Dan Steeves, "One Step Closer to Knowing"

Abbozzo Gallery

401 Richmond Street West, Unit 128, Toronto ON, M5V 3A8. (416) 260 2220 www.abbozzogallery.com

Member of the Art Dealers Association of Canada

Front cover image: There's a Lot I Don't Know 9/12, 2019. See page: 44

Table of Contents

1. Foreword

2-3. The Waiting Game: Artist's Statement

4-17. The Waiting Game

18-19. One Step Closer to Knowing: Artist's Statement

20-48. One Step Closer to Knowing and associated poems

49. Dan Steeves: Biography

Foreword

I’ve fortunately had the privilege of growing up at Abbozzo Gallery and so, also with the artwork of Dan Steeves, who first exhibited with us almost 20 years ago. To draw from Steeves’ and Hartman’s concept of the “home landscape”, the place which becomes the benchmark for all others, perhaps no descriptor defines my experience growing up as growing up in the gallery with awe-inducing artists such as Dan Steeves. Steeves work often broaches the subject of childhood, time, change, and constancy or the lack thereof; and here I am with the unique pleasure of having Dan Steeves’ artwork be a part of my own childhood, and a constant ever since at the gallery. I would be remiss to not mention I’m incredibly excited, almost giddy, to be part of his first solo exhibition here in close to a decade and our patience, our waiting, is being rewarded with these two incredible series The Waiting Game and One Step Closer to Knowing. The landscapes of these two series depart slightly from the southern rural New Brunswick we’re used to, rooted in Cathedral Grove of the Pacific Rim National Reserve and the Christina Olsen Colonial home, yet seem still familiar as Steeves meditates on the passing of time, or the seasons of life: his father in law sitting amongst the Old Growth Forest in The Quiet and Mostly Hidden Life, fresh crayon drawings scribbled on walls by children in old colonial homes throughout One Step Closer to Knowing, or the juxtaposition of shorts clad figure and an ice skater in Often it Feels Like Enough; these images simultaneously expanding and collapsing our conceptions of time and the passing of it to great effect.

Blake Zigrossi, Abbozzo Gallery

The Waiting Game

Artist's Statement

Reflecting on many years of artistic practise, I realize much of my research has been focused on time and traveling through time. The working title for this research actually comes from an image I engraved on a zinc plate over forty years ago. That image was created after being in Washington Square in New York City, watching individuals sitting on benches playing chess on concrete tables. It had started to rain, and the onlookers eagerly awaited the next move of the chess players. It was all about time and waiting, waiting for the rain to end, for the next move in the game

Travel does much to enrich the mind and on a recent trip to the Pacific Rim National Park and specifically Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island I had an intense experience in that mystical place. Lush and rich, ancient and towering, the forest in that National Park was an encounter of all the senses. I felt very protected in that old growth forest, very humbled with the history of those massive trees. I was not only in awe of the physical space around me but upon reflection I was astonished with the sense of quiet, the waiting of that place.

Global warming has put much stress on the existing forest, even one as old as Pacific Rim. It is important we recognize the importance of the forest and the role it plays in making oxygen for the earth. Cathedral Grove is well named as it is a sacred place of thought and contemplation of who we are and why we are here. It is a place of rest.

In each image all figures are at a point of stasis, waiting, rest. They all point to the importance of the individual begin a part of nature, and our role in protecting and sustaining it.

In each image all figures are at a point of stasis, waiting, rest. They all point to the importance of the individual begin a part of nature, and our role in protecting and sustaining it.

In making this series of work, I would like to have people reflect on their own lives and stop and consider their response to the larger world around them.

This body of work was selected as a gift from the artist to the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown PEI after coming to my studio in Sackville Gallery Director Kevin Rice wrote in an email to me:

“I was particularly intrigued by the most recent work and wish you well as you complete the edition. Those rich, dark images of the old growth forest of Cathedral Grove, near Tofino, BC, seem clearly related to your earlier works. And the portraits of family members in the west coast landscape struck me as future focused a younger generation and how they relate to the natural world--even when surrounded by an ancient forest.”

Dan Steeves

Constantly

17 3/4 x 22 1/8

"Two worlds exist side by side in constant need of renewal. In one, the artist's view is renewed by his muse. In the other, the natural world is being cared for by its gardener."

How Long Will I Have to Wait Until it Becomes Clear? 8/8, 2021

Etching on Zinc 17 3/4 x 17 3/4 in.

"A guide explains the beauty and intricacies of the forest to a group of young creative minds who should be able to find it for themselves."

"The beauty of this car is swallowed up by the immense interior cavity of the tree. Our striving to create beauty has a definite effect on the physical world around us."

Etching

17

"Beauty and the rarity of the object of desire is juxtaposed against the natural world that is endangered by it"

"As an artist who is now a grandfather, I am concerned about the world I will be leaving for my grandchildren and their impact on the environment"

My Seeing was Muted 10/10, 2021

Etching on Zinc

17 3/4 x 23 7/8 in.

"Even the beauty of the sound of music has its beginnings in the forest, with the rich wood carrying the sound."

Reggie and Gracie 10/10, 2021

Etching on Zinc

17 3/4 x 23 5/8 in.

"The abandoned house in this image is continuing to slowly fall back on its crumbling basement wall, in much the same way I watched my own father's physical demise. The dog Gracie, a special friend to my father, guards this process although in danger itself, lying in the middle of the road."

So

Etching

"Douglas fir trees, so dominant on the west coast of Canada, make their way to the east coast to build houses, displaying their permanence and strength."

"The natural beauty of the forest, and the natural beauty of the wooden doors carved from the forest, must coexist together."

The

"Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island is a mythical place with lush green vegetation and massive trees. The foreground figure is so transfixed that she is not concerned with the figure floating above the boardwalk."

The Quiet and Mostly Hidden Life 10/10, 2021

Etching on Zinc

17 3/4 x 23 3/4 in.

"My father in law, a man of quiet strength like the trees he spent his life felling, is reduced to dementia in the later years of his life The forest is still his sanctuary, his safe place"

The

Etching

x

"An uprooted tree in Cathedral Grove, a young forester and Italian police all searching for the perpetrator of the destruction of the forest."

Walking the Same Inevitable Walk 10/10, 2021

Etching on Zinc

17 3/4 x 17 3/4 in.

"Two generations walk the same road to Tofino, same beginnings, different lives."

Walking the Same Road 10/10, 2021

Etching on Zinc

17 3/4 x 23 7/8 in.

"The figure walking the dog is about to confront the massive girth of the tree impeding her progress and dwarfing the dog, giving her pause, reflecting on which way to go."

Artist's Statement One Step Closer to Knowing

Almost forty years ago in the spring of 1978, I was on my first trip to New York City as a young student. While visiting the Museum of Modern Art, I encountered the painting Christina’s World by American painter Andrew Wyeth. Painted in 1948, it depicted what seemed to be a young girl in a faded pink dress, lying in a field looking towards a farmhouse on the crest of a hill.

I distinctly remember this as my first impression of the painting. Seeing it again I realized to my disdain and amazement that the figure actually had distorted hands and the skin on bone arms of a much older woman. I had neglected to actually see the work.

This painting taught me my responsibility as the viewer to focus my visual observation, to find the various elements and meanings presented by the artist within the work before me.The woman depicted in the painting was Christina Olsen. She had a form of MS that debilitated her movement to the point she had to crawl wherever she went.

It is thought that the muted palette and barren landscape of Wyeth’s paintings at that time were part of an outward expression of his inner grief over the loss of his father. He would continue to paint more than 300 works of Christina, her brother and their farm in Cushing, Maine over the next 30 years.

In August of 2016 we took a trip to see the house, now a National Historic Site. At the Olsen house, we experienced the architectural beauty and gripping stories and left with a profound sense of the physical and metaphoric importance of that place.One of our travelling companions, a writer, was sensing the same range of emotions. Through her written words, and my visual images, we have both begun to deal with the psychological impact of our visit and the stage of our lives in which we now find ourselves.

I have used the framework of the gaze in and from that Colonial house to be a starting point to think about my own life, what has passed, the loss of youthfulness and how we got here from there. We all search for a place that we call home. We want to understand it better, to be able to reflect and savour past experiences, to better understand where we are today in order to find our way back home.

I once heard Canadian painter/printmaker John Hartman claim “I believe we all have a home landscape, a place from childhood, whose light, space and scale are the benchmark for all other landscapes. We all carry our home landscapes around inside us.”

I am attempting to find this “home landscape”, this place where clarity and rest can be found. This new body of work has its roots in the Olsen house experience but extends beyond a singular place. These images contain the home landscape of my experience found in space and time around the Bay of Fundy in my home province of New Brunswick.

I completed a series of thirteen works. I corresponded with our travelling companion, writer Wendy Jones, who created a series of written texts that were printed as letterpress broadsides to accompany the images.These broadsides were printed on photopolymer plates, produced by Box Car Press, a letterpress company from New Jersey. I printed these letterpress plates on a Vandercook Letter Press at Mount Allison University.

This completed collaboration could be presented in a gallery exhibition with the broadsides hung alongside the prints.I am interested in the discourse of collaboration within my work and the printed word has piqued my interest in combination with these images.

Dan Steeves

"Looking Out, Looking In¹

'The reproductions on pale painted walls wide boards along worn floors shade-less windows, sunlit halls the ease and creak of every open door in this strange house, this inert, lovely space where Wyeth met his muse and painted an affectionate grace. Though Christina's World, seems to suffuse an uncasy, contorted merey, a dubious light.

"Windows are eyes or pieces of the soul?"²

As the docent engages us in this story it feels like gazing through a tiny keyhole into what I see as a broken woman's purgatory; images of a hundred cats, peeling wallpaper, two generations of accumulated stuff, windows ghosting curious children or a neighbor and this one artist who couldn't get enough of the bent, shell encased, bright, free soul.

I, along with all the rest, gawk and gape mute before the spare luminance of this curious landscape, this house emptied now at least of Their humanness is not barren. She never saw it so.

In breath and bone, not egg tempera through blind less windows all earth is painted in this frame. The splendor of Christina's World a fierce burning beacon a life light living in darkness that crippled, broken, bloodied, dead is for me alive and a light again.

1"AndrewWyeth:LookingOut,LookingIn,wasanexhibitionthatranattheNationalGalleryofArtinWashington,DCfromMay4 November30,2014,focusingon"thevisualcomplexitiesposedbythetransparency,symbolism,andgeometricstructureof windows".www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/exhibitions/2014/andrew wyeth.html

2"Intheportraitsofthathouse,thewindowsareeyesorpiecesofthesoulalmost.Tome,eachwindowisadifferentpartof Christina'slife."AndrewWyethwww.farnsworthmuseum.org/olson house

Etched plate pressed on eager sheets carbon based inks bleed a dissertation an opus (no magnum just yet). From dust we were made all of us varying lifeforms organic images etching with graphite and clay, pigment and language, into onto lives on lives on lives a singular impression.

The inner core of everything that is place, person, this planet iridescent patches of presence present. Imprinted deep in us (and in this place) an exposition of the glory we see only faintly echoes of a past impinging a frail future present flash of pleasure or memory of pain the sensitive dependence in one small incandescent wing.

You are both marked - jagged, knotted, tracking subtractions, additions pain known and unremembered foundation stories hidden indelible lines tracing a barely spoken cruel artistry perverse decorations, lives overlaying wounds a warped mirror of the other, Two. Reprieved. Two granted stays. Trace the scarred pain etchant intaglio etched flesh, fractured beauty, sure and certain.

People come from far away lay in this field view this house - closer than you may thinkmimicking his image though into the future. This house is all houses and we in one small woman scrabbling, frantic, determined to imbue immortality our own bent shapes, immobile effervescence.

When we were young and summers full in equal measure, of grace and judgement in the games we played. We ran

until our lungs expanded full of sweet summer air, hid in the canopy of the willow, behind paint peeling Adirondack chairs. Ragged breathed, heart pounding, willing silence against the tinny clang of a metal garbage lid, murmured voices of adults in the summer porch, screened against our exuberance and mosquitos.

Suspended in that brief exemption before obligation, not wanting, wanting to be found, laughing, we stayed until the constellations found us and 'ollie, ollie oxen free' called us home.

The calendar says spring the sun bathes through the evergreens the lilac bush pulses buds But there are vestiges of snow and the little pond wears a molting coat of ice

Winter's heavy veil still bartering death, though a devalued currency.

In my own burial clothes Lachrymose beneath a cold spectrum of unbelief faintly a chickadee proclaims a tiny piercing promise the scandal of new life.

Search this pale and soul less empty shell, whitewashed, scrubbed clean

Those of us who show up here, way off the beaten track, even for northern New England prowl the space searching for God knows what.

A heartbeat maybe

Something to connect to that strange and arresting image, the crooked person Splayed upon spiky grass

Lone house against a troubling sky

Something is very off. Can't quite put my finger on it

I an imposter skald, Parnassian, not quite seeing just what it is barely scratching a surface with elemental words

It's never so simple than when it's simple. Straightforward, realist, the critics decry, dismiss.

Perhaps, just this once, the twisted sepulcher façade Cracks, breathes a revelatory courage ascending through the form my own singular resurrection.

I search for meaning in these walls check the closets, imbue significance on a chair in a corner a seashell on a shelf

Peer outside command my imagination to see the ghost, the shadows sifting shape scrabbling along the ground inching towards or away from me not clearly always on the edges

Something is beyond the horizon I know or here in here

A minor anointing or haunting one or the other

In this place the ethereal shift and shimmer in our peripheral vision We turn to catch a glimpse and there is nothing there our own reflection on wavy glass an opaque impression a skittering just through that door around the corner.

This window frames the fear that faces us, Or that we ignore

One or the other.

Am I really safe this side? The house my protection and my pulpit

I freely pronounce curses insurance against the unknown other.

That figure, close up, That image in the glass a startlingly intimacy though our breath fogs the panes obscures and obfuscates so dark we cannot even see our face a willful blindness cursed to weave skewed parodies of the world.

Hobbled, constrained, shackled, the house as prison

now whitewashed and scrubbed of all that made it home and holy empty now, a faint memory of dirt streaked panes, unused stairs echoing arched and useless limbs. Lone figure summarizing all the stories in this one pain body-specific bent, arched away and toward Cruciform

Though unchosen in this instance.

Shards of shattered light reshape and break the geometrics of windows, walls, floor a roof a door. A shape disturbs the still air The knowable and known visions still seen alternatively, light and dark though we can comprehend only one

The room's windows admit and refract light sun streaming in and waning as the day Now early evening blue shifts to black outside an orb sinks below earth's edge

on the stool in the storage room front and centre, shrinking in an unfamiliar habitat and unaccustomed form, odd shapes nestled as they are, in the carton that once housed eggs (though sterile) their golden-eyes feed my shell.

these bulbs I'm drying cach shrinking, desiccating shape belies life, their paper shells rustle a hazy remembrance of wide fields a remarkable optimism from the basement tomb until fall-buried embryonic longing for warm resurrection.

and when I visit you your own body a betrayal once capable encased now in an opaque paper skin emphatic, strident speech now Jabberwocky blue eyes vacant, pale (that used to see me through and through me) you held me once though I cannot recall now in this grand diminishing I take your trembling hand meld stories, memories, till light and darkness blur in grief and hope filled renaissance.

Biography

Dan Steeves was born in 1959 in Riverview, New Brunswick. He graduated from Mount Allison University with a BFA in 1981. He worked in the Fine Arts Department at Mount Allison University as printmaking technician from 1981 2020, and continues to teach first year printmaking.

Steeves has received an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation award and a New Brunswick Strathbutler Award for excellence in the arts from the Sheila Hugh McKay Foundation. He won first place in Open Studio’s National Printmaking Award. He has been elected to the Royal Canadian Academy for the Arts and has received exhibition awards from the Canada Council, NB Arts Board and Internal SSHRC, Bell and Creation grants from Mount Allison University.

He has participated in over 100 public exhibitions across Canada and in the United States, as well as China, England, Holland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, Scotland, Taiwan, Russia, and Ukraine.

His work is represented in the Canada Council and New Brunswick Art Banks and numerous other public, institutional and private collections.

He has published two books, The Bone Fields and The Light That Lives In Darkness. He lives in Sackville with his wife Lisa.

Text © 2022 by Blake Zigrossi and Dan Steeves. Poetry by Wendy Jones

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission by the publisher

Published by Abbozzo Gallery

401 Richmond St. West, Suite 128 Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8

Credits: Images courtesy of Dan Steeves and Abbozzo Gallery Catalogue by Quincy Shaw

Back cover image: The Lines Can Get Blurred 13/16, 2019. See page: 38