Margaretha Bootsma
"Margaretha Bootsma" by Rebecca Fairbairn, Spring 2007, pp. 108-09
In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s apocalyptic documentary film warning of Western civilization’s demise through human environmental stupidity, the former American vice-president states emphatically that doubt is our biggest enemy. According to Gore, it is doubt about the frailty of the environment that will cause our fall. We turn into believers or nonbelievers relative to whether we accept his premise.
Margaretha Bootsma’s exhibition “City Limits” places her firmly in the camp of the believers. Her canvases stand as imagined testimony to the state of the world if we fail to see the writing on the wall.
Her work endeavours to be part of that writing. At first glance, Major Destination offers the opportunity to meditate on the regenerative power of water to cleanse and restore. Brilliant colours, applied as Pollock-like drips and spills on the surface of photographic imagery, seduce the eye and lure the viewer with the promise of desires fulfilled: desire for beauty, desire for painting’s ability to calm and restore harmony to an unharmonious world, desire for a seaside view onto a limitless expanse of ocean. But a more realistic consideration of the chartreuse, sulphurous yellow and Pepto-Bismol pink in the seascape arouses one’s suspicions that all is not as it should be in the natural world. This acidic mix of acidic colour is something downright noxious. And the presence of a distant figure immersed to the waist in water in Disappearing World seems to invite the possibility that, unlike the person in the painting, who appears oblivious to the surroundings, we might realize that seawater doesn’t naturally include the ingredients for this particular unsavoury recipe.
The works in “City Limits” point literally to wrong turns. Traffic signage pasted to the paintings’ surfaces suggests that for all of the behavioural constraints such signage implies—warnings to slow down, or of hazards ahead, or the need to merge—we nonetheless ignore more significant signs, like the colour of our water, sunset smog and skylines of industrial monoliths. The signage itself is complicit with one of the root problems—car culture—and our lack of success in navigating our way out of it.
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