11.22.2003 | 01.24.2004
BLIND STAIRS | ARLENE STAMP, MARY SCOTT, JANICE GURNEY
The idea for this exhibition came from the artists. Janice Gurney summed it up by observing that “Arlene, Mary and I feel that we are at similar points in our lives as artists. All of us are re-visiting our past work and re-making it in some way that alters its original form and content.”
Janice Gurney, Arlene Stamp and Mary Scott have been exhibiting, sometimes together, for more than two decades. During the past six years each independently decided to reflect on strategies of doubling and generation, citation and appropriation that were already entrenched in her art practice. Each began to recycle, sample, and cannibalize her own earlier works. Gathering the works together in a group retrospective is intended both to acknowledge and to compound these tendencies.
It should be noted that all three artists began their careers as painters. Their work has developed through a critical relationship with modernist abstraction. In place of modernism’s assumptions concerning the primacy of the medium, Scott and Gurney and Stamp have insisted on painting’s textuality–its absorption of an array of signifying practices. When compared to traditional painting their works look decidedly impure, even parasitic, with respect to the incorporation of materials, authors, and technologies. Thus Mary Scott describes her works as “an enmeshing of language (literature) in language (paint).” When not removing the paint from earlier paintings and bundling it together with safety pins, Scott applies it to household furniture and dishes. She calls this “getting rid of clutter.”
While Scott physically incorporates old paintings into new ones, Janice Gurney has been making new works “that are ‘cancelled’ versions of my older works. Each new section replaces the original component of an earlier work with a black panel. These are made in the same size and the same medium as the earlier component, but are now made blank. The readable image has disappeared from the cancelled work but the physical structure of the earlier work remains.”
In the early 1980s Arlene Stamp made paintings based on colour photocopies of paintings by the obscure self-taught artist Gladys M. Johnston. I was, saw I belongs to this series. The painting referred to in her Lost Painting project is another third-generation GMJ copy, which survives today only in slide documentation. To render the hand-painted “details” of the Lost Painting, Stamp scanned portions of the slide and transferred the map-like template to aluminum, painting the aluminum in paint-by-number style to match the “decomposed” image printed from the computer. This notion of reproducing without repeating is also exemplified in the Tilings, where a mathematical formula is used to mechanically generate a recursive (infinitely non-repeating) pattern in various colours of vinyl floor tiles.
Mary Scott (Calgary), Janice Gurney (Toronto) and Arlene Stamp (Calgary) have for many years carried on a rigorous dialogue with painting that has won them national recognition. The relevance of their current production lies chiefly in its conceptual orientation, a bias that favours experimentation and system, and acting on things that already exist, including painting itself. And yet their work appears strange. The strangeness may have something to do with the works’ delirious detours around binary distinctions, such as logic and nonsense, avant-garde and kitsch, moderation and excess, or lost and found. Such binary blindness indicates a feminist spirit of playful subversion, a spirit that also revels in the generative power of elements that remain concealed or invisible in a context of visual display. That would be one perspective from which to consider Gurney’s submersion of reference in the “cancelled “works, or Stamp’s variant “recoveries” of a lost painting that we’ll never see, or Scott’s clumps of words formed in paint and masquerading as garishly girlish treasures.
Ingrid Jenkner, Director, Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery
Joan Stebbins, Curator, Southern Alberta Art Gallery
Co-organized by MSVU Art Gallery, Halifax and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts
