Monday, January 31, 2011
See Below by Susan Feindel, installation view of India ink floor canvases (photo: Steve Farmer)
OAG contemporary preview by Tony Martins / Images courtesy of Ottawa Art Gallery
See Below by former Ottawa resident Susan Feindel and Development Series by current resident Barbara Gamble are related contemporary exhibitions opening Friday, February 11 at the Ottawa Art Gallery. Together the shows demonstrate the desire of OAG contemporary curator Andrea Fatona to situate art as a real-world concern that can address pressing issues in both man-made and natural worlds.
Feindel’s See Below installation was originally exhibited at the Mount Saint Vincent University Gallery (MSVU) in Halifax in 2009. Here, six 17-foot-long India ink canvases laid flat on the floor and three smaller drawings on Plexiglas stands were inspired by the artist’s trips aboard oceanographic research ships exploring sea-floor habitats. Darkened lighting and an eerie audio component called “Sediment Chorus” add to the atmosphere as gritty and scratchy ocean sediment sounds fill the dim gallery space.
Susan Feindel, “It will smell like the breath of a newborn baby.” 7 (Anonymous, aboard C.C.G.S. Hudson, 2001) 2009 (detail) (Photo: Steve Farmer)
The larger visual works are abstractions of sonar print outs that provide a bird’s-eye view of long swaths of the ocean floor. Each piece describes an abundance of topographical activity but Feindel is most interested in the tracking of changes that are more difficult to discern: global trends in fish migration and magnetic reversals in the earth’s crust. The artist subtly includes this “data” in the smaller drawings using rows of tiny pinpricks that are illuminated from below.
Many of the sea-bed areas depicted in the works are degrading or being altered through fishing, oil and gas exploration, and munitions dumping, causing a mix of motivations for Feindel.
“My desire to share joyful and poetic experiences is intermingled with expression of despair within my work about ecology, the oceans, cold-water corals, Canadian and global fisheries, and awareness of human dependency on a healthy ocean,” writes Feindel in her artist’s statement.
Susan Feindel, Perforation Map 3: Eel Migrations, Sargasso Sea (Portuguese Map, 1632) 2009 (Photo: Steve Farmer)
“Maps make beautiful pictures and enhance knowledge,” Feindel continues,” but they precede intervention. Sound, in my work, emphasizes the vulnerability of human and non-human inhabitants of land and sea.”
As the show’s MSVU curator Ingrid Jenkner writes in the exhibition catalogue, the installation’s overall aim is to “submerge” viewers.
“Covering the floor from wall to wall, textured black roofing paper made the edges of the canvases, which are painted in black ink, appear to bleed into an immeasurable depth,” writes Jenkner.
“By re-orienting the spectator’s gaze to the stretches of horizonless ‘terrain’ at their feet, the installation dissolved the gallery architecture,” Jenkner continues.
New developments
Moving from ocean topography to that of local parkland, Barbara Gamble’s Development Series offers seven wall-mounted paintings that examine urban planning and the ongoing environmental damage that results from urban sprawl.
Just as See Below addresses issues beyond the art world, Gamble’s works are layered and altered interpretations of mapped landscapes that illustrate the harmful effects of human intervention in nature.
From Barbara Gambel's Development Series
The paintings are also the artistic fruit of Gamble’s successful campaign to ban pesticide use in her neighborhood park in Nepean back in 1995. Since then, the community has rallied together to turn the park back into a naturalized environment with native plant species in abundance.
Most the of the paintings (six of which were acquired by the OAG for its permanent collection) are colourful, imprecise, and almost childlike embellishments of aerial-view planning drawings. The effect is one of regrowth and reclamation of community land that is, in most cases, not directly nurtured by the community.
Gamble has said that her nomadic lifestyle as a child had moved her to explore a sense of place in her artwork—an effort mirrored in her community activism.
From Barbara Gamble's Development Series
The show’s curator Fatona emphasizes how the works “poignantly draw our attention to the relationship between art, nature and culture, identity-making and the re-imagining/re-imaging of our ‘worlds.’"
By grouping Feindel and Gamble—generational contemporaries with similar environmental viewpoints—Fatona invites us to change our own perspective on environment and community through exhibitions of complementary style and technique. Both artists compellingly alter scientific documentation to engage the viewer aesthetically and intellectually. We feel at once a sense of wonder and the gnawing pull on the conscience when seeing the effects of environmental destruction.
Jenkner’s over-arching comment on See Below could apply equally to Development Series: “Feindel takes scientific findings and processes them subjectively, producing hand-made works of art whose ambiguity and incompleteness with respect to their declared subject matter render them more receptive to the viewer’s interpretive impulses.”
See Below and Development Series will be exhibit at OAG until April 3.
