging, but led to another conceptual breakthrough. Thinking that the tissue would be what Semmel calls “the tender skin of fragile thoughts,” Shaw-Russell was surprised by its durability. This experience helped reconfigure her ideas about resilience and laid the groundwork for a new conversation about change.

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Janet Shaw-Russell, “To Have” (left) and “To Hold,” 2018

graphite pencil on paper, 14” x 11” (photo by Kevin Bertram of installation in artist’s studio)

Her latest series, Crossroads, completed over the last three years, illuminates the beauty and power of our last developmental stage: death. During an intensive period of study, she produced more than 30 drawings of a female skeleton. Intimate and precise, these drawings not only reveal her respect for the legacy of that individual, but also record how the experience changed her perspective on mortality and aging.

Her drawings of the bones of the right and left hands, To Have and To Hold, suggest that richness, not loss, characterizes the last stage of human existence. The apparent fragility of the bones belies their strength and their ability to conjure hope in a new kind of life at the crossroads of an old one. ■

Crossroads is on view from Nov. 16, 2018, to Jan. 19, 2019, at the Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery in Winnipeg.