Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
pamphlet
volume 1 | number 2
february 29 - march 4, 2016
Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
Schedule Winter/Spring 2016
dates
artists
writers
February 22 – 26
Jannik Plaetner
Stephanie Turtle
Joshua Wade
February 29 – 24
Varya Vinogradova
Patrick O’Reilly
Ashley Ridley
Garrison Berger
March 7 – 11
Leanne Munchinsky
Brianne Davis
Emily Kohlert
Candace Chickowski
March 14 – 18
Samra Sheikh
Cole Thompson
Pascal Dimnik
Qiming Sun
March 28 – April 1 Floranne St. Amand McLaughlin
Brandon Panasiuk
Amy Prive
Stephanie Simonot
Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
pamphlet series
volume 1 | number 2
February 29 - March 4, 2016
Director’s Message
Marcus Miller
Varya Vinogradova- Alternspace
Ashley Ridley - Beast
Garrison Berger - Extension
by Patrick O’Reilly
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2
Director’s Message
It is my pleasure to introduce this series of interpretive
essays accompanying the graduating exhibitions of
BFA candidates this year. Our writers reflect on the
work of 17 solo exhibitions, presented over six weeks
from February 22 – April 1, 2016. This is a new initiative
at the University of Saskatchewan that will no doubt
benefit all contributors as they enter professional life
and add discursive heft to their work.
I want to thank Brianne Jael Davis (B.A. Honours in Art
History, 2016) in particular, who suggested the idea of
a pamphlet series, worked hard to solicit writers and is
one of the writers herself.
Six pamphlets will be produced over six weeks and be
made available to the public during the exhibitions. At
the end of this cycle, photographic documentation and
artist’s material will be added to a compiled catalogue
and made available for a nominal cost.
Marcus Miller, Director
Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
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Varya Vinogradova: Alternspace
Ashley Ridley: Beast
Garrison Berger: Extension
February 29 - March 4, 2016
by Patrick O’Reilly
We are myth-saturated. Our cultural landscape is built
on mythologies, on which we build new mythologies at
every instant. From deep within the territory, we mistake
the modern abundance of myth for poverty. We cannot, to
use one old myth, see the forest for the trees. The three
artists who comprise these exhibitions continue to forge
new mythologies from old. From the psychedelic swamps
of Varya Vinogradova, through the stylized religious
symbolism of Ashley Ridley, to Garrison Berger’s modernday hagiographies, the works which make up these exhibits
make our new myths from dazzling colour.
Varya Vinogradova creates a cosmic inner-space, irregular
convolutions of lines which seem to split the difference
between nebulae and neural systems. This sensation of
being caught between the colossal and the minute, the
external and the internal, carries through all of Vinogradova’s
work. One notices her careful manipulation of colour,
resulting in work that is simultaneously vibrant and muted.
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This psychedelic swerve and weave does not abandon the
viewer in abstraction, but finds a place for the human inside
of it. In Chair Dreamer we find a sleeping woman at the
literal root of these abstract lines, gradually blending with
the lines themselves; the lines become a tableau of her
dreams. In Ancestor Dreams the lines give way to primal
leaf shapes and bright white beads which could be bubbles
or firing synapses; again we find human figures beneath the
scene, submerged and peering at once ahead and above.
But don’t miss the openings in the lacing: dark gaps we
ourselves might fall into. There is something primordial
about Vinogradova’s paintings. They could be scenes from
the beginning of time. They could be scenes from the end
of it.
“I feel like I’m living in two worlds simultaneously,” writes
Ashley Ridley; her worlds are inhabited by fabulous
beasties, and plagued by apocalyptic images. Ridley’s work
contains echoes of illuminated manuscripts, folk art, manga
characters, stained glass, chalk drawings. Hers is a broad
cultural net which captures a single vision.
Pay special attention to Good Works Alone is Not Enough.
Note the red-ness of the flames, the overly-literal look
of despair on the boy’s face: this is a child’s vision of
damnation, one which inflicts both terror and wonder, and
reminds the viewer of our own small helplessness. In Final
Awakening, the artist depicts a figure shrouded in sweeping,
blurred strokes, giving an impression of speed and tumult.
The smooth, sombre blues of this painting stand in sharp
contrast to the sharp red flames of Good Works, and offer
an ambivalent depiction of the Apocalypse. The scene is
markedly distinct from Hell, but full of its own tension and
drama.
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It is perhaps impossible, and unfair, to take Ridley’s works
outside of their religious context: they are, by nature,
Christian works. But they achieve their Christian vision
without proselytization. Rather, they offer that sense of awe
which should always accompany religion, and point to the
variety and creative energy that keeps religion a vital part of
so many lives today.
In the eighth canto of Inferno, Dante describes the souls
of sinners trapped in the seventh circle of Hell, their
bodies transformed into wailing trees whose sap is blood.
That scene is translated into the modern day in Jokester,
Accidentally Nicholas Cage, and Fear by Garrison Berger.
In these pictures, the viewer finds faces layered between
vertical bars of radioactive colour – part tree, part late-night
tv test pattern.
Berger works in monotype print and collage, media which
emphasize the repetitive and reproductive nature of the
modern age. He uses these techniques to great effect in his
portraits. Here he enters a hagiographic mode, reproducing
pictures of nostalgic celebrities: John Belushi, the Notorious
BIG, Gene Simmons (in a Mona Lisa parody). These are our
modern mythic heroes in stark two-tone, drained of their
colour, left with grim expressions and a bark-like texture.
Is this a criticism of the shallowness of our modern pantheon
– the absence of colour a reflection on the unheroic nature
of our heroes? – or are these faces freed from the colourprison that holds the wailing faces in Jokester or Fear?
Berger adds the final facet to our myth-building – the
inclusion of new faces, new icons, refusing the privilege or
restrictive tradition of colour.
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Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
Department of Art & Art History
University of Saskatchewan
191 Murray Building
3 Campus Drive
Saskatoon SK S7N 5A4
306-966-4208
www.usask.ca/snelgrove
snelgrovegallery@gmail.com
twitter: @gordonsnelgrove
instagram: @snelgrovegallery