Fantastic Threadworks at the Thunder Bay Museum

An incredible little show of selected works representing twenty guilds from across Ontario with nearly a thousand talented members is on view on the Thunder Bay Museum’s third floor. Titled, Threadworks 2013, the show is comprised of needlework each taking on the theme of Water. The show was professionally juried and the only reason there are no Thunder Bay artists represented is because they didn’t enter. Tich! Tich! Get your act together! However, this show has so inspired our local members that they are determined to enter submissions for the next show in 2015.

     It’s become a bit too easy to be an artist today, and when your typical fine art show relies on the subjective and viewers search for relevance and meaning, the amount of time spent creating the work will come into play in a big way. It’s one way, a weak way, to determine its value.

     This happens too when the work is sentimental schlock, shocking, downright ugly, or entirely self expressive. We naturally want to think the artist has the best intentions, but it’s hard to overcome feelings of resentment when we see works hanging on a gallery wall with a price tag that beats the few hours spent creating it with Wall Street zeal that screams – rip off!

     So, of all the art shows you might see this year, this is one that will be hard to beat for the combined amount of effort, skill, knowledge, and heart. Even if your knowledge of needlework is limited, and you can’t appreciate the amount of time invested, you can still appreciate the beauty and the many themes therein, including the overly sentimental pieces.

     Overall the majority of works are contemporary and brilliant, in both beauty and execution. The show is comprised of professionally crafted fabric, quilts, machine work, needlework, free motion works, and most involve mixed media and mixed techniques.

     So much so that two of our local guild members, Karen Boote and Cathy Ridley spent a great deal of time discussing each piece, returning to several pieces a number of times. They were entranced by the variety.

     When asked if they had a favourite, they couldn’t come up with a single work.

 “It would be hard for me to pick one,” says Cathy. She motions towards a work called Sirens, and although she doesn’t like its background she finds the freeform workmanship to be incredible. “It’s stitched so precisely but so creatively.”

She was also very impressed with the folding involved in the shell piece entitled Nautilus by Helen Gordon. They were both impressed by the occasional subtle hand painting and with the knowledge that, “None of these works start with a standard design of anything,” says Cathy.

     Karen had her nose practically pressed to the work, Cellular Aqueducts by Mary Cope. Karen wondered if the cloth had been dipped in dye, and whether rice paper was used, mesh, or mulberry paper.

     A good number of works involve the use of free motion, which involves dropping the feed-dogs on a sewing machine so that the cloth can be moved around by hand. This can take a great deal of skill. “It helps if you have a glass of wine,” states Cathy.

    Cathy and Karen were very inspired by the show. “Looking at this work online does nothing for the pieces,” declares Karen.

     Threadworks 2013 is on view at the Thunder Bay Museum till the end of June.

Lakehead University Retrograduate Exhibition at the Definitely Superior Art Gallery

     Nudity and nacho chips combined at the opening of the Lakehead University Retrograd Show to three packed gallery spaces. Stephanie Celine and Kristin Jorgenson aimed to poke fun at our society’s obsessive love of snack food with a work performed by Stephanie and Reed Thomas. The brave souls disrobed to hop into a tub and pop open bags to cover themselves with thousands of Dorito’s Nachos chips. Brave, not only because the performers were naked, but also because those damn addictive cheesy chips have sharp little edges. Death by Doritos! If you like nachos, there are still lots of them available in the bathtub and all over the gallery floor. The show packs a crunch. :)

      The Definitely Superior Gallery hasn’t had such a dramatic performance piece for a while. Performance pieces can wedge themselves into one’s mind as much as a great art show.

     And there’s lots to like about the current show, set in all three-gallery spaces, comprised of a long list of young and talented creative people, many who may become major artistic contributors to our city. A few works are certainly worth obtaining for collector’s walls. If you want to invest in art, or begin the great and respected hobby of buying art and being involved in the community, here’s a good place to start.

     However, you won’t find the standard landscape, still life, or portrait. There are lots of portraits, but most have a tilt, a playful twist, as do the landscapes and still life. Kristin Jorgenson’s playful Bountiful Harvest is a slightly typical portrait of a house, but with a big wedge of pink frosted cake sitting in the front yard. Painted in a naïve manner one suspects its creator, not a professional, got distracted. Since we know the painter has a university degree, and is a better painter as evidenced by more painterly and detailed examples throughout the show, we know she’s poking fun at our indulgences and making a statement about easily accessible art at the same time. Art too, can be like cake. Or Doritos.

     Eli Castellan’s piece, Mental Traffic, continues the theme. This time it’s a gaunt soul starved semi-human who can’t escape the magnetic pull of the television. The figure’s body becomes an alien-twisted anorexic, with arms reaching for an alternative from the soul-sucking world from which he can’t pull his mind away. This deceptively simple piece is fraught with meaning and has as much a cognitive pull as Robert Crumb’s comic piece, Keep on Trucking. The image sticks in the mind because it’s emblematic of a human condition for many people, like our addiction to Doritos Nachos. A miniature version of Eli’s sculpture would be a good present for every child at Christmas. Just a Grinchy thought.

     There are also great abstract pieces like Scott Poluyko’s Rauschenberg-like piece, Aggression, and Rebecca Taddeo’s very red yet composed untitled mixed media canvas work.

     There are wonderfully crazy surreal pieces, like Melissa Miller’s, Awakening, with its bizarre gooey drips floating between teeth and an eye, and Michelle Kivi’s assemblages of recognizable imagery for her Northern pieces: Routes and Commute.

     There are thoughtful emotionally fraught personal pieces like Viki Ludmark’s, Hereditary Relapse, a bold statement as if seen through the very liquid that creates the addiction.

     The show is comprised of twenty different graduates, all worth checking out. Please go to www.definitelysuperior.com for a list of the artists. The Lakehead University Retrograduate Exhibition is on till May 31^st.

Into the Woods with George Raab

Feelings of plenty, a sense of awe, and mimetic replacement for what we love and need in our lives are a few of the standard functions provided by art. You can probably find “mimetic replacement” in your house. It can be seen in wallpaper, carpets, household objects, bed spreads, teenage posters, paintings, and your curtains.

     Take curtains for example. Are yours depicting fruit or leaves or trees or butterflies or birds? These curtains help to block the view of five months of winter while simultaneously providing imagery that reminds you that spring and summer will return. This kind of imagery can also give you feelings of plenty; similar to the feelings you get when you view a fridge or pantry full of food.

     So it is no surprise that Sharon Godwin, the director of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, got the response she did from a patron when asked what she thought of the work of George Raab. The patron loved the show, but even with all the artistry involved, she didn’t like the few images of snow.

     The patron’s reaction may have involved more than simply being tired of seeing snow. George Raab’s work reveals a personal love for the peaceful and somber moments one can have standing alone in a forest. We share his view of real places, places we rarely visit, bogs, marshes, and lonely landscapes that are subtly interpreted to create a sense of mystery and awe, yet can make a big impression. For all its beauty, being alone in a forest is not for everyone. The sense of awe and depth in a world with no paths or footprints can also illicit worries and fear. It can depend on your personal experience and imagination as well.

     Unlike a lot of art that is deliberately flat, the perspective depth in George’s work is a powerful quality, furthering the duality of beauty and the unknown. The mix of drawing, painting, etching, aquatint and the photographic process that Raab employs make it difficult to know how much interpretation was involved, so the places become both real and imaginary, further creating a sense of wonder.

     It’s also nice that after five months of winter you can go to a gallery and get a little “mimetic replacement.” Visiting the gallery a bit like going for a walk in the woods.  

     George Raab employs both traditional techniques, the kind Rembrandt used and modern photography. Raab might start by drawing an image on a clear film using pen and ink as opposed to drawing directly on a plate with etching tools. The photo itself might be altered on a computer using Photoshop, employing a program to create a softness he enjoys. The photographs are always his own.

     Raab commented during his talk last week that digital art wasn’t taken seriously as an art form for the longest time. “But now, digital art is as perfectly a valid form of self-expression as painting is.”

     Far from digital, yet very detailed is the Intaglio process. Intaglio is a traditional process where the basic image is burnt or drawn into a zinc or copper plate. Ink is rubbed into the areas of the plate bitten by the acids, allowed to do so by either the drawing or the photo emulsion. The plate goes through a press with wet paper on its surface forcing the ink and paper to combine. Peeling away the paper from the plate results in a negative image that becomes the art, reproducible, generally 15 to 25 images for an edition, sometimes up to 50 images, which explains the numbering system you see penciled beneath the images.

     Raab spent a couple years working with the process searching for a personal style, something he says, “has atmosphere with stillness and peace.” He wasn’t looking for spectacular landscapes and drama. “Some of the images are ethereal, not morose. There’s something very evocative about some of them.”

     George Raab is also a rare bird in that he’s been a full time artist for forty years, managing his own career without relying on the gallery system and managing to represent himself, occasionally spending months away from his art to do the office work required to make sales and organize shows. “It’s a big schlep,” he says, “but it’s worth it.”

     He also commented that he was tired of subsidizing galleries. Galleries generally take 50% commission along with charging for the framing services. Raab hosts his own art shows to sell his work and does his own picture framing, which is excellent, by the way. As for the art, he obsesses over the images, and the images are so detailed and the process so finicky that he produces only about eight new images a year.

     Raab says submitting his work to public galleries is a bit of a crapshoot because there are juries involved. But he’s been very successful at showing his work despite the representational nature of the work, less contemporary in approach and more popular. Although he does play with contemporary approaches as with the hanging Mylar piece in which patrons can make themselves disappear.

     “I thought it would be nice to have something other than another flat object on the wall,” he says. However, Raab’s imagery is far from flat. There’s a lot of depth to be seen in his work.

     George Raab’s show, Into the Woods, is at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery till June 15.

3 Shows at DEFSUP Gallery: Adam Makarenko, Amy Swartz, Dr. Bob Chaudhuri's Newly Collected Works.

A quality some artists have could be compared to obsessive-compulsive disorder, which includes a manic desire to repeat actions and creatively arrange objects. The Definitely Superior Art Gallery is hosting three shows, two of which feature artists dedicated to detail in an obsessive manner than is very intriguing, uniquely artistic and definitely worth checking out. Also worthy of your ocular pleasure is the continuing bulging collection of a local obsessive art lover Dr. Bob Chaudhuri.

     Former Atikokan/Thunder Bay resident and now aspiring famous Toronto artist, Adam Makarenko in his show Miniature Frontiers goes in for mimicking reality in much the same way that train hobbyists do with miniature landscapes, except that Makarenko’s miniature dioramas are most often a means to an end, a photograph. One particular photograph, of bees, was so intriguing it kick-started his career, winning him a major prize.

     Gallery director, David Karasiewicz, describes Adam as a modern renaissance man, which sounds like an oxymoron, but accurately describes Adams multiple ventures into sculpture, photography, painting, music, and video. His work is a blend of traditional art, fine art, and popular art. Most artists would be happy with success in one field, but Adam has the ability to do them all well and to combine them successfully into music videos, one of which was nominated for a Juno Award. The results are quite beautiful and often create a wonderful sense of awe by way of contrast of large and small scales. The images make you question what is real and at what scale that reality might exist.  You are even encouraged to take your own photographs of one particular piece.

     More artist than entomologist, Amy Swartz, a Toronto-based visual artist is less interested in the insects she uses as a base for her subject matter and more in how the insects can be used to stir our emotions to create an eerie reality that at times seems cruel, yet humorous.

     If you’ve seen the disturbing ending of the 1958 movie The Fly, where Vincent Price’s character spots a fly with the miniaturized human head and arm of his friend Andre who screams, “Help me! Help me!” that may give you a sense of the tragic that Amy Swartz can stir up in your mind. 

     Then think of an army of flies with human heads. Or imagine a crowd of insects protesting or butterflies with little animal heads. Just as popular culture in the form of B-movies or CSI can make great moral statements using fantastical and depraved concepts, so can contemporary artists, even on a smaller scale with a lower budget.        

     This is what Amy does well, but with a twist. The imagery she creates has the feeling of intellectual weight because her work is displayed in glass cases, the formal setting of an entomologist’s collection as found in an insectarium or museum. The sense of eerie is enhanced by the scientific quality of the pieces. The cold and almost heartless world of display cases contains the bizarre and funny world of insects on parade or protesting or fighting or just being plain weird for weirdness sake. The sacrifice the insects made to have their bodies indignantly altered seem more worthwhile as a result of the artistic and scientific mix.

     Dr. Bob Chaudhuri has been collecting worthwhile works of contemporary art for many years. This show reveals the additions to his collection. Works by acclaimed Canadian artists with different approaches to image making make for a unique show that allows those of us who don’t get to the bigger galleries to see what the contemporary world of fine art has to offer. The mix includes an etching, paintings, collage, acrylic on deer skin, a watercolour, sculpture, graphite, ink, photography, and ceramics.

     Jen Dyke’s “Sales are Down” is a humorous collage which is unusual for it’s use of perspective, achieving a story telling quality. Greg Pace’s ceramic piece titled “Music” as a whole might be considered “art,” but each individual piece is as traditional in its function as any plate or mug. However the work is incredibly beautiful all the same, certainly worthy of being called art.

     The paintings on drums by David Wilson and our own Christian Chapman, who also has a very cool print in the collection from a new series of works, titled Bezhig, bring First Nations voices to the show.

     Wonderful drawings by Dougall Graham for a piece called Marijuana Seven cleverly contrast a quality of sexiness to dull instructions on how to make joints. The drawings looks like Don Draper’s sketches for a pitch to create advertising when smoking pot might become legal one day.

     Get out to see this shows quickly as the last day to view them is the 26^th this month. After you’ve seen them, you’ll certainly have something to talk about.

2014 Bologna Children's Book Fair: Opportunities in a Faraway Land

   The Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy is an annual gathering of children’s book publishers from around the world. Their primary goal is to sell rights for their best books to foreign publishers in order to have the books translated and printed in other countries. Some publishers, especially Canadian publishers, are not interested in buying rights to foreign books. Whether buying or selling, publishers split the proceeds. The author and illustrator also get royalties out of the deal, although usually less than from books sold in their own country.

     My last publisher sold the rights to my first picture book, Spacesnake, to Korea with no contract and no discussion. I got a cheque for a thousand dollars, apparently a buyout fee, and ten copies in Korean. To this day, despite going through a lawyer, I still have no idea how many copies were printed, how many sold, and what was involved in the deal. This was one of many infractions that made it easy to get the rights back for my three previously published books.

     The last time I came to Bologna I approached publishers as an illustrator. This was four years ago when two weeks were added to my trip due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. No planes were flying due to the ash in the air. I didn’t get any work out of that trip, but I met other illustrators who did, mostly Italian. For me it was a real learning experience. And it was great to see how bookstores in Italy are more popular than Starbucks in Canada.

    Last week I attended the Bologna Book Fair, but this time as a publisher, with a mission to sell the rights to my books to other countries. There were hundreds of publishers to choose from. Booths were filled with agents, publishers and their assistants, who spoke with prospective publishers, authors, and illustrators, usually in English. The illustrators were easy to spot. They carried large black portfolios. I had a heavy little leather bag filled with my books.

Illustrator's Wall

     With the current state of the publishing industry in Canada being in eternal crisis, with distribution being a major hassle in such a big country as ours, and now that Chapters/Indigo is officially a department store, it helps writers and illustrators to look beyond our borders. In my case the results could be fantastic, and could serve as an example of why it’s important to publish your own work rather than rely on a Canadian publisher.

      Because I own the rights to my books, I can do what I want with the stories, the characters, etc. I don’t have to sell universal rights to a Canadian publisher if I chose one day to work with one. In Bologna I met with, Beatrix Martin-Vidal, an author who doesn’t sell the universal rights of her stories to publishers.

Argentinian Author/Artist Isol
Winner of the Astrid Lingren Award

     “Many publishers are lazy, or they want too much control of your work,” she says. “They buy the universal rights but don’t sell the rights to other countries. I can make more money selling the rights myself.” And she is quite successful at doing so.

     I had six books to pitch to publishers, three of which I printed last year, draining my bank account of carefully saved $30,000.00. I’m a martyr for a cause, one reason I don’t own a car. But Thunder Bay has been really good to me and I recovered the printing cost of my first self-published book, The Love Ant, within a year. And it was a real confidence boost. Thanks Thunder Bay!

Australian Writer/Artist Bruce Whatley!

     In Bologna, the Germans screwed up their faces in disgust when flipping through my books, except for Spacesnake, the most modern looking of the bunch, apparently. The French were cool, but one French publisher is interested in two of my books, Night Wall and The Boy from the Sun. I met with a Quebec publisher and they were so enthusiastic that all of my books could be translated into French for distribution in Quebec fairly soon. But the best reactions came from China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. In fact the agents and publishers gave me a profound look of surprise. Not only was I the author and illustrator, but the publisher as well. They would repeat questions like, “This is your book?” or “You did the design yourself?” or “You published this?” or “You did the pictures too?” And they all wanted me to send pdfs of every book, enthusiastically handing me their business cards. I was a little taken aback by their interest.

     Of course, this doesn’t mean that anything really promising could come from this, and I have to be careful not to get conned, but it’s certainly a great first step. And hell, if I can do it, there are lots of talented writers and artists in Thunder Bay who can do it too.

[Message to fellow Canadians! If you can get your EU Passport - with your parents or grandparents born in Europe, go for it! Email the embassy of your parents birth and get the details/application. Opportunities in Canada in the arts are diminishing due to our current Conservative Government. Don't be fooled by the EU stereotypes dished out by right wing nuts. Europe is a far better place than most Canadian media or politicians and economists will admit to.]