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EQUINOX GALLERY
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Gathie Falk: The Things in My Head November 7 to December 19, 2015 Equinox Gallery, Vancouver “I have worked throughout my life at mediating opposites: soft and hard, painterly and densely flat, form and space, emotion and control, beautiful and ugly. A synthesis of my work can be said to consist of a desire for control of opposites.” - Gathie Falk, 1986 A career survey spanning over 50 years of art-making by groundbreaking artist Gathie Falk opens at Equinox Gallery on November 7, 2015. This exhibition brings together 70 sculptures, paintings, installations, and performance works, including a new series of sculptures as well as works borrowed from private and public collections from across Canada. The Things in My Head is the largest exhibition of Falk’s work in fifteen years and establishes Gathie Falk as a pivotal figure in relation to the Pop Art, Conceptual Art, and feminist art movements in Canada. Over the past sixty years, Gathie Falk has deftly traversed the mediums of performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, ceramics, and installation establishing herself as a true multi-disciplinarian. Her bold disregard for convention has led to an expansive practice that is fueled by a desire to transform her mediums as much as her subjects. This exhibition recognizes the continuum of an incredible artist by featuring a number of ideas that have been revisited by Falk over the decades, from the fruit piles that infuse minimalism with domestic content, to the sculptures, photographs and performance works that explore body types and rituals. The works are as rigorous and pertinent today as they were in the 1960s when Falk was making the first installations and performances in Canada. Now at the age of 87, Falk continues to undertake projects that require the development of a new understanding of material and practice, and the result is a body of work that not only stands the test of time, but reflects her position as one of Canada’s most significant artists. The long-serving Vancouver critic Joan Lowndes describes Gathie Falk’s work in the following way: “What strikes one immediately about her oeuvre is its diversity. She is a true polyartist, having worked in ceramic sculpture, performance and painting as well as in more eccentric combinations of materials such as pencil on painted plywood. She moves easily between three and two dimensions, refusing to be confined to any category.” Gathie Falk has defined her practice as a “veneration of the ordinary” as it is based on close observations of everyday life and objects. Eggs, shoes, dresses, sidewalks, fruit, and shirts have recurred as her subjects as she takes these ordinary objects and transforms them into surreal and evocative subjects through her choice of medium, method, and style. Her practice has been aligned with the traditions of Surrealism, Funk, Fluxus, and Pop Art, but the influences are rarely direct. Indeed, Gathie Falk is most comfortable when poised on the edge of contradictions: the real and the surreal, the quotidian and the sublime, light and shadow, life and decay, surface and substance. She is open to all possibilities of ideas and images, explaining: “My idea was
to do the things in my head. They were all experiments, but it was just to make the things in my mind that were visually and emotionally strong.” Gathie Falk was born in 1928 in Manitoba, the daughter of Russian Mennonite parents. She began working in warehouses and packing plants at the age of sixteen, while completing her education at night, and came to Vancouver in 1947 where she trained and worked as an elementary school teacher. In the 1950s, Falk began taking painting courses, subsequently studying pottery and sculpture at UBC under the tutelage of Glenn Lewis. In 1968, Gathie Falk was introduced to performance art through workshops given by American dancer Deborah Hay. By 1976, she had created fifteen meticulous performances, as well as many of her signature sculptural works including Home Environment, Herd, Veneration of the White Collar Worker, Single Men’s Shoes, and the Fruit Piles. After many years of being a sculptor and performance-artist, Falk returned to painting for nearly two decades, producing the renowned exhibitions Pieces of Water, Night Skies, and Cement. Since the 1990s, she has skillfully alternated between two- and three-dimensional work, creating her most significant papier-mâché and bronze works, and continuing her evocative exploration of paint. In addition to over 50 solo exhibitions, Gathie Falk has received many awards, including the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (1990), Order of Canada (1997), Order of British Columbia (2002), Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2003), Viva Award for Lifetime Achievement (2012), and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts (2013). Falk has been the subject of two retrospective exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1985 and 2000 (traveling to the National Gallery of Canada, Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal). Her works are included in numerous private and public collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, Glenbow Art Gallery, McMichael Canadian Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario, and many more. Gathie Falk lives and works in Vancouver.
My Dog’s Bones 1985 Bones, cord, spruce trees and enamel paint Dimensions variable
Gathie Falk likes art when it records the point of contact between two or more elements, when one thing enters into the space of another and in the process changes our view of both things. Often in her work something placed on or growing up from the ground will meet something hanging down from the ceiling – Christmas trees and dog bones, a dresser and cabbages… But despite the sometimes unsettling relationships the work suggests between objects, Falk’s world is ultimately one of calming connections…
ROBERT ENRIGHT, 1993
Red Angel (Installation view) Video and performance props 1972 5 tables, 5 record players, 5 parrots, wings Dimensions variable
…Gathie Falk discovered another way to externalize her fantasy world through props, people, movement, costume, sound – bringing together sculpture, painting, and performance art. Incongruities abound in Falk’s performance works, linking them both to her funk period and her ongoing Surrealist sensibilities…one can say with certitude that Falk’s theatre art works are dateless. They are not tied to the sensibility of a period like happenings, nor do the clothes, which Falk deliberately keeps non-fashionable, limit them. They are extraordinary projections of her gifts as an image-maker… JOAN LOWNDES, 1979
The Problem with Wedding Veils 2010-2011 Papier-mâché, rocks 71” x 64”
Dress with Boy 1997 Papier-mâché, paint, photograph, varnish 33 ½” x 25” x 18”
Agnes (Black Patina) 2000-2001 Bronze 37” x 28” x 7”
Reclining Figure (after Henry Moore) Lizzie (black patina) 2002 Bronze 41” x 22” x 13”
Single Right Men’s Shoe Series: Spectator in Boot Case 1970 Glazed ceramic, painted wood and glass 10 ½” x 17 ½” x 6 ¼”
Andy’s Suit 2015 Oil on canvas 24” x 18”
Tom’s Shirt 2015 Polymerized gypsum, acrylic and varnish 30” x 29” x 7”
Crossed Ankles 1998 90 Photo Silkscreens Dimensions variable
Crossed Ankles (detail)
Baseball Caps: 2003 Papier-mâché 10” x 6” x 5”
As an artist, all possibilities are open to [Gathie Falk]. She lives comfortably poised on the edge between the real and the unreal. This person who to meet is so direct, pragmatic and humourous is also the one who wrote: “Now I have a fantasy that I live in a welter of furniture, fruit, still lifes, clothing, eggs and egg cups, fabrics, soft or shiny surfaces, gorgeous horrors, sacred and profane utilities.� JOAN LOWNDES, 1979
In its slow, repetitive and meditative process, building up layer upon tissuethin layer, [papier-mâché] is a metaphor for Falk’s entire practice. Through her considered use of repetition, the acts and objects of everyday life become ritualized, invested with a character that both venerates the commonplaces of existence and transcends them. Falk’s images, whether painted, sculpted or performed, are made as sacred as prayers, chants and mantras through repetition and reiteration. They are images that carry with them a weight of personal symbolism that draws upon her extraordinary life, upon her bank of experiences, emotions, beliefs and intuitions. But they are not simply personal: they convey social and cultural meanings, too, meanings that reverberate in our lives and times. ROBIN LAURENCE, 2000
Single Right Men’s Shoes: Bootcase with 6 Orange Brogues 1973 Glazed ceramic, painted wood and glass 28” x 38” x 7”
The only way to pile fruit is in a pyramid… magic and surreal…I use down-to-earth apples, grapefruit and oranges… each piece has a blossom and a stem, a beginning and an end. GATHIE FALK, 1970
168 Apples 1969 Glazed ceramic 29” x 27” x 16”
55 Oranges 1969-1970 Glazed ceramic 17” x 17” x 13” Collection of TD Bank Group
What makes Gathie Falk a particularly interesting artist of tableau is the wholeness of her creation – the degree to which her life and her art interpenetrate. For, as a visit to her house confirms, the art is at the same time the context, the expression and the substance of her life. DORIS SHADBOLT, 1972
Picnic with Clock and Bird 1976 Ceramic, acrylic paint and varnish 8 ½” x 9” x 11”
Hat and Scarf 2015 Oil on canvas 18” x 24”
Untitled 1962 Oil on canvas 24” x 30”
Basket of Apricots c. 1970 Glazed ceramic 7” x 7” x 4 ¾”
Pieces of Water: 200% Wage Increase 1982 Oil on canvas 77 ½” x 66”
The Cement paintings offer a very different notion of the sublime, one that is human in scale but offers its own notions of limitlessness and evocative presence. In flipping up the sidewalk to face the viewer, Falk invites us to give it the same contemplation that we might give to the night sky or the water. They are the object of her scrutiny on a daily basis, and their sublimity comes from her acknowledgement of the wondrousness of the everyday. BRUCE GRENVILLE, 2000
Cement with Fence #1 1982 Oil on canvas 78” x 48 ½”
Dressed Canoe 2014 Papier-mâché 125” x 18” x 13 ¾”
From Left to Right: (D) 4 Plaid Shirting Samples 2004 Acrylic on vellum 37 ½” x 6 ¾”
(G) 3 Plaid Shirting Samples 2004 Acrylic on vellum 28” x 6 ½”
(H) 3 Plaid Shirting Samples 2004 Acrylic on vellum 28” x 6 ½”
(A) 6 Plaid Shirting Samples 2004 Acrylic on vellum 56” x 6 ½”
Shirting: Long S, Light Yellow, Yellow, Grey, Dark Grey 2002 Acrylic on vellum 95 ½” x 30”
My idea was to do the things in my head. They were all experiments, but it was just to make the things in my mind that were visually and emotionally strong. GATHIE FALK, 1999