GARY PEARSON, "The End is My Beginning," March 30 to May 25, 2008; Kamloops Art Gallery

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"I'm Going Back to Greenville"

Gary Pearson, "I'm Going Back to Greenville," 2005, oil on matboard.

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"The Cocktail Bar Fade"

Gary Pearson, "The Cocktail Bar Fade," 2005, ink, pencil, rubber stamp, and collage paper on paper.

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"I'm Going Back to Greenville"

Gary Pearson, "I'm Going Back to Greenville," 2005, oil on matboard.

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"Please Don't Smoke During the Concert"

Gary Pearson, "Please Don't Smoke During the Concert," 1999, oil, rubber stamp and collage paper on paper.

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"Aftermath"

Gary Pearson, "Aftermath," oil on paper, 2007.

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"When I get to Baton Rouge"

Gary Pearson, "When I get to Baton Rouge," 2005, oil & oil enamel on canvas. Kamloops Art Gallery Collection 2007- 003. Purchased with financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program.

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GARY PEARSON, The End is My Beginning

Kamloops Art Gallery

March 30 to May 25, 2008

By Portia Priegert

Gary Pearson’s paintings typically explore communal spaces – bars, restaurants, jazz concerts. But those social settings also underline the sense of disconnection of the solitary figures central to Pearson’s work. They create, in tandem with his somber palette, a certain melancholy. Even when he includes multiple figures, the feeling of isolation remains strong, in part because his subjects seem frozen in stereotype.

Pearson’s protagonists are ‘types’ rather than real people with lives and personalities, and his work evokes parallels to genre fiction or the stylized engagements of film noir. An air of ennui, even in the exotic locations suggested by pastiches of palm trees, rises muggily from the canvas. A narrative may be suggested but it seems flimsy, a quality enhanced by Pearson’s incorporation of fragments of ambiguous text. The end is my beginning is an aptly chosen title, suggesting both circularity and repetition.

Stylistically, the naïve quality of the rough-hewn protagonists lingers on the line between drawing and painting. Pearson’s men often sit stiffly, their backs toward the viewer, at tables placed at mid-canvas. Close at hand, a single glass and, perhaps, an ashtray. It’s easy to read an autobiographical component into the work.

An extract from Pearson’s journal published in the exhibition catalogue, mentions that when he travels he likes to find a comfortable spot for a drink to wind down at the end of the day. “… it gives me an opportunity to reflect. I’ll start a conversation with the person next to me, I don’t care, or whoever’s behind the bar, as long as they’re not assholes. I like to be alone, but I also like to meet people.” Women, when they accompany his male figures, are typically cast in the role of servers, their sexuality emphasized through plumped lips and little black dresses.

This exhibition is dominated by recent paintings, including some from Pearson’s road trip through the United States during a sabbatical from his teaching job at UBC Okanagan, but also features earlier pieces from a series based on a 1998 Diana Krall concert in Berlin. He includes a pair of looped videos, Soliloquy andSoliloquy2, displayed on monitors at opposite ends of a narrow corridor at the back of the show. To the left, a woman in a cocktail dress smokes at a bar table, a glass of wine in front of her. To the right, a man in a suit puffs on a cigar at a similar table, occasionally scribbling something on a pad of paper.

Pearson is heir to a creative trajectory that can be traced from the Impressionists’ concern with the social life of the city (think of the melancholic absinthe drinker) through to the German Expressionists’ cruder handling of paint to capture the angst of social upheavals in the early 20^thcentury. But Pearson also references the cartoon-like qualities of some Pop Art and, at times, evokes the paint handling of abstraction.

An avid follower of art-world trends, Pearson, who maintains an occasional practice as an art critic, creates work that in the words of the gallery’s former curator, Jen Budney, offers “a beguiling sophistication” that is simple only at first glance. Ultimately, to see and be seen is not just the terrain of social engagement. It is, on some fundamental level, the role of the artist.