Thrust, David Janzen and Julian Forrest, Peter Robertson Gallery, February 25 - March 18, 2010

With an exhibition title like Thrust, one can only expect a certain amount of sexualized energy on display. Only after viewing, the title and subject matter are more about the redirection of sexual energy into other forms such as aggression and bravado.



Image credit: Julian Forrest, "Play/Fight #4", 2009 Oil on board. 9" x 12"


The two man show at Peter Robertson pairs up painters David Janzen and Julian Forrest, who although share a similar palette, approach the world through very different outlooks. Forrest, who since moving here from Ontario, has ironically noticed an increased influx of males moving to the province, and takes up the matter of increased levels of competing testosterone on display. Referencing media portrayals of fights, mostly from internet stills of YouTube clips, Forrest encapsulates these fleeting moments into rather comical stances and poses, and puts forth more questions than answers of how our society has shaped the male identity through pop cultural imagery. Also showing a series of rabid looking dogs, the animals actually hold a much higher sense of nobility than any of the men in his paintings, who are often awkwardly street wrestling each other or in stances ready for a fight.


Image credit: David Janzen, "Blossom (026)", 2009 Oil on paper (framed) 9"


On the other hand, it was pointed out that Janzen plays on the notion of bravado without evoking his sentiments to any living form. While his series on rocket ships blasting off are certainly phallic in nature, Janzen contrasts the work by playing with circular canvases, even using small embroidery/sewing frames to offset the overtly boyish subject matter with a touch of the feminine and the contained. While there is certainly a comment, if not a fascination, with the amount of energy being wasted with each blast off, there is also a sincere innocence in invoking the reckless and wild streaks of destruction of being young with too much energy to burn.

Karsh: Image Maker, AGA, until May 30, 2010

Debuting last summer as part of Festival Karsh, a summer-long celebration organized by the Canada Science and Technology Museum and the Portrait Gallery of Canada, a program now contained within Library and Archives Canada, Karsh: Image Maker is an extensive tribute celebrating the centenary of Armenia-born, Ottawa-based photographer Yousef Karsh's birth.


Image credit: Yousef Karsh, Winston Churchill 1941. Gelatin silver photograph


Standing as the premiere exhibition in the AGA's new second floor gallery space, the show highlights how important it remains for regional, and certainly national, acknowledgment of portraitures and photography in shaping our cultural identities.

Designed as an interactive bilingual exhibition, Karsh: Image Maker gives prominence to the photographic tools used as well as Karsh's portraits that span the bulk of the 20th century. As an internationally celebrated portrait photographer, Karsh, like many photographers of his generation, profess to seek that "elusive moment of truth." But if you compare and contrast every photographer who's ever been after the truth, from Cartier-Bresson to Sally Mann to Nan Goldin, it becomes clear how subjective the notion of truth really is and how their truth reveals more about the photographer than anything else.

From Thomas Church to Jean Paul Riopelle, to legends like Cecil B. Demille and Winston Churchill, Karsh carefully crafted his portraits to reflect his subjects' iconic stature. The celebrity factor may be what continues to be heralded, but this was before people were famous for just being famous, and this fact overshadows an underlying credence Karsh sought in those who contributed some form of mass cultural significance.

The archival typewritten documents with hand-written marginalia are fascinating to note that Karsh had an ongoing wish list titled, "Important Personalities Yet To be Photographed For Possible Inclusion in the Book." Going after people with larger than life personalities like Ernest Hemingway, Jacques Cousteau, and Diego Rivera, Karsh had an ongoing interest in capturing writers, musicians, dancers, political figures and movie stars, all reputable for their contemporary achievements and translating their cultural stature into an emblematic portrait.


Image credit: Yousef Karsh, Pablo Casals 1954. Gelatin silver photograph


From over 15 000 portrait sittings, Karsh noted one of his favorite photographs was of French cellist Pablo Casals, playing inside a rotunda of an old stone church. Vastly different from the majority of his well-known mid-frame shots and intimate close-ups, his image of Casals captures the cellist in full, sitting with his back turned and his instrument in hand, existing in perfect harmony with the curvature of space and light surrounding him.

Karsh, who began with photographing for theatre productions and experimenting in highly stylized abstract photography before establishing himself as a technically superb portraitist, undoubtedly preferred the large format method of staged photography. The only regret of this exhibition is the mummification of Karsh's large format 4 x 5 method, a heavy, laborious process involving complex alchemy, but one that still exists today. As it stands, large format and the medium of film is becoming a specialized art form as dark rooms continue to disappear from art schools and fewer artists can access this technique. The exhibition's digital reproduction of Karsh's large format process sent instantly to your email is a fun idea, but it is arguable that large format film and digital photography are in fact two different mediums, and an exhibition that pays tribute and educates viewers on the art and science of photography would pay more respect to its nuances.

Karsh is History, an award-winning documentary screens Friday Feb. 26 at 7pm at the AGA's ledcor theatre. Admission is free.


*First published in Vue Weekly

Corinne Duchesn "In Memorandum" Harcourt House, February 18 - March 20, 2010*

With indiscernible text scratched into one piece along the short wall, and an inexplicable reoccurrence of the same cherry tree and bowl fixated in the majority of the exhibiting works, Corinne Duchesne's In Memorandum remains mostly a mystery of her memories.



Image credit: Corinne Duchesne, "Blazing Cherry" Mixed media on Mylar 36"H x 123" W

Relying heavily on Jungian, Freudian, and antiquity symbols as motivation for herself and hopefully for the viewers, the works throughout the exhibition were created during a period of intense grief for the artist. For whom she was grieving remains a quiet matter, one could guess it was for a child with the repetition of a plush rabbit with long ears, but for whom she is grieving ceases to be the point in an exhibition focused solely on the grieving process.

There is no doubt of the artist's technical capabilities; with each mark made and captured, the strokes of emotion run the gamut of calm to wild, and this energy in each piece makes for an open entry for viewers to engage. Multi-layered with various treatments from washes to resistances, they are simply appeasing to the eye, but stepping back and seeing the exhibition as a whole, there is an underlying disconnection between the emotion put into the work and the sensation one draws from it.

As a series of triptychs each hinged on a beginning, middle and end structure, each piece reads as a visual entry of a daily diary, bringing together fragments of thoughts, images and moments that do not necessarily cohere together, but are made to be remembered.

The repetition of certain images across the show do not connect with one another, existing as islands unto themselves, making each occurrence appear more like drawing studies and exercises. As large expansive bursts of colours textured onto 10-foot-long strips of mylar, Duchesne's pieces are individually engaging. Collected side by side, however, the works have no room to breathe, suffocating themselves and viewers with saturation.

The most interesting aspect of the show is that while the works were created during a grieving period, they are undeniably full of vitality, as to grieve is to honour life, be it the end of one or our very own. Understandably it is difficult to discern the logical process of how one person grieves, but as a visual exhibition designed to engage with a general public on the subject matter of grieving, the works are a document and history of heavily subjective visual metaphors that leave viewers in an unsatisfied state between a process and its praxis. To view somebody's drawings during their time of grieving does not necessarily translate to an understanding of that emotion, nor does it have to, as the show appears to be more about remembering this period of grief than anything else. But if the show is to be contextualized under the umbrella of exploring the nature of grieving, there should at least be some point of transference, or elicitation of understanding another shade of grief—otherwise, the works remain therapeutic exercises, that albeit are important to do, but not necessarily ready to exhibit under the same intentions.

*First published in Vue Weekly