Exhibition preview by Tony Martins  /  Photos by David Barbour

That very little local art in Ottawa cries out as overtly political or rooted in activism should be no surprise. In a town rife with lobbyists, diplomats, NGOs, polite demonstrations on Parliament Hill, and scores of civil servants who must collectively bite their tongues, our way is one of calm, not protest. Art-with-politics in Ottawa can be a tough sell.

This mostly apolitical backdrop may serve to heighten the significance of the Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG) showing of works by local stalwart Alex Wyse opening June 17. Co-curated by the OAG’s Andrea Fatona and Catherine Sinclair, Wyse Works: Exposing the Inevitable positions the multi-disciplinary Wyse as part of a small group of locals who fuse satire with the conventions of folk art to do something that’s not so much in vogue: to get political.

“Over the past few decades and presently, there has been a vein of artists in Ottawa working with a folk-art inspired aesthetic to create social and political critique through humour in their work,” explained Sinclair in an interview with Guerilla.

Who besides Wyse could be included in such a vein? In the foreward she composed for the catalogue that will accompany Wyse Works, OAG director Alexandra Badzak draws parallels between Wyse and three other accomplished locals—Tim Desclouds, Eric Walker, and the late Mark Marsters—each of whom offers “political and social irony mingled with a healthy dose of humour and fashioned with a handmade and folk-art-inspired aesthetic.”

While there is little or no evidence that these artists have influenced one another (and no one is rushing to unite them under a banner called, say, The Ottawa 4), the humour and folk art similarities across practices are significant and may be characteristic of our art scene—a scene that reflects how we prefer political works with a splash of cream and sugar.

Still, though fashioned with abundant cleverness and craft, the works of Wyse do not lack for bite and, as Badzak notes in her foreward, he is overdue for a major solo exhibition. Viewers will appreciate the remarkable artistry, inventiveness, and whimsical-yet-sophisticated use of language threaded through the work in this retrospective.

With many options for shaping a broad range of pieces dating from the period 1956 to 2011, Fatona and Sinclair chose to emphasize a thread of environmental consciousness.

“Environment tends to be the background to everything in his work,” explained Sinclair, though it is used to make comment on human foibles. “Alex is always looking to expose and deconstruct underlying structures,” added Sinclair.

In Exposing the Inevitable, the painting from 1988 after which the exhibition is named, Wyse exposes both a colourful fish and the absurdity of human environmental practices.

As the artist’s long-time friend Christopher Youngs writes in his exhibition catalogue essay titled “The Unfashionable World of Mr. Wyse,” the painting is a prime example of how the artist creates scenarios with bizarre-yet-profound implications.

“Wyse frequently confronts the absurdity, the underlying stupidity, of our conventional sense of reality with a more ludicrous farce of his own invention,” writes Young. “In this case, a fish has taken a huge leap in an attempt to escape its threatened environment, the water. Sadly, desperately, it has propelled itself into a totally foreign surrounding in which it cannot exist. The entire balance of nature has been set askew—set to self-destruct.”

Wyse expresses of variety of moods when pondering the plight (and flight) of fish in several other works in the exhibition—including the sobering painting It Was Once So Plentiful and the fanciful box construction Fish Flying South—but the artist’s curiosity proves exceptionally diverse. This ambitious exhibition includes 58 works that range from simple art school drawings to almost room-sized sculptures.

If pondering the political nature of the art is not your thing, Wyse Works is an important show to attend simply because it surveys the career of one Ottawa’s most engaging, versatile, detailed, and thoughtful artists. Arguably, Wyse is himself an artifact of folklore.

“Alex Wyse has been working in Ottawa for almost 40 years now making such witty and beautiful creations,” noted Sinclair, “and this retrospective exhibition is a chance to view his varied and evolving practice.”

Exposing the Inevitable (detail), 1988, mixed media

Rutherford Rockets on Display, 1987, mixed media






It Was Once So Plentiful, 2006, ink, oil and crayon on paper

Fish Flying South (detail), 1988-89, mixed media






Female Fellers, 1972-73, mixed media