Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
pamphlet
volume 1 | number 5
march 21 - 25, 2016
Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
Schedule Winter/Spring 2016
dates
artists
writers
February 22 – 26
Jannik Plaetner
Stephanie Turtle
Joshua Wade
Feb. 29 – March 4 Varvara Vinogradova
Patrick O’Reilly
Ashley Ridley
Garrison Berger
March 7 – 11
Leanne Munchinsky
Brianne Davis
Emily Kohlert
Candace Chickowski
March 14 – 18
Mardee Xamin
Kristina Parzen
Paul Panko
Michelle Gagné-Orr
March 21 – 25
Samra K. Sheikh
Cole Thompson
Pascal Dimnik
Qiming Sun
March 28 – Apr. 1
Floranne St. Amand McLaughlin
Brandon Panasiuk
Amy Prive
Stephanie Simonot
Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
pamphlet series
volume 1 | number 5
March 21 - 25 2016
Director’s Message
Marcus Miller
1
Samra Sheikh - The Path (Taken / Not Taken)
Qiming Sun - Eidolon
Pascal Dimnik - Oah/Yod: Interregnum
by Cole Thompson
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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
1
Samra Sheikh: The Path (Taken / Not Taken)
Qiming Sun: Eidolon
Pascal Dimnik: Oah/Yod: Interregnum
by: Cole Thompson
Three exhibitions currently on view at the Gordon Snelgrove Gallery
explore multiple contemporary and historical issues in an effort to
investigate and unearth new or existing narratives. [The Path: Taken
/ Not Taken, a photographic exhibition by Samra Sheikh, engages
with the multiplicity of personal trajectories affected by individual
agency via stark and effective metaphor. Qiming Sun’s Eidolon,
through the employment of Baroque- and Renaissance-influenced
painting, as well as ceramic sculpture, operates as a site of pluralistic
convergence for cultural, historical and gender-based identities that
have personal significance to the artist, but are often unacknowledged
in a contemporary context. In Pascal Dimnik’s Oah/Yod: Interregnum,
narrative construction is central, where, inspired by the Shigir Idol, the
artist has crafted a fictional mythology that weds untold ancient history
and Lovecraftian horror]. In all three exhibitions, strong narrative-based
themes emerge ranging from the unknown or unacknowledged to the
ubiquitous or banal. The three artists have employed a wide range of
visual tactics to grapple with these narratives, illustrating the variety
of artistic practices necessary in confronting pressing contemporary
issues.
Sheikh’s The Path: Taken / Not Taken explores the multiplicity of
personal narratives that unfold as a result of individual agency. Images
of constructed wooden walkways, barricaded alleyways, snowskimmed residential streets, commuter-train stations, vacated retail
centres, and aerial perspectives of urban expanse, among others,
comprise a photographic series that poses a string of open-ended
questions for the viewer. The questions are evident: spectators are
provoked to interrogate their own personal path and the decisions
that have dictated its course; however, the answers are not so easily
procured in the ambiguous and complicated spaces that Sheikh has
documented.
The spectator’s central role is emphasized by the absence of human
forms in the images, as there are no others to divert attention to –
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the gaze must be introspective. And while many works in the series
are indebted to the traditions of street photography through their raw,
documentarian aesthetic and subject matter, there remain only traces of
human activity and lived experience. The works are forensic in nature.
Post-apocalyptic may be the most easily charged descriptor, but the
images are truly concerned with a de-romanticization of agency and
pathway. They complicate the romantic, free-willed tropes of personal
journey espoused in popular media and literature (c.f.: Robert Frost’s
“The Road not Taken” or John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country
Roads,”), and provide an alternative that questions agency despite the
ubiquitous nature of paths. Doorways mark the division of public and
private space and barriers prohibit us from following certain routes:
are all paths accessible to all people? Air travel routes, commuter
train lines and walking paths are cemented, archetypal and void of
individualism. On one level, The Path asks us to consider our choices
and personal narratives; on another, we must consider the degree of
personal choice granted when archetypes proliferate and agency is
curbed.
Exposing unacknowledged narratives is at the core of Sun’s Eidolon,
an exhibition that functions as a site of convergence for multiple
historical, cultural and gender-based inquiries. Stylistically inspired by
the masters of the Baroque and High Renaissance, Sun’s oil portrait
paintings diverge from a tradition that emphasizes the presentation of
the individual subject. Instead, the works are ripe with symbolism and
allusion which serve to represent a host of identities and histories that
have personal significance to the artist. As allusions are made to occult
paganism, ancient Chinese history, Tibetan and Yunnanese ethnic
minorities, gender identity and androgyny, and lost or dying traditions,
it becomes clear that the works are shrouded in complex layers of
meaning. They are both the meeting places and vehicles for exploring
the beauty of cultural groups which go largely underappreciated by the
mainstream.
The unnoticed, sophisticated beauty of these cultures is echoed in
the exhibition’s title, Eidolon, where groups that have had a phantom
presence now attain physical manifestation through the artist’s work.
In this sense, the work is not only a presentation of culture but an
ongoing process where the previously invisible takes material form.
This process is illustrated in the artist’s ceramic sculptures where
forms possess anthropomorphic, transitional qualities. The organic
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objects seem frozen in motion, caught between initial and final states,
representing both the procedural concept of the exhibition as well as the
living, evolving nature of the cultures it showcases. Eidolon assumes
the important task of unearthing these cultural narratives – those of the
minority, the unknown, the outcast, the phantom – and inserting them
into a contemporary space where they have long been absent.
The Shigir Idol, the world’s oldest wooden sculpture, dating back to
9000 BCE, serves as a conceptual starting point for Dimnik’s Oah/
Yod: Interregnum, an exhibition which weaves a fantastic mythology
through the use of serigraphs, ink-wash based drawing and watercolour
paintings. The artist has created a fictional narrative centred on the idol
which speculates on untold human events, acted out and experienced
regardless of a recorded historical presence. The story’s protagonist,
Oah, is a powerful Neanderthal whose natural, pre-agrarian lifestyle
is threated by Yod, an alien deity determined on shifting society into
a technological, agrarian existence. The anachronisms that surface in
the relationship between Oah and Yod mirror those that exist between
those of the pre-historic setting and contemporary society, where
technology and agrarian-based production are at odds with the natural
world.
The interregnum, or stoppage in course, that Dimnik investigates is one
of both resistance and transition. Human faces and skulls appear in
two phases: living and dead, while hands caress fauna that seemingly
fades away as a result of their ink-wash base. The fictional world is
clearly in a state of flux. The artist’s horizontal narrative presentation
also has affinities to a long history of the horizontal storytelling that has
manifested in historical tapestries for centuries. The temporal, processbased qualities of tapestry weaving had important social functions for
the weavers involved. They were also incredibly important in recording
and presenting historical events. Dimnik’s contemporary tapestry
operates in a similar fashion, recording and validating a fictitious
history that would go otherwise untold. Is Oah/Yod: Interregnum
a contemporary tapestry where histories are woven? Does the
protagonist’s connection to a pre-industrial natural world advocate
a return to the social structure of craft-based cottage industries that
were essential to weavers throughout history? Dimnik inserts narrative
where little else is known and participates in an essential practice of
critical readdress and expansion of recorded history.
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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