Rewind: Jeannie Thib
Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto
Jeannie Thib's exhibition "Flourish" featured large wooden panels printed with decorative patterned fields. The project extended Thib's explorations of historical vegetal motifs while also manifesting her commanding graphic sensibility. Arguably the work engages in a culturally dangerous operation in appearing to propose a celebration of the beautiful. Yet that very aspect is the basis of a subtle yet cunning strategy by which the artist draws attention to conundrums that seem to lie dormant like an antimacassar on an overstuffed chair.
To read what is going on, it is important to pay heed to Thib's material approach. She uses printmaking to argue for the efficacy of the traditional, but in usefully aberrant ways. There are intersecting references to commercial printing techniques of bygone eras (the wallpaper and textile printing methods of the Arts and Crafts Movement) within a deployment of contemporary approaches to silkscreening. This relationship posits a mere sidestep from everyday commodity production to produce another potentially more complex commodity: the mechanically reproduced fine art object. Rather than offering a critical gesture that relies on parody, Thib makes an insertion into material culture that is but a slight remove from the material object to which it alludes and is a work of art at the same time.
The five multi-panel pieces that constitute the exhibition involve black floral patterns on wood, delicately and whimsically overprinted with tiny coloured diagrams. These elements could be mistaken for botanical drawings but they are actually based on microscopic images of viruses. Their inclusion is arresting, even more so if one considers them in relation to another anomaly in the works. The artist has also printed a scalloped border at the top and sides of the wooden panels to mimic the look of curtains as they are hung from and attached to the edges of a window frame.
The conceit, which references medieval fresco painting, is remarkable for its ability to further the tension between the centre and the periphery of the work, between the patterned and punctuated interior space and the edge that gives way to what lies beyond. This relationship is an allegory through which the artist presents the possibility of simultaneously confirming and denying a dangerous presence. Viral images are caught safely and prettily amidst a field of flowers, but the field itself exists within the world—a world of penetrable bodies. However lovely, Thib's delicate curtains, while they veil and hide, also display what threatens.
Spring 2004
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