DON JEAN-LOUIS, "Silver Works," Sept 19, 2008 to January 4, 2009, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

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"Silver Works (exhibition)"

Don Jean-Louis, "Silver Works" exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

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"Silver Works (exhibition)"

Don Jean-Louis, "Silver Works" exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

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"Silver Works (exhibition)"

Don Jean-Louis, "Silver Works" exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

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DON JEAN-LOUIS, Silver Works

Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Sept 19, 2008 to January 4, 2009

By Liz Wylie

Qualicum Beach, B.C.-based artist Don Jean-Louis has been on his own quirky and individual path of contemplation, research and discovery for decades. Beginning in Toronto in the 1960s as an artist who drew directly from nature (microcosmic close-up studies in graphite of seed pods), Jean-Louis moved into more conceptual, even industrial, areas of work, dealing with coloured light and formed plastics. He was intellectually engaged by the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and communications theories of the time, and they informed his work.

Jean-Louis’s exploration of the notion of “silver” in its many connotations and manifestations began in the mid-1980s, stemming from his contemplation of the magic of movies, and the parallel cinema that we all have playing out in our minds. The Silver Works from this period are large-scale painted objects, both canvases and full sheets of plywood. He does not intend these to function or be read as paintings exactly — he was not intent on engaging with any issues, histories or properties of the painting art form. To indicate this, most of these works are installed on the floor, just leaning against the wall, and not hung in the usual eye-level position.

Just how are viewers meant to engage with these objects? Possibly as expansive records of quasi-alchemical forays, and explorations that are emotionally charged, only with the human passion held in check by a strategic method of media application. The role of chance and nature has been given some rein as the works were left to cure and season in various conditions (out of doors, for instance).

Also included in the exhibition are later silver-oriented works: a selection of six digital images from a series that was printed in 2005 from old black-and-white Polaroid slides shot by the artist in the 1990s. Intriguingly, they have the same ethereal, yet somewhat impenetrable mood as the painted pieces from two decades earlier.

None of Jean-Louis’ art production (including his more recent monoprints and painted works dealing with individual drops of water) is intended for visual, aesthetic pleasure in and of itself. Rather, his is an art that nudges us to consider how we see what we see, and how we think, both superficially, and profoundly. His practice is highly disciplined, but strangely the works themselves seem almost provisional, like layers of skin shucked off and discarded as he moves along his path, no longer necessary for him, but left behind for us to ponder.

The Silver Works exhibition was co-curated by Lisa Baldissera, of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and Ihor Holubizky, senior curator at the Art Gallery at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, in P.E.I. Ingeniously getting around exorbitant shipping costs, the curators created the show in two portions: the Ontario-based version, which toured within that province, and now this Victoria book-end to that initial project (which includes works not in the Ontario incarnation — for example, three round mirror works from 1969). This version feels like the exhaling of a breath inhaled earlier in Ontario, our own western rendition, awaiting our consideration and contemplation.