Two new exhibitions at Arts Underground
Two new exhibitions at Arts Underground feature beautiful artworks that reach towards a sense of place. This kind of reaching provides interesting reasons to reflect about our highly-mobile society.
In the Focus Gallery, the one you walk into first, Anick Fernandez’ solo exhibition entitled Roots brings together copper, paper, printmaking and sculpture, to gesture towards holding on.
Fernandez assembles four small sculptures in stone, copper and driftwood. The rest of the show consists of paper-based works framed behind glass.
In the sculptures, I find the use of driftwood evocative of a sense of dislocation that is common but not ubiquitous in our contemporary culture. Driftwood is wood found far from its roots. Preserved in the salty water of the sea, shaped by the waves, currents can bring it to distant shores.
Fernandez pairs the driftwood with heavy stone bases and entwines them with copper wire. Smaller stones, coated in copper leaf, play their parts. The copper-wire roots and the heaviness of stone bring the driftwood home.
In the works on paper, Fernandez plays abstractly with images of tree trunks: tiny, broken painted rootlike lines that look like stitches; and circular motifs, often applied with copper leaf and ranging from about 1.5 millimetres in diameter to approximately penny-sized.
Based in Whitehorse now, Fernandez was born in Mexico City. She has lived in Mexico, Spain and Canada. In Spain, she studied etching and aquatint. Wanting to use materials with lower toxicity, she has moved towards collography, a form of printmaking where items are glued to a rigid substrate to make a plate from which to print.
Talking with Arts Underground staff, I understand that in some of the pieces, she inked and printed her laminate floor for its wood-grain texture.
These works seem to come out of a desire for rootedness—for a sense of home. Fernandez evokes this sense with an elegant playfulness. In Roots Connect Us All, Fernandez brings together monotype—a print where you paint a surface and print from that, just once—collage, and acrylic. Among tree trunks, her finely-painted broken lines rendered in acrylic, which look so much like stitches, twine the work together.
An intimate exhibition of hand-woven textiles, with photographic images applied to them, draws you into the Edge Gallery, a smaller room at which you arrive after you walk through the Focus Gallery. A Passing Glimpse evokes the transitory nature of art created in artist residencies. Soft-edged images question the nature of memory.
Dawson-based artist Miriam Behman works from images she photographed during two northern residencies. One took place in Eagle Plains, up the Dempster Highway in the Yukon; the other in Svalbard, Norway.
Behman’s exhibition consists of a series of handwoven textiles of about the same size, mostly about 8×10 inches. They hang from their silken warp strands from a wooden slat, with their warp threads hanging as fringes along the bottom.
Behman has transferred images onto her textiles using a disperse dye technique. For this method, the artist uses a special printer that prints with dyes. They print the images onto paper and then transfer the images to the cloth with heat. Behman uses an iron.
The silken warp threads resist these dyes, so they are only absorbed by the weft, which is polyester. This partial uptake is how Behman achieves her soft and almost grainy images.
A few of the pieces depict snowy mountain peaks. Contrast between dark rock and white snow makes these images read well through the disperse dye technique Behman uses to apply the images to her handwoven surfaces.
Other images depict people in the residencies, singly or in groups, encountering the northern landscapes, making memories during these brief visits.
My Companions shows a pair of hands, possibly gathering berries, above what looks like a lichen-rich surface. I look carefully at the hands … Are those red bits berries? I can’t quite tell.
Cottongrass is one of my favourites. In the background, soft-edged colour barely describes grey clouds, distant blue mountains warming to violet, then closer expanses of a warmer yellow-green. I feel like I recognize this landscape from my own time up in the Tombstones, though I am not sure whether this is Svalbard or Eagle Plains.
In the foreground, on a darker green, the dyes evoke a mass of cottonweed with similar economy of means. It delights me that the cottonweed tops, being white, are actually evoked by the absence of ink. The naked textile represents what this piece depicts. The inks just make the context for us to read it like that.
During my first few visits to the Yukon, I remember feeling this way. I remember returning to my studio and making a piece I called So what if I remember what I barely saw? In the end, I chose to live here.
Behman makes her home in Dawson, but this challenge of the practice of residencies persists. Residencies provide interesting opportunities for artists, but they also propagate a kind of aesthetic tourism. Behman’s work seems to challenge this practice, asking what can be remembered from such a brief visit. Still, the warmth and commitment of her handwoven textile, at this intimate scale, draws us in.
Both exhibitions continue until Saturday March 28. Arts Underground is open Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
