Arts' Gallery and Future Prospects

     Inspiring individuals can expand a city’s cultural footprint by drawing like-minded people under a welcoming umbrella. Don Bayes, a savvy artisan and businessman first partnered with Carol Kajorine last November to form the home of Hide 5 Leather and Pike Lake Forge at 12 St. Paul St. in the North Core. The space is called Arts’ Gallery.

     Joyce Seppala who creates unique and fantastic clothing designs and Steve Godin who creates fine woodworks, are both in the process of setting up shop with Don and Carol. This gang also continues to work Saturday mornings at the Thunder Bay Country Market in the Dorothy Dove Building on the CLE Grounds.

      Unlike other umbrella organizations that have come and gone, Don is a sensible organizer and salesman whose discerning ability includes finding talented people who create original works of art that are folk-functional, decorative, trendy and contemporary.

    Don has begun an artistic and commercial venture sure to surprise and please these artist’s fans, and any other patron of the arts. Set up like a gallery with a couple working studios and room at the back for classes, the space has also has a retail vibe that is funky, spacious, and less cluttered than most retail shops. It is also dotted with works by other contributing artists and there are more artists to come.
     Don himself is branching out, experimenting with his leather works, taking on challenges and finding inspiration from artists around him, including Carol Kajorine, whose metal works blend both functional and fine art so well that it takes a moment to figure out whether some of her pieces are art or art and some kind of display to host jewelry or wrist bands for sale.

     Don wants to help expand Thunder Bay’s artistic development in stages, beginning with classes offered in the space to eventually developing a school. He is inspired by the success he sees in Grand Marais with the North House Folk School. This school not only assures that Grand Marais’ history remains relevant, it offers its residents a way to fully integrate into their community with hand made creations.   

     Don’s folk school concept for the North Core could be really valuable. Much like teaching someone to fish, teaching people how to make original things keeps the mind and soul healthy and can even make one a little dough. A folk school would also be a great tourist stop for Thunder Bay. Don is thinking big. Thinking big is what Thunder Bay is getting good at.  

     “We want to take culture out of the Walmart world, take us out of the consumer society and create something that is close to home and built to last,” says Don. “We want to provide value for our clients by creating something that is less commercial. I want them to come back, but not for the same item.”

     As an example of one of the artists in the space, Don has been a leatherworker for over 40 years, producing mostly one-of-a-kind creations like handware for blade blanks. He’s got Damascus skinning knives, popular to use on deer, moose, caribou - whatever. He’s begun employing chainmail for leatherwork. He makes men’s and women’s wear, from buckskins to bikinis. His corset design with cincher on the waist is similar to the fantastic steam punk style. Some works employ porcupine quills. He’s creating unique lamps that sport top hats. When pressed, he had trouble finding one overall unique item. He strolls the space pointing to various items, which stand out amongst items that are also trendy. Being the savvy businessman Don caters to both the unique and what’s hip.

     When asked about interesting customers he bursts into a laugh. “From hunters and fishermen to the BDSM society!” he declares. Don describes pieces he’s created for use in historical reenactments. “We get them all, man!”

Preserving the Past - the Archival Challenge

  A few years ago, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. a young adult of sixteen years, travelling with his parents across the United States from Thunder Bay, was soaking in all the details of the vast array of contemporary and classical art. Standing alone in front of a massive and colourful painting he noticed a long thin line of minuscule flecks of on the floor directly beneath it. He assumed it was a result of paint dust having dropped.

     But how could that be? He recognized the work as Jackson Pollock’s. The painting couldn’t be more than fifty years old. With no one around to see him, the young man held up his hand and with his thumb as the release, snapped his index finger against the painting. The canvas shook a little and thousands of tiny flecks of paint trickled down its front to join the long thin line on the floor.

     Surprised, the young man stepped back. He had just caused further damage to a painting worth millions of dollars.

     A large tour group entered the gallery space. The tour guide stood in front of another large abstract and the guide explained that unlike classical works or popular art, this painting would never grow old because the subject matter that would ordinarily date the painting didn’t exist. There were no horses with buggies, old cars, or outdated clothing fashions.

     The young adult, now standing behind the tour group spoke up, “But the paintings don’t last forever, do they?”

      “Yes, you’re right,” said the tour guide. “This museum spends over one million dollars a year on restoration. Ninety percent of that money goes to repairing works of modern art, because artists today experiment often and they use all kinds of untested materials. For instance…” She pointed to the damaged painting. “Jackson Pollock did that painting using household acrylic paints. And he painted into raw canvas, so the paint is slowly destroying the canvas, and the canvas doesn’t protect the paint from acids and small pests.”

     The young man scooted into another room where he found a woman with a small trolley with all sorts of equipment and dials. She held a chart and a magnifying glass. She was staring intently at a Rembrandt painting. The young man recognized the famous painting from a book. He approached the woman and asked her what she was doing.

     “I’m analyzing the painting to take notes and see if the cracks have gotten any wider or that the paint is getting more yellow.”

     “How long will this painting last?” asked the young man.

     “Well, this painting is almost four hundred years old. At its rate of entropy, the painting should last maybe another eight hundred years. If we take care of it. Maybe longer.”

     Within the space of ten minutes, the sixteen year old was keenly aware that he had learned a valuable lesson about art. And fortunately, that lesson would travel with him for the rest of his life.

     Last Sunday at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, archivist Sarah Janes and a professional art conservator, Meaghan Eley hosted a workshop called “Preserving Your Past for the Future.” For three hours they offered all sorts of great advice about preserving photos, letters, artifacts, and digital files. They went into detail about what most quickly deteriorates what we love: people handling art improperly, earthquakes, shipping troubles, bad storing, fire, water, pests, pollutants, light, incorrect temperature, humidity, and something we rarely take into account as being important, yet obvious, disassociation.

     This is where we forget or neglect to place value on an object by understanding its meaning and recording it somewhere, like writing the date, place, names of people, and other information on a family photograph. When loved ones die vital pieces of information about family history can be lost if it isn’t recorded somewhere.  

     All this wonderful modern technology we have isn’t a reliable alternative for recording material. Digital versions of music and photography can vanish in an instant, never to return. Methods of keeping our past aren’t much better. Our ability to understanding what is worth keeping and how to keep it changes over time. Our current Conservative Government is an example. They are causing great harm to our collective memory by cutting funding, closing libraries, and firing scientists.

     If you want to preserve your family’s memories, don’t store what is most valuable in your basement or attic. Put your valuables in strong plastic bins that seal tightly. Back up computer files with external hard-drives, keeping files in different locations, including outside your home. Get your art framed properly with museum standard materials. If you’re an artist, don’t shirk on using the best products. Store fabric materials in plastic. Ziploc bags are great, apparently.

     And get proper advice. The Internet is full of bad advice as it is a huge topic. If you want some real detail about preserving something, contact the Thunder Bay Art Gallery or the City Archives and Records for a reference. You can also try these websites: Imagepermanenceinstitute.org and www.cci-icc.gc.ca.

Decolonize Me: Six Artists at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery

     Decolonize Me, at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery takes on very humanist issues using a variety of materials and approaches; mixed media, photography, collage, video instillation, sculpture, found objects, and more. The show displays the variety of contemporary methods used to express oneself to encourage the viewer to reflect on the subjects broached within each piece. As a result it takes a bit of time to adjust from one piece to the next but the effort is certainly worthwhile.

     Heather Igloliorte, the curator of Decolonize Me (a title inspired by the film, Supersize Me) hopes the show will “make visible the history and legacies of our shared colonial past while highlighting the politics of resistance that have sustained Indigenous cultures through to the present day.”

    Underlying each of the six artist’s works is how their humanity is either taken away, reclaimed or sustained. These artists manage to do so without anger, without the attempt to shock, belittle, or condescend.

     My own personal bias enjoys a more dramatic and in your face protest art when it comes to serious disenfranchisement. If my descendants were victimized for hundreds of years and felt the reverberations of colonialism I might produce art like that of the American Expressionist movement.

     This movement was aided by the Works Progress Administration, a federal art project set up by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression at the suggestion of an artist friend and inspired by the Mexican government's dramatic support of artists that helped beautify nearly every public institution and church in Mexico.
     Before World War II when artists, many communist, sought recognition and equal treatment for women, African Americans, and other immigrants, they boldly criticized their corporate bosses, governments, the police, the military, etc, with shocking imagery.
By employing strong drawing and painting skills, with the bolder technical approaches of early modernism, they were also able to capture loving and sentimental images of motherhood, fraternity, partnership, and nature. They fought for their rights and for respect.
     The efforts showed brilliantly in their art, and it was distinctive enough to be very different from the kind of art produced before the movement and after, although there are a few individual examples of similar artists dotted throughout history, such as Daumier, Goya, Delacroix, and others.

     Immediately after the Second World War, when Roosevelt died and Harry S. Truman took over, there was a sudden shift in support for the arts. The United States government was terrified of communism spreading worldwide, especially in Europe. The CIA used the Guggenheims and the Rockefellers to fund artists and writers with a mission to make the United States appear as modern and as progressive as possible, while McCarthyism reigned within its own borders. The contrast was dramatic. While the CIA funded symphonies, operas, black musicians (large musical ensembles included), progressive literary magazines and modern art, McCarthy was part of a horrible witch hunt for communists in a country that continued to "hyper" segregate African Americans.
      Because American Expressionism honestly and brilliantly revealed to the public many of the internal problems the U.S. was having, this kind of art was not in the interest of the U.S. government, and it didn’t help that some of the artists were communist. Critics, like Clement Greenburg and Harold Rosenberg denounced the realism and subject matter of the pre-war artists. Socially conscious art was passé. The CIA toured major American abstract expressionists throughout Europe, and the CIA considered this type of propaganda the most successful method of making the Soviets appear backwards and far from progressive.
     A huge influence on the fierceness with which modern art took over in the United States was the appeal of meaninglessness in modern art. Millionaires and billionaires who previously never collected art, due mostly to its subject matter, which often criticized the intolerance and negative influence of the wealthy, suddenly shifted to a form of art that could be collectible because it was "safe" non-political art. In a 1950 Fortune Magazine article titled, "The Businessman and Picasso," wealthy collectors were told to forget about art with subject matter. And with tax incentives to collect the art, CEOs rushed into buying modern art, not for the love of it, but for the investment.

     The result is that pre-war artists were ignored and nearly forgotten. They could no longer sell their work. Some became abstract artists. Some stopped painting altogether, while others lived in obscurity till their death. More than a few committed suicide. Only recently, in the last ten years are museums and galleries searching their basements and looking for private collections of pre-war art to hang on their walls.

     The value of pre-war art can still be a valid reference point for how disenfranchised people can better express themselves with a ferocity and directness that the public could respond to that isn’t nearly as subjective or coded as our contemporary art. Or supported by millionaire and billionaires. It was a people’s art.

     However, possibly the greatest aspect of contemporary art is that it allows for any individual to creatively express themselves, as subtly or as dramatically as they like, in a contemporary gallery avoiding the pitfalls of an easy “good guys versus bad guys” scenario. Contemporary art also allows artists who don’t have traditional drawing or painting skills to make statements. Photography, collage, video projection, digital works, found object art, etc.,  – all those non-traditional skills can make great creative pieces. 

     These works may lack a hard punch, or employ beauty to celebrate a culture, but that is not what they are up to. They are six experienced and creative contemporary artists who do a great job of taking on subtleties of self-expression using contemporary methods and contemporary galleries. This is a kind of soft-pull into issues that otherwise would be hard to stomach if they were statements of anger, cries for justice, compensation and reconciliation. This is not the art of Rebecca Belmore or Pamela Masik or Lawrence Paul Yukweluptun. 

     Nigit’stil Norbert, from Yellowknife, explains how he would feel “as though he would cease to exist,” if he didn’t regain his knowledge of his “grandmother’s specific beading style,” which he lost as a result of the horrors of residential school. Norbert also creates work to criticize the romanced notions of “Indians” in dolls, memorabilia, paintings, masks, etc.

     Bear Witness (great name!) is a DJ and filmmaker who feels empowerment by altering typically racist narratives from the movies to make them his own. With sometimes eerie and powerful music, he’s created a moving video instillation.

     A bit of the trickster is involved in Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s work. She sets up a computer so that anyone can get their own Treaty Card, poking fun at databases and government rules as to how and who is determined to be native.

     Without malice, Barry Pottle contrasts the inhumanity and the human side of a formerly tagged and numbered people. The faces of First Nations people, smiling and surviving provide a dramatic contrast with a numbering system that has an association to Nazi atrocities.

     Sonny Assu wants us to reflect on how museums and private collections are made up of the remnants of other societies in order to make the wealthy appear knowledgeable and worldly, when really only the aesthetics are appreciated and not the culture.

     Jordan Bennett mixes pop culture with more insightful statements using mixed media to layer and contrast images. He is able to take those who were formally ghettoized in our culture and replace them with our Prime Ministers and show how they too can be “pop-culturalized” and sent to the ghetto.

     This show is more personal, subtler and a little more complex than the dramatic images of the American Expressionist movement. As Heather Igloriorte points out, this show avoids the viewpoint of “perpetrators or victims….” and gives us more to reflect upon.

Accosting the Ordinary: Elizabeth Buset at the Definitely Superior Art Gallery

Elizabeth Buset’s four large realist paintings in Gallery two for a show titled, Accosting the Ordinary, are immediate hits. Most everyone can appreciate the incredible amount of time spent on each piece and most everyone likes paintings of representational objects.

     However, unlike a still life or a typical floral, Buset chooses subjects and isolates them to make a philosophical statement. With limited referents the paintings work to inhibit subjectivity (your opinion) to direct you more easily to their philosophical subject. If not, you may at least feel a sense of unease.

     Buset completed her dissertation for an MFA last year at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, having received an Ambassadorial scholarship and studying under the guidance of a controversial Finnish artist, Teemu Maki, famous for killing a cat and then masturbating on it in a gallery in Helsinki.

     Anywaaaaaay, Buset got her HBFA and a teaching degree at Lakehead University. As well as being an artist, Buset supply teaches and visits schools with the Learning Through the Arts program.

     Regarding her paintings, “It’s a huge physical process,” states Buset. “Some of the paintings take me over 700 hours to do. When you’re using a brush that’s just over a millimeter wide, it takes a while.” She admits she doesn’t enjoy the process so much, but loves when comes together.

     And the works are very impressive. The attention to detail, composition, colour, and ultimately the underlying reason behind such attention make for real eye-grabbers. This kind of realistic approach waxed and waned over the centuries. The Dutch golden age of painting, the pop-art movement in the 1960s (Audrey Flack and others) and the current Hyper Realism movement in England are all influences on Buset’s work.

         The canvas oil paintings were completed in Finland and shipped here. Each depicts a singular object or theme, or dog on a white background. Buset explains that the large scale helps people to reexamine the ordinary, and that the works are meant to find meaning in the mundane and pose questions about the role of consumer society in our every day lives.

     The work called, Paint Fan, contains 960 distinct colours. Buset explains that the painting was inspired by stories of people who bring paint swatches to galleries in order to find artwork to match their furniture.

     “It’s about the commercialization of art and looking at art as décor and its aesthetic beauty as opposed to a form of philosophy.”

     Buset likes that people will connect to the work, and think upon it. Knowing that the paintings take a great deal of time, she points out, causes people to reflect more on the work. So although the technique can become the subject, Buset also believes that all art is inherently political. Buset quotes the mysterious communist playwright, Bertolt Brecht, “Art is not a mirror to reflect society, but a hammer to reshape it.”

     Although ambitious, Buset is still on an exploratory learning curve; eagerly looking to see if the time and thought she puts into her paintings has an effect and if it’s all worth it. So, although she doesn’t expect to reshape society in any dramatic way, she does believe, more realistically, “You only need an audience of one.”

     Elizabeth Buset will have a solo show in 2015 at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. Buset is working to exhibit locally and internationally. 

Jean Marshall: Surface and Symbol, at the Definitely Superior Art Gallery

Jean Marshall’s work was on prominent display for a solo exhibition at the Ontario Crafts Council’s gallery in Toronto last year. The show, curated by Suzanne Morrissette, called Surface and Symbol is now at the Definitely Superior Art Gallery till February 15. As is Buset’s work.

      Jean Marshall is modest about her accomplishments and very dedicated to her work. Receiving her HBA in Native Studies from Trent University in 2000, she has produced a great deal of work in the years since. Amongst her many textile and bead works Marshall has incorporated birch bark, porcupine quills, and pine needles. Her work is sometimes collaborative and created amongst a group of people, but she works most often in her studio in Fort William First Nation.

    Marshall’s works are diverse self-expressive works and craft pieces, reflecting both her creative abilities and knowledge of materials, blending contemporary approaches with traditional functions. Care, attention, and craftsmanship appear in all her works, and are rooted to Marshall’s family history and her “mother’s home community of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug… a fly-in community located approximately 600 km north of Thunder Bay.” (Quote from OCC Catalogue.)

     Much of our thinking about what is appropriate for a gallery space is sometimes culturally biased towards works that deal primarily in aesthetics and self-expression rather than traditional social function.

     Historically in European culture there was no need for gallery spaces because works of art performed a great variety of social functions with little focus on self-expression. Collections of art in galleries and museums began to appear when the understanding of the traditional functions began to fade. In tandem, expressing oneself also became more socially acceptable.

     Today indigenous populations around the world don’t feel a great need for galleries because their art is intrinsically linked to their traditions, often still in practice. In Ghana, for instance, stools are symbols of kingship that are brought out of hiding and washed ceremoniously when a new king is selected. Then the stools return to hiding. This process, and rarity, makes the stools much more symbolically significant. The stools are at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of symbols for some Ghanaian tribes.

     But in a gallery, for all to see on white walls, without understanding or feeling the connected emotional history of the stools and other objects, the objects become “art,” objects appreciated for the aesthetics.

     This is one reason why Jean Marshall’s work, in a gallery setting or anywhere, is as appropriate as any other work. They can be celebrated as symbols of a culture, and be self-expressive at the same time. Her works can inspire others to keep traditions alive and to help us all reflect on the past and what could be lost. It’s also very beautiful.

     All three artists were very grateful for funding from the Ontario Art’s Council. The financial assistance that lead to the production of the works by all three artists combined for one solid and well attended show, sure to encourage and further the creative efforts of these artists and inspire others.