2011 ISSUE 5 $4
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Left to right: Helena Kvarnรถstrom, Cheltenham Badlands (detail), 2006; Mike Bayne, Coquitlam (detail), 2008;
Joanne Hui, Shanghai World Expo Passport Pages (detail), 2010 Cover image: Jennie Suddick, Sasquatch Father and Son, 2009
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399 333 S QUARE2 NOTES 335 THE CABINET OF WONDER the work of Jennie Suddick by Trish Boon 343 MONOTYPE by Max Lupo 351 C MYK & THE MIDDLE OF IT poetry by Sara Pinder
363 MIKE BAYNE by Nicole Armour
391 THE GERTRUDES by Melinda Richka
375 EMILY FOSTER by Emily Foster
399 JOANNE HUI by Joanne Hui
377 M AGNIFIED LANDSCAPE interview by Chrissy Poitras 387 B UFFY CARRUTHERS by Chrissy Poitras
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2011 Issue 5 885 County Rd. 5, Picton Ontario K0K 2T0 613.476.0337 info@square2magazine.ca DIRECTORS / Chrissy Poitras & Kyle Topping EDITORS / Betsy Matthews Becky Lane Square2 is published quarterly by Spark Box Studio. For advertising inquires contact info@square2magazine.com For subscriptions visit square2magazine.com Printed in Canada by Printcraft. photograph by Kelly Taylor at Hand Works, Bloomfield, Ontario
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elcome to issue five of Square2 Magazine. After an exciting first year we are eager to kick off year two with a look at some of the ways contemporary Ontario artists address notions of place, identity, community and home through their artwork. How do you see the world around you? What pieces of the landscape stick with you? How does your community affect your identity? Is it possible to create without being influenced by the spaces, places or people around you? Some artists, like painter Mike Bayne or photographer Helen Kvarnรถstrom, reinvent the way in which a place is understood and appreciated. Others, like sculptor Jennie Suddick, play with iconic figures and imagery to challenge a particular way of thinking. Whatever the method, the artists featured in issue five encourage us to question and revaluate our experience of the world around us.
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A CABINET OF WONDERS the artwork of Jennie Suddick by Trish Boon
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he first time I came across Jennie Suddick’s work was at the Narwhal Art Project’s exhibition last fall, “The Dazzle: A Cabinet of Wonders.” I remember her charming miniature dioramas of burning trees and awkward glimpses of the communal lives of hairy Sasquatch families. I think I was as attracted to the painstaking amount of work to flock entire families of naked railroad models into furry beasts and fold tiny squares of paper into miniature bursts of fire as I was confused by the oddness of the representations. During my visit last spring with Suddick in the Parkdale (Toronto) home she shares with her partner chef Michael Synowicki, printmaker Marco Cheuk, and her delightful studio-companion Stevie Nicks, Suddick showed me her progress on a piece for the Open Studio Visiting Artist Residency series, which exhibited at the artist run centre this June. Bigfoot Trap Matchstick Model Kit is a complete kit which allows Bigfoot enthusiasts to reproduce, with matchsticks, a trap built in the mid 70s in Southern Oregon – a site which continues to be maintained in case the big man himself is careless enough to stumble into it after all these years. The sticks come in a hand-printed box which includes silk-screened instructions and elaborate diagrams to aid hobbyists in creating their own miniature traps. The project is the latest manifestation of the artist’s minor obsession with cryptozoology, the study of evidence which substantiates the existence of currently unproven creatures such as the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster.
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Previous: Sasquatch Father and Son (detail), 2009 mixed media sculpture, acrylic case, 2" x 2" x 2" photograph by Jennifer Sciarrino
Left: Replica Victorian Ornament of the Patterned Tent Caterpillar’s Communal Tent – Species Variation 1., 2009 mixed media sculpturemakinaw cloth, thread, synthetic clay sculpture, found materials, bell jar, 10.6" x 5.5" diameter
Right: Bigfoot Trap Matchstick Model Kit, 2011 artist multiple- hand printed and constructed box, screenprinted blueprints, 300 matchsticks, wood glue, acetate sheet, variable dimensions box: 9.8" x 6.3" x 3" created under the auspices of the Open Studio Visiting Artist Residency, 2010-11
photograph by Thomas Blanchard
Suddick’s interest in cryptozoology stems from her own unsettled feelings about her relationship with nature. The idea that something out there remains unclassifiable, and therefore undominated, resonates with her insecurities over a lack of connection to the natural world and the arguably innate human desire to connect to the land. It’s possible that the desire to connect to the land is not so much innate as it is expected for a young Canadian artist. During two 337
years of working, studying and showing in Florence, Suddick was reminded of her Canadian artistic heritage through the overwhelming international recognition still enjoyed by the Group of Seven. The legacy of these back-to-the-wilderness art-legends was particularly poignant for Suddick, who grew up in Unionville, the one time home of Frederick Varley. Like many Canadians, however, her childhood relationship with nature was
punctuated with rest-stops and visits to Giant Tiger department stores. The artificiality of the experience was often as memorable as the so-called fresh air. Inspiration to bring her art closer to that of a Canadiana-inspired natural heritage struck after an idyllic encounter admiring a tentcaterpillar infestation. Seeing the nests as weirdly ornate and aesthetically pleasing, she was shocked at the reactions of horror by her city counterparts as she retold the story. When her research revealed that
the solution to tent caterpillars was often to kill the entire tree, Suddick began to muse on the irony of this drastic measure as well as on the idea of communities and their interdependence on each other – as a parasite relies on its host. From these musings Suddick’s Communal Tent series was born. In it, Suddick mimics the ad hoc artistry of the tent caterpillar by using traditional Canadian materials such as unraveled mackinaws and threads from old 338
Above: Commune , 2009 mixed media sculpture, 4" x 2" x 5.1" Right: Commune II, 2009 mixed media sculpture, 4" x 2" x 5.1"
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Above: Fan Fiction Series #3(PBS: don’t take it for granite), 2010 mixed media sculpture, 3" x 3" x 2.27"
Left: Nothing of harm to dread- agYU, Toronto Vitrine #3(Detail), 2011 mixed media miniature sculpture, 7.6" x 5.9" x 3.9"
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Hudson’s Bay blankets to construct webs of artificial Canadian cultural history. During the Communal Tents exhibition for her York University Master’s thesis show, Suddick created intricate samples of the thread specimens accompanied by stunning pencil drawings, simulating the experience of a visit to a museum of natural history rather than an art gallery. Later, during a residency in Berlin focusing on the same series, Suddick continued her tradition of hand-made mythologies by desecrating sentimental family artifacts belonging to Canadian expat families and weaving the threads into the existing dents and nails of their Berlin residences to create her distinctive oddities. The cryptozoologist’s search for the unknown creates a narrative for the existence of the unproven. This search seems to mirror Suddick’s reinvention of articles from the collective Canadian past into a new, artificially created natural icon. That her icon is modeled after a
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pest that threatens our proud Canadian trees, or is made from cloth worn by hipsters and small-pox carrying settlers alike, is unlikely coincidental and aptly descriptive of a country of folks who are expected to be nature lovers but, in fact, contribute to the demise of their environment. Suddick’s next project focuses on the aforementioned punctuations on the Canadian road-trip to the great outdoors – the recently closed and increasingly overgrown service centres she describes as nostalgic “non-monuments” that continue to resonate in her memories of family ventures out of the city. She may even pay homage to the Colborne, Ontario’s Big Apple. Jennie Suddick has shown her work at various venues in Toronto and abroad. A selection of her smaller pieces is currently available at Magic Pony, in Toronto. Suddick will be showing at Toronto’s Le Gallery this fall.
Above: Fan Fiction Series #1- Blair Witch, 2010 mixed media sculpture, 2.9" x 3" x 3" 342
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MONOTYPE artwork and article by Max Lupo
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o print, to be a printmaker, is to delight in the many nuances of the medium.
You may approach the medium in an architectural fashion, undertaking to manage every aspect of the process, ensuring that the finished work is a fit representation of your initial blueprints. Or, you may approach printmaking as a constant conversation with the process. Through this dialogue, you discover that the process not only speaks, but often acts of its own volition. Whether I am making an intaglio print or a monotype, I find that I cannot resist the latter, more conversational, approach. I often start with a specific vision in mind, but I enter the process knowing that I am only responsible for making half of the artwork. As much as I am concerned with producing a print directly, I also imagine that I am merely establishing the necessary criteria for the print to make itself. I do 344
Previous: We’re on the Water, 2011 monotype, 6" x 5" Left: Aerial Bridge Car, 2011 monotype, 3" x 4" Right: Unloading a Lake Freighter, 2011 monotype, 4" x 5" 275
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Above: That’s Me in the Umbrella, 2010 monotype, 22" x 30"
not mean that I leave an overwhelming amount of the process up to chance. Rather, I enter the work intuitively and when the process begins to speak, I am ready to listen.
the process that I made my decision. The transmutation of image into final monotype involved many similar action/reaction moments.
You can visualize the working process Here is an example of what I mean. this way: decision--> process/action--> The origin of the monotype, They result(s)/reaction -->decision. Load Containers, was a photograph. I was drawn to certain qualities of the They Load Containers is part of a body photograph, so I ventured to use it of work which deals specifically with as the basis for an artwork. I began the distortion of information through by using acetone to transfer the reproduction and memory. As a result, photographic image onto rice paper, I see printmaking as an ideal medium which would later to explore these I enter the work intuitively issues. To print be used as a chineand when the process begins is to reproduce, collé (a chine-collé to speak, I am ready to listen. and the effect of is a thin paper with an image that is doing so varies glued to a heavier support at the time from one situation to another. In of printing). After transferring the the case of my recent work, I acquire image, the process had something to photographs and reproduce them in tell me: it said, “the reverse side of this the form of monotypes. The process paper looks more interesting than the begins with a clear image, but through front”. Rice paper is semi-transparent my technique of reproduction, the and the acetone transfer process can original information is diluted and produce interesting effects when the finished work may contain little of viewed from the back side. Before the descriptive information found in transferring the image, I had not the initial photograph. This is similar really thought about which side to use to the process of memory, where any and it was only through experiencing initial thought is diluted by time, and
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often all that we have of a particular memory is a vague recollection of some earlier idea. As well, our memories are altered or distorted by new information that relates to them – when the context changes, the information changes. When creating my monotypes, I pull images from some portion of our public memory or shared history: the archive. Specifically, I use images from the Library of Congress’ Print and Photograph Collection. The archive allows me to use public domain images that are both historical and (through the power of the internet) immediately available. From the archive, my interest was initially captured by a certain set of photographs involving harbours, or heavy machinery, as seen in my monotype Unloading a Lake Freighter. I am not sure why I was drawn to these images in the first place, but now it is obvious that certain connections have developed. Particularly, there is a timelessness to these types of machines. For
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example, look at Unloading a Lake Freighter and They Load Containers, then tell me, which one was created from an image photographed in 2010 and which one was created from an image photographed in 1943? Which one is from Pennsylvania? Which one from Halifax? Your uncertainty is my intent. To put it plainly, I take information then distort and re-contextualize it in a way that is visually interesting and, I hope, thought provoking. My process is: acquire--> reproduce/ manipulate--> distribute--> repeat.
Right: Grain Elevators, 2010 monotype, 22" x 30"
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Poetry by Sara Pinder
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YK LIKE USUAL, I FOUND HER. IT WAS THE RIGHT PLACE FOR SOMEONE WITH PIGTAILS DYED TO MATCH THEIR LIPSTICK.
AND THAT DAMNED RED COAT THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR, A BANNER OF FUN FUR. THE SLEEVE WAS HELD ON WITH SAFETY PINS, BUT NOT IN THE HARDCORE WAY, JUST LAZINESS. SHE COULD SEW A PATCH ON WITH DENTAL FLOSS, DARN A HEEL, EVEN KNEW THINGS ABOUT THE GAUGE OF NEEDLES. THE RAW SEAM SURPRISED. UNDERNEATH, IT WAS MATTE LIKE A BONE. 352
THE MIDD
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DLE OF IT Poetry by Sara Pinder
I CAN TELL YOU WHICH MEN IN THE ROOM BEAT THEIR WIVES, GIVE OUT WAXED-PAPER TOFFEE ON HALLOWEEN, OR PRINT FAKE STATUS CARDS, AND I CAN SAY WHOSE LAWN I ENDED UP ON AT THREE A.M. LAST SUMMER, YELLING EPITHETS RECEIVED BY THE WOODPILE, THE RATTY TARP-COVERED SKIDOO, HEAVY WITH THE PRETENCE OF SLEEP.
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Dichotomy and delicacy are the essence of the encaustic works of Tanya Kirouac. The luminosity of the wax becomes rich with layering as it takes the form of a rose, cloud or field. A Montreal native, today Tanya is likeliest found working in the Distillery District Toronto studio and gallery, Studio Fuse, or looking out the kitchen window of the Cherry Valley farmhouse she shares with her partner, watching the way light falls on wild poppies and hay fields.
www.tanyakirouac.com www.shopfad.com Case Good Warehouse, Building #74, Suite 110 55 Mill St., Distillery District, Toronto
Owl Farm Studios is a straw bale structure that is an ongoing work of art. “It was our aim to create a sustainable unique building using local reclaimed materials, which would feature our skills and personalities in the building.”
Janna’s functional ceramics are featured throughout the studio, from the sinks and tiles to the coffee mugs and dinette sets; she creates a multitude of pieces anyone can enjoy at home. Jon paints large acrylic portraits of various personalities in a unique graphic style, and continues to offer archival custom framing services. 2603 Victoria Road Carrying Place, Ontario K0K 1L0 t. 613-919-1041 e. owls@owlfarmstudios.com Facebook: Owl Farm Studios
The Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s mandate is to serve Queen’s University, the City of Kingston and the region as a cultural locus, through collecting, research, interpretation and exhibition of works of art, in the belief that contact with original works of art contributes to understanding our world, ourselves and others. The Art Centre features new exhibitions of contemporary and historical art year round, public programs including film screenings, public lectures and art classes, and free admission on Thursdays, as well as extended evening hours from September to April. Located at the corner of University Avenue and Bader Lane, Kingston, ON. For information of programs and current exhibitions go to
WWW.AEAC.CA
Mecanismos no. 2
Mecanismos Series are for sale
through the Oeno Gallery
Art and illustration from Carl Wiens t. 613-476-2500 carlwiens.com
Avoid repetition and find inspiration in your universe.
Love what you do. Love where you are but look beyond.
Collaborate, Create.
MIKE BAYNE article by Nicole Armour
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oronto-based artist Mike Bayne’s oil painting China Doll features a diminutive Chinese food restaurant on an unremarkable block of Kingston’s Princess Street. The worn, brick building is resolutely boxy with few flourishes apart from its coloured signage, vaguely Asian awning, and pair of willfully circular windows. The amount of detail in the image is astonishing, especially given its limited colour palette. Bayne often works in tones of white and, in this case, an overcast sky hovers above a white edifice with a snow-filled sidewalk at its base. It’s because of this bleached-out background that distinct features emerge – the unassuming unit isn’t obliged to compete with full sun that would easily overpower it. What little light the day gives off is reflected in the wet, grey pavement. The building mostly blocks the only evidence of nature, a bare, grasping tree extending its tensile fingers skyward. There are no people present, but blinds hang in the upper-story windows indicating indoor activity for which privacy is sought. Bayne’s paintings present typically Canadian scenes and are densely populated
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Previous: Green and Red Truck, 2010 oil on wood panel, 4" x 6" Left: China Doll oil on wood panel, 4" x 6" 292
with mid-century buildings of middling architectural ambition. They’re painted head-on in medium shot, their contexts apparent but only enough to elucidate the subject’s character. China Doll, for example, amountstoa portrait, its square windows the eyes through which you might discern its soul. There’s life within these walls.
seem to unite his subject with this form. But the discrepancy between rendering banal, contemporary sites with such technical acuity, and in an older language like painting, is central to Bayne’s project. All of the residential and commercial shells he depicts, and their attendant signs, lots and vehicles, are aesthetically mediocre. By reproducing them with evident care and contemplation, Bayne invites us to look as closely as China Doll is also notable Why paint he does at places we might for its tiny size. At four by otherwise disregard. Their what you six inches it’s comparable in small size forces scrutiny. He could shoot explores the fact that these scale to a greeting card or, more significantly, a more easily? spots, like his work, are also snapshot. With few man-made and imprinted exceptions, this format dominates with choices and effort. They constitute Bayne’s body of work. Further, the the ways we ornament our lives and act likeness is so remarkably realistic that it’s as mirrors of how we see ourselves and, only upon close inspection that for this reason, are deserving of brushstrokes are discernable. Given that monumental treatment. In Bayne’s the artist works from his own estimation, it’s our tragic flaw to have photographs, and his execution is so defined the environment so thoroughly seamless as to obscure technique, the by our own meagre purpose. images raise the question: Why paint what you could shoot more easily? This is not to suggest that Bayne’s work is Photography’s primacy in the modern either imperious or lacking in warmth era closely aligns it with Bayne’s twentieth and hope. Green and Red Truck, for century content in a manner that would example, is emblematic of the artist’s 366
Above: Liquor, 2010 oil on wood panel, 8" x 12" 367
humanist vision. The painting depicts a vehicle irregularly parked in an asphalt lot. It’s built from the bed of one pickup that’s been fused to the cab of another, its distinct parts in two different colours that show where one truck begins and the other one ends. The humble vehicle sits in the foreground and all but obliterates a swath of inconsequential foliage and some lowslung buildings. Again, there’s no-one present. But the truck, an assemblage of industrial parts, bears the evidence of human intervention, as does its irreverent position between two, ruled parking spaces. It promises proof of life becauseit demonstrates adaptation and resourcefulness, a faceless person’s encounter with change. Its appearance denotes use. By documenting this scene, Bayne conflates himself with this inventive, absent character, his own skill a testament to the human potential for mastery. It also questions what our surroundings could be like if we saw beyond our own limitations
to expect more than sameness, economy and rigidity. Bayne’s lineage can be traced back to the genre paintings of Dutch Realism due to the verisimilitude of his work, his use of oils, and his study of the effects of realistic light. Though he paints signs and buildings, he approaches them like portraits in the manner of Hals or Rembrandt. These same subjects also qualify as landscapes. His exteriors depict everyday life and, while devoid of people, suggest a preoccupation with the present comparable to the populated domestic scenes of Vermeer. All of Bayne’s paintings are executed on wood, a tradition that persisted in Holland far longer than in other parts of Europe. This choice of material also summons thoughts of religious altarpieces, acurious association given the apparently secular nature of the artist’s subjects. However, by making this reference Bayne underscores the virtual absence of religious symbology in public
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Above: Nibourg, 2009 oil on wood panel, 16" x 24"
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Above: Coquitlam, 2008 oil on wood panel, 8" x 12"
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modern life, as well as our apparent disavowal of grandiose tributes to beauty.
There’s a distinct lack of florid gesture in the homes and communities that Bayne displays. But the corollary of this observation is the possibility that reducing the sites of our lives to their barest, most expedient versions is what passes for devotion in the modern moment. We’ve made a religion of cheap development and consumption. By painting in miniature, Bayne redeems us, transforming our cultural artifacts into icons when we’d previously settled for none. Liquor is a compelling example of Bayne’s conjoined exploration of humanism and religiousness. The painting is exceptional among the artist’s body of work for being a comparatively large eight by twelve inches. At its centre is a looming, unadorned sign advertising liquor, the word’s letters in simple, separate rectangular blocks on top of white, stiltlike legs. Though it probably appends a store, it’s not shown in the image. It’s Bayne’s habit to isolate signs from the
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building or situation they describe. This one seems to emerge independently amidst stout buildings that line the roadside behind it and into the distance. The painting is bigger but the architecture doesn’t fill its horizon as usual. Instead, the text hovers over it like a divine symbol or a weak but persistent sun. The only other structures that mimic the sign’s scale are streetlights. This implied light and shared proportion suggest the forms towering over the roadway serve their surroundings like beacons. The sign stands alone at the forefront uniting and governing everything in its wake. Since Bayne’s work is highly edited, it makes his content more pointed and potent. This is especially true when text is present. Wrested away from explicit meaning, words become more expansive as well as graphic. The extent to which the text is open to interpretation is magnified by the spaces between the letters as well as by the emptiness of the sky. Here, “liquor” radiates above nearby, indistinct sites like a promise or an affirmation. But it’s a bulletin disseminated from between two worlds. The sign is grounded by its legs but also
appears to be floating. Further, the word inhabits a murky space between what the sign’s actually addressing and what it conjures – liquor as sedative, oppressor, ebullience, detachment. This abstraction is best exemplified by the electrical wire that emerges from its side and trails across the street and out of the frame. We can’t determine if there’s an anchor so the cord seems like a kite string keeping the sign earthbound or aloft depending on the current’s whim. Completed in the artist’s standard small format, Untitled (Hospital Corner) is surprising because it depicts an interior. Still, true to form, it’s reduced to bare essentials painted entirely in whites and greys. It’s among his most minimal works. Bayne locates the image’s focal point where the wall meets the ceiling, providing only a partial view of institutional instruments that suggest rather than confirm you’re occupying a hospital room. Despite its simplicity, it’s suffused with tenderness for evoking the kind of human drama this room would support, one so hard to look at in a prolonged and direct way you’d find solace by searching out the ceiling. As in
all of Bayne’s paintings, the material of import lies just beneath what we’re shown. Due to its perspective, the image is intensely immersive. You don’t observe from the emotional safety of the doorway or, as in the case of his buildings, from a comfortable distance across the street. This painting, more than the others, highlights Bayne’s gift for portraying isolation and connection simultaneously, the way consciousness separates us despite being the essential quality that links us all together. To find absence in these pictures is to repudiate your own presence. And Bayne both validates and joins you in solidarity as a witness. This is the site of his compassion as an artist, the way his work includes and embraces your distinct point of view. He affirms that, in the midst of surfaces and starkness, the soul resides in the details.
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Right: Untitled (Hostipal Corner), oil on board, 4" x 6" 373