Rewind: Robert Houle/John Abrams
Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen Sound
Canadian identity is deeply entrenched in ideas of land and landscape. Canadiana is full of images of loons, lakes and vast spaces vacant of people. We drown in images of Niagara Falls. The Group of Seven looms. It is therefore apt when one walks into the exhibition "Landmark," featuring the work of Robert Houle and John Abrams, that one passes through a room filled with Tom Thomsons work in a gallery named for him. The exhibition, which originated at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, is a thought-provoking juxtaposition of paintings that brings issues of land, history and memory to the foreground.
Houle contributes three works and each is made up of several elements; including oil on canvas, digital photographic prints drymounted on Masonite and text. The surface of the canvas at first appears abstract and minimal, but then reveals a rich layering of paint where streaks, drips and marks become prominent. The photographic prints appear separate from, flush with and in the middle of these large painted surfaces; each pictures arrowheads within red and yellow blocks that signal caution. Text appears twice in the form of ionized aluminum letters: once as a large "X" and once spelling the now-infamous "Ipperwash."
Abrams exhibits two triptychs, Canadian History Trilogy and Canadian Landscape Combine. In contrast to Houles abstracts, Abrams images are landscape-based and figurative. Trilogy consists of a loose interpretation of Robert Harriss Fathers of Confederation (1883) flanked by a flying skeleton on a smoking battlefield and a looming icebergflames lick the bottom of the Fathers section. Combine is made up of two sets of 20 small paintings, hung on either side of a large-scale image of Niagara Falls painted in muted tones. Iconic and emptied of figures, the small paintings underscore the power of the Niagara Falls image and question the ideas of landscape and identity that are associated with it. The 40 small paintings of rivers, icebergs, cliffs and industrial scenes offer a variety of perspectives from which to form a larger notion of landscape than any single, simplifying example.
Houle denotes both specific places and events as well as interior landscapes. The horizontal streaks in Ancestor recall the prairie Houle comes from, the arrowheads claim space as signs of his ancestry. The five thin lines that run down one side of the canvas look like the markings of a claw and are a personal mark of painting as well as tribal travel markings. Kanehsatake X and Ipperwash commemorate Oka and the shooting of Dudley George, events in recent Native Canadian history, and point to continuing strife over land claims as well as Houles personal belief that land is the key to identity. In Ipperwash, when the surface takes on a watery layering, the viewer contemplates the paint as showing something beneath, a catching of the truth.
The combined work of Houle and Abrams raises ideas about the simplicity and fabrication of identity and history within this country. Working within painting, the artists disrupt notions of landscape traditions. Abrams usurps known images; Houle works with multiplicity and makes his smooth surfaces resonate with depth and spiritual colour. Together, the artists expose the gaps in our history. They present the more complex truths of tragedy and loss, of disregard and faded memory.
Summer 2002
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