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Rewind: Stephen Andrews/Rae Johnson

The exhibition of works from Stephen Andrews' 1993-94 series Excerpts from Sonnets and a new body of paintings by Rae Johnson entitled Dream Girl, at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto, provided unexpected comparisons. Excerpts from Sonnets includes checkerboarded grey-scaled, grid-formatted paintings on paper and newspaper crossword puzzles that are portraits of Andrews’ friends and his deceased partner. Johnson’s Dream Girl consists of loose, painterly oil sketches of her eleven-year-old daughter. The common ground here is photography and digital imagery: both are based upon a re-gridding and drawing/painting of the photographic image.

Johnson has transposed digital photos to canvas by a numbered grid system pencilled onto the surface. These whimsical, expressive portraits of an adolescent girl, subject matter reminiscent of Balthus or Sally Mann, show Johnson’s daughter seated on a chair surrounded by a successive variety of still-life props—tables, flowers, etc. "I recorded the corporeal image of my daughter Joslyn," Johnson writes in an artist’s statement, "to act as a vessel for the idea of awakening womanhood...these paintings are made from a woman’s point of view with an acute awareness of their brutal context—a society that routinely degrades our daughters."

Both Johnson and Andrews approach personal subject matter through the most abstracting and depersonalizing kinds of representation. In much of Excerpts from Sonnets, what were once photographs are now patchworks of chunky grey scales that obliterate detail. In Johnson’s paintings, traces of the pencilled grid system show through, and the brushwork dissolves into loose skeins of paint. While a press release for the exhibition states that there is a resultant distortion in Johnson’s work, the paintings don’t appear that distorted, or any more so than the normal distortion that is the inevitable result of painting. What they do reveal, marvellously, is that the process of vision—of both viewer and artist—and its increasing digitalization, is an ongoing act of construction and investment. Aware of their social context—images of adolescent sexuality have long been a staple of art and, more recently, Internet porn sites—Dream Girl is a reminder of the tenuously arbitrary nature of images in culture.

If Johnson’s paintings move backward from an illusion to its digital underpinnings, Andrews’ work revels in a digital dissolve where intricate components of media imagery are enlarged and painstakingly marked out. In Alex Walking Away, the painted combination of square grids provides the minimal visual information for illusionism. The figure, based upon a photograph, is abstracted to the point where Alex becomes a barely discernable arrangement of squares. What is here an eye-squinting exercise in visuality is, in another work, a large grey-scale painting—simply an abstract arrangement with no image to speak of. In his newspaper crossword puzzles, Andrews has used the puzzles as a gridding system that, when coloured in, form hazy portraits of friends, to whom they are dedicated. The works are part of his ongoing fascination with the function of images and their uses.

Spring 2000

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