Yes, but who loves the 70s more? Friday, November 21, 2008, The ARTery, REVIEWED by Sarah Hamilton

“Hot Topic vs. Wednesday Lupypciw" with the Ladies in the Back Room promises to challenge visitors and how they identify with singular labels. Kirsten McCrea, an Edmonton native, back from Montreal with “Hot Topic,” a painting series of 60 notable feminist and queer icons mentioned in the song “Hot Topic” by Le Tigre. Wednesday Lupypciw, a Calgary-based performance artist, whose work “Beige Decade(s)” combines performance and fibre art in a loving tribute to the 70s. The third artist in the show is Corissa O’ Donnell, whose ink nudes are places on vintage textiles and presented in baroque vintage frames.

In her curatorial statement, Amy Fung states that she hopes that “gathered together, the connections and disconnections between these three artists aim to prompt audiences to re-evaluate what still constitutes as a “Hot Topic” in our increasingly post-ism identities.” The works all individually pay tribute to the history of feminism, queerness, and subversion, but together are strained in scale and medium to make those strong connections over the louche din of The Artery. The fourth, unacknowledged conversant in this conversation is the seeming apathy of nearly everyone in the room.



Photo credit: Sarah Hamilton of Wednesday Lupypciw in "Beige Decade(s)" 2008


All the artists seek to address a certain aspect of feminist history from the 70s but each one is approaching it with her own medium and politic. McCrea’s paintings, a little smaller than legal size paper, are hung in a grid style on several chains dangling from the ceiling. Most of the images are head shot portraits, with a few exceptions. McCrea discovered in her process that she couldn’t find images of some of the icons mentioned in the song, or any information, in the case of one or two. Undaunted, McCrea interpreted what information she had about the figure and created her own image of the person.

Across the room, Lupypciw is capturing the essence of a decade through interaction with weaving and text. She sits, perched in beige, amidst an unmitigated compilation of fragments weaved in tribute to 70s naturalist fibre art. Her work is ritualistic, almost without purpose besides the task at hand. Beige was chosen for its historical relevance. With the emergence of fibre art in the 1970s, many fibre artists moved away from brightly coloured polyester and towards organic, undyed fibres. Beige, though unexciting, came to stand for what is natural. Lupypciw participates in their ode to beige – she wears a beige blouse and a pair of beige pantyhose (an especially brave move, since they are one of the most unattractive garments I think any woman or man could put on, but Lupypciw has embraces them whole-heartedly). Lupypciw is surrounded by a mountain of books, ranging from the 70s to the 90s which you are invited to look through as you sit with her.

Corissa O’Donnell’s work, which is in the backroom of the Artery, is a tribute to the women left behind by the work of the women in the front of the Gallery. In the eyes of the feminists that are celebrated in front of the house, these women are the exploited, mistreated and objectified casualties of the era. As interesting as O’Donnell’s work is, it remains in the back of the mind of the exhibition, unaddressed and unresolved, though ultimately where a great many of this evening’s revelers reside.

O’Donnell, McCrea and Lupypciw individually work to convey a message about maintaining connections with the past and acknowledging the hard work of those who came before you, but I think that in this post-ironic, post –ism crowd, these themes require stronger, louder voices all around. A simple “fuck you” cross-stitch will not do in the era of over-the-counter counter-culture. Give us an obscenely large tapestry that reminds us of where we have failed our own history. McCrea’s paintings come close to this, but the positive tone to her work does not address our failings. This performance and exhibition was the initiation of a conversation that is no where near complete but brings these issues to light.

The work lives right now as a tribute to the past. In future incarnations and exhibitions the historic references could be reframed in a contemporary light; all three artists intend to take their work further (with or without collaboration). These themes can be investigated further without compromising the integrity of the work and it would be interesting to see how Lupypciw and McCrea’s work would change if they sought to make it actively political. They have both shown a strong recognition of feminist and queer history by celebrating it. Lupypciw’s cautious sense of irreverence could be cultivated further. McCrea originally exhibited the “Hot Topic” series with the subtitle “A Feminist Memory Project”. A stronger voice from each artist would give the overall collaboration more potency and meaning. This more engaged sense of storytelling could transcend community boundaries.

It’s also worth noting that this is the first collaboration of its kind in Edmonton. There are no artists in Edmonton working in performance and fibre art simultaneously and this was a debut for both Lupypciw and McCrea. This is a type of risk taking that Exposure embraces and something I hope the larger visual art community will take up.

- S.H. Edmonton

Amie and Matthew Rangel, FAB Gallery, November 12 - December 6, 2008

Touted as the first ever wife and husband exhibition in FAB Gallery, Amie Rangel’s “From the Observation Room” and Matthew Rangel’s “a transect - Due East” are certainly a great compliment to each other’s shows.

Both shows present an interest in spatial relations, albeit executed differently as Mrs. Rangel remains preoccupied with phenomenology of interior institutions while Mr. Rangel is invested in the cartographic traversal of landscape.

Working in drawing and intermediary, Mrs. Rangel’s research has been primarily based in the clinical pens within the Swine Research and Technology Centre. The spaces she devotes her black and white renderings are always empty, void of the presence that permeates those spaces nonetheless. In the single installation, “Overflow,” she situates her fascination for the sterile institutional glimmer through an endless row of miniature standardized single steel cot beds. Offering a memory of being in this specific space, Rangel follows her intuition, as it is not so much the space itself that is alluring, but its lack that pulls you in.

Mr. Rangel on the other hand places himself directly into the spaces which interests him, namely into the foothills and Sierra Nevada Mountains. His presence along the cross-country hikes in his encounters and observations fuel many of the works through a mixture of archival prints, correspondences, and even audio files. The sound bytes, however interesting on their own, simply remain on their own without formally integrating them into the rest of the show, which stands as a very precise conception of experience into art.

On their own, the exhibits each respectively address our experiences of space as remembered through being and our ontological presence as a remembered experience; but together, the works present two different entry points into a mutual interest--and appear stronger because of it.

Prairie Artsters: Expose and express*

Spending the better part of the past week invested in the second year of Exposure: Edmonton’s Queer Arts and Culture Festival, I’ve had to question what “queer art” actually means. In our fluid understanding of borders and identities, being queer can be as simple as identifying with a queer community. Not exclusive to sexual orientation or gender or how we relate to the people in our life, being queer may be as basic as standing up for the right to be queer.

In the art world, queer art exists at various levels, as demonstrated by this year’s Exposure lineup. From a wide-ranging selection of works by youths who identified as queer, to lectures by internationally renowned Canadian artists AA Bronson and Wayne Yung—both of whom pushed forward ideas of queerness in their works dealing with AIDS and transnational identities, respectively—to films and lectures by transgendered individuals such as Gwen Haworth and Eli Claire, queer art appears to encapsulate artistic expressions dealing with repressed voices, usually in direct relation to representation in mainstream media and culture.

My experience with Exposure this year involved curating “Hot Topic vs Wednesday Lupypciw,” a one-night exhibition featuring art work by Lupypciw, Kirsten McCrea and Corissa O’Donnell. McCrea painted a series of 60 portraitures based on the feminist/queer/activist icons in Le Tigre’s song, “Hot Topic.” She created a work preserving and celebrating these individuals that have either been elevated to pop icon status or swept into the dustbins of history. Many of McCrea’s figures come from the 1970s, so I posed the question of “What is Feminism(s)?” to Calgary based fibre/performance artist Lupypciw. Weaving to life “Beige Decade(s)” as a direct response to McCrea’s 2-D work, Lupypciw created several fibre works in the style of 1970s feminist natural weavings, an art form often negatively relegated to the craft world in a traditional discipline hierarchy that favours painting and sculpture over forms such as craft and intermedia. Bringing together the activist icons, fiber artists, and anonymous women in McCrea, Lupypciw and O’Donnell’s works, I hoped to pose the question of feminism and identity to a contemporary audience who, for the most part, have formed in a post-ism era.

I approached Exposure to present this show for the primary reason that the issues being raised by the works are inherently political and, framed within a queer arts and culture festival, I hoped the issues of identity would hold its own against the artistic merits of the work. I had similar expectations for the Bathhouse event, undeniably the show stopper of the festival, with close to 400 audience members packing SteamWorks on a weekday evening. Turning the men-only bathhouse into a temporary exhibition space for visual art installations and performance, Exposure bridged the realm of queer identity politics with art in a very problematic manner. For better or for worse, the general public moved through the two floors of a black-lit labyrinth to view works that ranged from intimate to thoughtful to challenging to downright wet and messy.

No doubt, much of the audience came out of curiosity for the space more than the art, and the space itself remains the most powerful element of that event. Only existing somewhere between art and politics, the Bathhouse event became a spectacle for most, who arrived with camera in tow ready to gawk at the slings, stocks and glory holes. Comments overheard from some surprising and disappointing sources revealed deeply embedded homophobia and AIDS hysteria, where supposed open-minded, art-loving queers didn’t want to touch the walls in fear of contracting AIDS. Unfortunately, very few of the artists featured in this first Bathhouse exhibit addressed this perhaps expected stigma.

Still, in its unfolding, Exposure Festival has affirmed why politics and art need to coexist: to generate different perspectives, to queer our normal view points concerning every person’s basic human right to express him- or herself.

*First published in Vue Weekly, November 27 - December 3, 2008.