DaveandJenn RBC New Works Gallery Art Gallery of Alberta March 21 - June 7, 2015
You should probably listen to me, 2013 Acrylic, oil and resin 36.5 x 42.5 x 6.5cm
A Tale Ad Infinitum The Bucket Moon is in full animation, swirling colours in an all-seeing eyeball that takes eighty leagues to complete all its lunar phases. Deep in the light of the Moon projection, in a transcendent and technicolour forest, lives our Wolfmother, Euphoria. Her two sons Slow-to-Start and The Archer, along with a host of other tiny children, still live with their mother, riding her back. One night, in an onyx overglow, Slow-to-Start is crossed by his more ambitious and restless brother The Archer, sent into a state of paralyzing malcontent, cursed with an unknown illness of judicial paroxysms. Deteriorating quickly, Slow-to-Start clings feebly to the back of Euphoria, wasting the resources she rains down on her tiny childlings below, clinging to her fur with their unformed insect legs. 3
The Archer is defiant and resentful of this, his adult brother’s weaknesses. He lashes out, deciding to mount an attack on the only home he has known: the one closest to him, inside his mind and thick in his veins, his mother, Euphoria, who has grown over the years to be so dangerous and bright. He stalks her through tourmaline oceans and peridot swamps. She senses him ever in the background growing closer, yet doubts even the shadows of her mind. She evades him by hiding in her imagined darkness by layering sheaths of palms over her thick white fur, letting herself be completely enveloped. Through the deepening foliage she can hear a voice, repeating, “Now would be a good time to come to your senses…” The light of the Bucket Moon leads her finally into a clearing where she realizes suddenly the Binding Line between them is firmly drawn: the trap of survivalism cast between her progeny and her own self. Arrows shoot past her into the mystic grape sky enveloping them, piercing the edges of finitude with their exacting orange razorblades. Losing her focus for just a moment of delirious joy in the colour of it all, The Archer sends a fated arrow through the heart of Euphoria’s soul blood. It oozes in a pool around her and he leaps forward to finish the death task with flourish, sawing through her neck until her head drops into the lush grass, her veins and arteries reaching to rejoin their lost parts in vain. She will live henceforth forever distended and separated head from heart. Death rattles shake to a cacophonic echo in the distance, and The Archer looks up to his survey his completed task with satisfaction. Beneath his unaware and conquering silhouette, Euphoria’s beautiful gemstone eye rolls slowly back into her bronzed skull, making a complete revolution back to the outward worlds and blinking slowly, gleaming with a resurrected life energy filled with lavender promise: they are still all together. DaveandJenn is the compound name for the artists David Foy and Jennifer Saleik, brought together in name, marriage and artistic practice
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after meeting as art students over a decade ago at MacEwan University in Edmonton. Their story brings some truth to Robert Filliou’s declaration that the Birth of Art springs forth from a sponge in a bucket of water, since their collaboration began alchemically with the sharing of a paint bucket. The simple bucket still exists in the corner of the studio they share in southwest Calgary, transformed with layers of paint into an abstraction that the two simultaneously describe in each of my ears as both “a lunar landscape” and “actually a large mixing bowl”.
when it all runs off, 2014 Acrylic, oil and resin 107 x 93 cm
David Foy and Jennifer Saleik had an affinity of style, and before long, late night studio sessions in art school resulted in a collaborative painting processes, where one artist would take over from the other in a time of creative stalemate, each responding in turn, their process evolving into a competed artwork. By the time they graduated with Bachelor of Fine Art degrees, their paintings were produced exclusively in tandem. The duo began to conjoin their names professionally prior to their eventual marriage. As an art couple, they bantered and characterized the elements of their paintings until the characters began to follow them through each painting – the artists were able to anticipate a next step artistically through an evolving narrative. The paint bucket was the genesis of No End, an exhibition that both artists emphasized “needed to include as much as possible” 1 of their
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It’s just a touch/It’s just a line, 2014 Resin and acrylic 91 x 137 cm 6
collaborations since 2010 to complete “a chronicle without an end”. They describe this process as “gleaning and weaving:” DaveandJenn create a mythology of imagined creatures interjected with challenges representing the tensions of their own daily lives and those of the wider world, mixed together into a complex web of quotidian references and fictional larks that makes the iconography of their paintings difficult to pin down. The exhibition is introduced by a small figurative sculpture exterior to the gallery, My Mother, Euphoria (2013). This tiny creature has grown over time and is a principle character in the legend of DaveandJenn. She was developed at a time when Jenn had broken an ankle and could not get into their studio. “Polymer clay was accessible” so the artists began “playing around” with the new material. DaveandJenn describe the character of
Euphoria as a “raw and uncontrollable force, a composite of all those things you love… but slowly grows more and more destructive”. Euphoria becomes a mother to countless tiny creatures, most notably two sons, bound in a Cane and Abel drama. “One of her children has to promise to one day subdue her, before she devours all”, state the artists, explaining that the matricide and resurrection destiny of Euphoria relates to “a long view of both human history and the creative process… Although the act of saving a loved one from peril isn’t only an ancient or mythological concern.”2 Euphoria, in real life, is a medical and physiological condition of extreme, transcendent happiness and an overwhelming state of contentment.3 To arrive at this exaggerated state you need to swing into an extreme situation: great athletic endurance, ecstatic orgasm, nerve disorder, psychotic drugs or bipolar disorder can bring a person into a euphoric episode before crashing back into an opposing state of mind. Euphoria represented as a mother in conflict with her children is a metaphor for how the artists personify their view on life and creativity. They cite both the she-wolf who mothered the famous Roman twins Romulus and Remus and Tiamat, a Babylonian chaos god, as inspiration for her development: “civilization and chaos all rolled into one”. DaveandJenn’s hybrid version of these ancient legends in the exhibition No End is visibly closest, from the neck down, to the medieval era bronze Capitoline She-Wolf housed at the Musei Capitolini in Rome, Italy – a sculpture cited to be part of the city’s creation myth and “symbol of the city.” 4 The suckling children sustained below are also similar, though the decapitated work created by DaveandJenn is a contemporary clash of materiality: the form work was carved in styrofoam and epoxy putty, and coated in fun fur and other synthetic materials. The reference to Tiamat is central to the plot of their characters’ foibles: Tiamat is defined as a Mesopotamian ocean goddess or ‘creatrix’ who symbolizes an ancient marriage between salt and fresh water. 5 She eventually wars against her descendants and is slain when the “heavens and the earth are formed from her divided body”.6 The conflict of this myth is described as a Chaoskampf, which Jenn translates as 7
If it bides its time, its time will come (detail), 2013 Acrylic, oil and resin 86 x 122 x 11 cm
Don’t Worry Mama, 2014 Bronze, faux fur, epoxy putty and mixed medium 179 x 178 x 150 cm
‘chaos struggle.’ Born in Germany, Saleik and her mother moved to Canada in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down and her own mother country was reunified; she cites this upbringing as informative to her interest in this chaos struggle motif. Foy meanwhile was immersed in the ‘Chaoskampf’ of Edmonton’s teenage suburban culture of resistance: video games, skateboarding, rave music and DIY aesthetics. Upon entering the gallery space, this struggle is focused on two large figures of the Wolfmother – Euphoria herself – grown to full strength yet decapitated and split into her true two selves, in front of a temple of salon-style paintings developed over many years of the artists’ collaboration. The Paint Bucket hangs above the painting installation, truly like a moon in the distance, comprised of over 400 still images of the object stitched together in time as a stop animation video. One of the sons stands on top of her head in defiance, arrows piercing the gallery walls at a distance, while the older son rides her headless body. The paintings are heavy, dense in their physicality: each layer of colour is suspended in transparent resin, giving a three-dimensionality to the compositions. When viewed from the side, the relief-depth of each work
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averages on four inches thick, an aquatic kaleidoscope struck though with hovering paint flecks. The artists called back over twenty works from a series of dedicated collectors to present their oeuvre-to-date as a ‘Hall of Mirrors’ at the far wall of the gallery space, reflecting the story of Euphoria and her children back upon the sculptural figures of the divided mother splayed below. For the artwork No End, the larger of the two parts of her body is a headless wolf-dog creature, depicting Euphoria’s four stable haunches embedded in fertile green grass, nurtured by streams of Day-Glo milk from her abdomen. The character Slow-to-Start straddles her back, while her tiny children gather around her severed, gaping neck: “they helped The Archer cut the head off, performing a primitive surgery to remove the offending mind from its body.” DaveandJenn describe Slowto-Start as a stereotypical adult son still living at home: “unsatisfied, stuck in a rut, annoyed at his over achieving younger brother”. His blistered painful feet emphasize his sensitive nature. The gruesome and detached head of Euphoria, resplendent in a pool of guts, is entitled Don’t Worry Mama, and features a version of The Archer. His character was first represented as an unseen force whose arrows riddled the large figurative sculpture in -TheBindingLine-, a work exhibited at the 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art curated by Nancy Tousley. DaveandJenn cite The Archer as one of three main characters in their recent work: “the teenaged son, covered in acne, the golden son, always doing what his mother wants or what she needs”. Yet in this new work The Archer figure stands insolently above her with his sequined cape and sunset-coloured bow, having just completed a pivotal action in the sequences of the artists’ complex chronicle. DaveandJenn insist that “Euphoria foresaw this violent act, she even trained The Archer for this task when she was still younger and sound of mind. Not that he ever looked forward to it. Maybe he put it off until his useless brother pushed him over the edge…” Beneath him the purple jewel of Euphoria’s eye gleams with the promise of her eventual regeneration – separation is always inscribed with the bond of the beginning. 11
The wall of salon-style paintings illustrates the artists themselves intermingled with this imagined animus family within the psychedelic forests of palm trees and neon skies gleaming through the fronds, over the course of their own relationship. Sometimes Euphoria’s body is represented with leaves, as though she is the black forest itself, enveloping them all. As artists, DaveandJenn’s progression through the narrative is unified in the development of their work through experimentation with new material forms and in response to their own life experiences, a rich product of their coupled imaginations. Charles Baudelaire, emphatically quoting himself in his essay, “The Life and Work of Eugène Delacroix” articulates a qualification of the painter is the necessity of imagination for obtaining a status of true originality: The whole visible universe is but a store-house of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform. All the faculties of the human soul must be subordinated to the imagination, which puts them in requisition all at once.7 Kristy Trinier Curator, Art Gallery of Alberta Endnotes 1 Studio visits in Calgary, Alberta and email correspondence between DaveandJenn and curator Kristy Trinier, December, 2014. 2 Ibid. 3 Merriam Webster Dictionary, s.v. “euphoria.” 4 “Capitolene She-wolf / Hall of the She-wolf,” Musei Capitolini, accessed January 11, 2015, http://en.museicapitolini.org/collezioni/percorsi_per_sale/ appartamento_dei_conservatori/sala_della_lupa/lupa_capitolina. 5 The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, s.v. “Tiamat,” ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 546. 6 Ibid. 7 Charles Baudelaire, “The Life and Work of Eugène Delacroix,” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1964), 49.
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Artists’ Biography Probably better known as DaveandJenn, David John Foy, born in Edmonton, Alberta and Jennifer Saleik, born in Velbert, Germany have been working collaboratively since 2004. They studied Fine Art together at MacEwan University and Alberta College of Art + Design. Their joint practice, which includes painting, sculpture and installation, weaves a long view of comparative myth and history together with the more closed off realms of private spectacle and inner landscapes. DaveandJenn were shortlisted for the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2006 and 2009, awarded the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award in 2010 and long listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2011. They are currently based in Calgary, Alberta. Writer Biography Kristy Trinier is a Curator at the Art Gallery of Alberta. She previously was the Public Art Director at the Edmonton Arts Council, where she managed the City of Edmonton’s Public Art Collection, as well as related exhibitions and public art programs. Trinier holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Art and English from the University of Victoria, and a Master’s degree in Public Art from the Dutch Art Institute (DAI, ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) as a Huygens scholar in The Netherlands.
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List of Works Don’t Worry Mama, 2014 Bronze, faux fur, glass, acrylic paint, fabric, epoxy putty and mixed media 179 x 178 x 150 cm Courtesy of the Artists and TrépanierBaer Gallery No End, 2014 Faux fur, acrylic paint, epoxy putty, fabric and mixed media 259 x 117 x 236 cm Courtesy of the Artists and TrépanierBaer Gallery My Mother, Euphoria, 2013 Sculpey, crystals and acrylic paint mixed media 14 x 10 x 19 cm Private Collection That One, he’ll be holding all the pieces, too tight, too close, 2011 Acrylic, oil and resin 86 x 122 cm Collection of Sydney and William R. Pieschel In The End, don’t worry about me, I don’t need you, 2011 Acrylic, oil and resin 38 x 51 cm Private Collection The cardiologist’s beloved pet, 2012 Acrylic, oil and resin 25 x 20 x 7 cm Collection of Daryl and Ellen Fridhandler The General of the Mountain, 2012 Acrylic, oil and resin 30 x 45 x 6 cm Collection of Elizabeth Joseph, Edmonton The Cavalry and the Choir, 2012 Acrylic, oil and resin 86 x 122 x 11 cm Private Collection “You should probably listen to me,” 2013 Acrylic, oil and resin 36.5 x 42.5 x 6.5cm Collection of Provenance Fine Art Consulting Inc. If it bides its time, its time will come, 2013 Acrylic, oil and resin 86 x 122 x 11 cm Collection of Burnet, Duckwork & Palmer LLP Law Firm
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Swimming Lessons, 2013 Acrylic, oil and resin 88 x 11 x 173 cm Private Collection Midnight Shopper/Queen of the Roost, 2014 Acrylic, oil and resin 46 x 33 cm Collection of Tyler Stuart Good Boy/Sweet Thing, 2014 Acrylic, oil and resin 81.3 cm diameter Private Collection …searching for an idol, 2010 Acrylic and resin 28 x 29 cm Collection of Bill Rodgers with friends like these, 2014 Acrylic, oil and resin 107 x 92 cm Private Collection when it all runs off, 2014 Acrylic, oil and resin 107 x 93 cm Private Collection, Calgary It’s just a touch/it’s just a line, 2014 Acrylic, oil and resin 91 x 137 cm Collection of Tyler Stuart Now would be a good time to come to your senses, 2012 Acrylic, oil and resin 86 x 86 x 11 cm Private Collection Let the others have their days in the sun, 2012 Acrylic, oil and resin 15 x 14 cm Collection of Katie Karpetz & Mike Barry Othermoon, 2014 Video 78 minutes, continuous loop Courtesy of the Artists and TrépanierBaer Gallery Tanz Tanz, 2013 Acrylic, oil and resin 25 x 18 cm Private Collection, Calgary
The RBC New Works Gallery features new works by Alberta artists. Initiated in 1998 and named the RBC New Works Gallery in 2008, this gallery space continues the Art Gallery of Alberta’s commitment to supporting Alberta artists.
Š Art Gallery of Alberta 2015 ISBN: 978-1-77179-012-3 Editor: Catherine Crowston Design: Cut+Paste Design Inc. and Charles Cousins Photography: Kevin Baer, DaveandJenn Essay: Kristy Trinier Printing: Burke Group Printed in Canada
The Art Gallery of Alberta is grateful for the generous support of our many public and private donors and sponsors, as well as the ongoing support of the City of Edmonton, the Edmonton Arts Council, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Front Cover Image: No End, faux fur, 2014 Faux fur, acrylic paint, epoxy putty, fabric and mixed media 259 x 117 x 236 cm