Tag: reviews

Wendy is the brainchild of artist Walter Scott. She’s young, blonde, fresh out of art school and lives in an unnamed city that is a lot like Montreal. She works in a coffee shop (sort of) and spends her nights at indie music shows, getting high, and obsessing over boys who play in bands. She’s trying to get a toehold in the art world, but she can’t seem to keep it together long enough to finish an artist proposal.

Released in late 2014, Wendy is a full-length comic that follows Scott’s youthful and foolish protagonist as she navigates the volatile terrain of late adolescence in the (presumably) Canadian art world. It’s a familiar landscape, and one that Scott understands with astounding clarity.

We witness Wendy’s bizarre friendships and rivalries with the figures of Vienna and Paloma, two women who fluctuate between being revered as art world idols and derided as cruel nemeses.  Wendy explores everything from the unspoken hierarchies that define creative communities to the thrilling social and sexual flirtations that take place across all strata of this neatly defined system. Scott playfully mocks the convoluted language tied to certain artistic practices, and deftly captures the general squalor that comes with being a young artist.  If nothing else, Wendy’s hysterical typology of the artists at the FloJo (read: Banff) residency is sure to amuse anyone who survived an education in fine arts, new media, or curatorial studies.

For all its biting comedic insight, Wendy left me cold, angry even. The women in the wendiverse prey on eachother and get caught up in petty jealousies over superficial relationships with men. Wendy consistently makes ill-advised choices including falling for a sleazy, drugged-up, and vaguely radical band boy, and then pursuing him at the expense of alienating her friends. She all too easily loses sight of her ambition to hone her artistic practice to the point of legitimacy. Couldn’t she just pull it together, get a halfway decent job and focus on securing an exhibition assistance grant? I mean, what is her deal?

I wanted so badly for Wendy to be a quirky and upright role model for young women in the art world, I wanted her to succeed, to see through the people who were using her, and to make smart choices (whatever that means). As it turns out, I was so caught up in my own anxieties about representations of young women in the art world that I may have missed the point.

When I put down Wendy, I picked up Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist in search of some of Gay’s trademark wisdom to put me at ease. In one of her many ruminations on fiction, Gay calls out the tendency to attribute character flaws in fictional girls and women to larger conditions such as alcoholism or mental illness. She notes that the need to pathologize imperfections is a special prejudice reserved for female characters who -unlike their male counterparts – cannot simply be complex or imperfect. When a woman displays bad judgment in fiction, there must be something wrong with her. But when Raskolnikov throws an axe in the face of an innocent woman (spoilers!) he is a tormented philosopher at the pinnacle of metaphysical angst. Gay writes: “If people cannot be flawed in fiction there’s no place left for us to be human.” Well, damn.

I don’t know why I was so hard on Wendy at first. What I do know is that I am ready to celebrate her as an honest, real, great big fu#{b29860ee6b7af5bf99d3058cca3182816eed414b47dab251265e93b8c00e69b1}&ing mess of a person. At least, I’m ready to try.

SOURCE: Art Bitch - Read entire story here.

Hughes’ first solo show in Toronto in 10 years opens TONIGHT at Division Gallery. Our Sarah Letovsky brings you a sneak peek at this epic new body of work.

By: Sarah Letovsky

It’s with both a sincere and ironic nod to traditional Canadiana that Manitoban artist Simon Hughes presents his latest body of work, “The Central Region,” at Division Gallery. The show’s primary component is a series of large-scale watercolour paintings, a fact that’s incredibly hard to believe, given the painstaking accuracy and geometric precision that characterizes the work.

It’s immediately obvious that Hughes is working in a language defined by both early Modernism as well as Group of Seven legends like Lawren Harris, by abstracting the Canadian landscape into a series of shapes and flat colours. A broken-up patch of ice becomes a crowd of triangles; the aurora borealis transforms into a hanging chandelier of orderly geometric shards. Hughes’ work has always focused on our collective relationship to the landscape – but this is a marked departure from his more narrative scenes of condo-like log cabins and architectural structures interacting with human figures. In fact, a human presence is noticeably absent from this show – although we do see glimpses of civilization represented by cookie cutter houses and trucks spread out under the northern lights in works like Orange County, Alberta (2013), which Hughes mentions is inspired by the virus-like suburban sprawl he experienced in California. In this new work, Hughes turns the telescope around to experience the bigger picture, and the results are truly enchanting. The once outright narrative quality of his work has been subdued into subtle traces of human presence that produce a unique sense of (dis)quiet.

“The Central Region” feels both familiar and playfully experimental. In a somewhat tongue-in-cheek triptych, Red Studio (2013), Hughes presents us with a Matisse-like studio interior where a prototypical Canadian landscape painting hangs on the wall while a snowy urban landscape can be seen through the studio window. This contrast not only highlights a growing tension between the urban and the natural, but also makes a subtle comment about our changing relationship to (and perhaps fetishization of) traditional Canadian iconography.

While the show does, in many ways, question our own fascination with a landscape that we may or may not experience in a genuine way, and even goes so far as to imply that the landscape itself is changing because of our own encroachment – it also pays homage to the pure aesthetic pleasure to be found in nature, with iridescent dancing colours, sensitive gradients, and seductive geometric surfaces.

“The Central Region” is on view at Division Gallery from February 27–April 5, 2014

Sarah Letovsky is a Toronto-based artist, writer, and arts administrator.

SOURCE: Art Bitch | Toronto art review and blog - Read entire story here.