Pictures at an Exhibition
I have always been drawn to the lean and withered objects and places that exist all around us and I have always been curious about the relationship that society has with them. There they are all around us, yet they are remote and isolated from society. Such objects and places resonate with the sadder chords of society: that of loneliness, forlorn feelings, being forgotten.
As mankind enters this new age, the Information Age, where research is binary and AI provides the answers, what will society’s relationship to its past be? To the places, people, objects and philosophies that have shaped us – but seem now to have been forgotten?
In which direction is society trending today, toward relevance or non-relevance? What are the implications of today’s society's lost relationship to its organic history?
Those are the questions I am setting out to explore…
I am Generation X, born and raised and educated in the last decades of the industrial age, a time when knowledge, law, philosophy and reason were indexed on cue cards and stored in long wooden drawers housed in the great cathedrals of learning, libraries.
Today, I live and work at the beginning of the new age. Answers are Googled and read out by Siri, whether they are based on any real knowledge or thought. Anyway, who has the time to question it, for off we go chasing the next great trend, contented.
Politicians rule by 140 characters (or less!) and my own darling daughters communicate by means of 15 second TikTok videos, viewed simultaneously, on multiple screens.
And can you believe that MLB wants to bring in a pitch clock?
Wabi Sabi
In my early exhibitions – including a solo show at Justina M. Barnickie Gallery and in the group exhibition, CONTACT 2001 – I studied, photographed and presented to Torontonians the alleyways and port lands of their city, places most Torontonians never knew existed – virtually in their own backyards – the simple worn beauty of colour and patterns created by the weather and lost in time…
It was through my early exhibitions that I began to meet with Japanese artists, who enjoyed my work, and who shared with me the ancient concepts and imperfect expressions of Wabi Sabi.
Wabi = loneliness of living in nature and remote from society
Sabi = chill, lean or withered
Now, my early work fits well in that old definition.
Then, in the 14th century, the Wabi Sabi art movement emerged and those meanings changed, Wabi Sabi becoming:
Wabi = rustic simplicity, understated elegance
Sabi = beauty and serenity that comes with age
Life of an object has evidence of its being.
Patina: sheen produced by age, wear, and polishing, or any similar acquired change of a surface through age and exposure
So, whereas before we had a forgotten withered object, now we have “flawed beauty”. Patina is the story and energy of the object / place / being over time … and beauty is the meaningful relationship we place onto them.
Today, my work study not only represents a continuation of “simple beauty in forgotten places” exploration but is also about telling the visual story – patina. Understanding that emptiness and imperfection are tantamount to the value that society places on its history, the environment and the spacetime it occupies.