TAMMI CAMPBELL and KARA UZELMAN, "concerning certain events," Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, January 17 to March 22, 2015

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TAMMI CAMPBELL and KARA UZELMAN: concerning certain events

Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon

January 17 to March 22, 2015

By Bart Gazzola

Considering the starkly different practices of Kara Uzelman and Tammi Campbell in concerning certain events – Uzelman’s clustered ready-mades, Campbell’s meticulous play on absence and minimalism – their ideas overlap and mesh effectively.

Uzelman’s works illustrate Saskatchewan psychologist Duncan Blewett’s groundbreaking research in the 1950s on the therapeutic use of LSD: all the objects assembled in The Frontiers of Being (The Pump) are based on first-person accounts from his experiments. The suspended hammer, the passel of remote controls and even the polished stones, the ashtray and the tinfoil are specific references to the experiences of Blewett’s subjects. The repeating slides in The Frontiers of Being (The Furnace) are the same, looping the viewer into a hypnotic, receptive space, like the bristling snow on the large television in The Pump. The exhibition also invokes previous archeological works by Uzelman that invest seemingly random found objects with specific relevance.

There’s a utopic discourse at play here that fits with the sentiment that LSD, associated with various social-activist movements of the 1960s, expands one’s consciousness and encourages empathy. And when contemplating utopic idealism on the Prairies, the legacy of Prairie Modernism, Emma Lake and socialist history must also be considered. This is where the narratives in Uzelman’s assemblages meet Campbell’s equally investigative, yet broader, sentiments.

The three works presented by Campbell are Pre Post-Painterly (After Stella, Notched-V series #01-14), Dear Agnes (September 2014: #01-28) and 4’33” Emma Lake (the last a cheeky response to John Cage, who led a 1965 workshop at Emma Lake). Of late, Campbell is known for works like Stella that mimic masking tape (necessary to any hard-edge painter) as a trompe l’oeil fastidiously rendered in paint. This, to cite Mendel curator Sandra Fraser, is a “confrontational homage to Modernism.” Like the LSD trope, the Modernist epoch Campbell engages is often mythologized and misrepresented, and is still being argued (appropriately, the debate whether the Regina Five explored abstraction due to the drug that was Barnett Newman, or LSD, is touched upon.)

Fraser notes the exhibition questions the idea of expert knowledge. After all, Campbell’s work is perhaps a visual essay on the histories of Modernism as it intersected with Saskatchewan and elsewhere. Uzelman’s use of archeological methods and tropes is here more an engaging snapshot – both ridiculous and funny – of an oft-ignored or misconstrued period in Saskatchewan and Canadian history. As Fraser notes, these two Saskatchewan artists take their cues from a particular history. Where they go is different, but also similar.

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