Aidan Urquhart
"Aidan Urquhart" by Amy Karlinsky, Winter 2007, p. 110
Aidan Urquhart’s exhibition “Lost Boy” offers up a decade’s worth of work by this self-acknowledged “art terrorist.” The show, nestled into a triangular space at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, seems like Honest Ed meets Greg Curnoe, meets General Idea, meets commercial art stylizations, meets the copy button in a nightmare regression to perpetual childhood. It’s a childhood characterized by bright, even irritating, colours, clean lines and object relations. From quilted outfits for various personas to an extended musing on home to collaged paintings, multiples of the artist as a toddler and a sampling of fax art, representation is at issue, and it ain’t no pretty picture.
Serial repetition of symbols such as targets (an homage to the painter Claude Tousignant), the toddler (a simplified line-drawing portrait of the artist in sleepers), the mad dog (unbridled capitalist come-ons) and gourd heads (with their heightened emotional address) is just a start. In the apex of the gallery sits an interactive area, Fun with Physiognomy! In this work, visitors can colour, destroy, edit or amend photocopies of the 70 named physiognomies that Urquhart has developed in an extended riff on the history of the pseudo-science of physiognomy. Are you feeling enraged or besotted? The zany hyper-emotions multiplied by Urquhart stand in for the excesses that entice us to buy or to feel engaged with ready-made fabrications. We are close to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of kitsch, but ambivalently so; closer, perhaps, to the imaginary dividing line between the public and private spheres.
How do we construct ideas of home? Can we move beyond the impersonal address of a visually saturated culture? Are we ever outside representation? For answers, Urquhart consulted with friends, and the resulting Welcome Mats in the installation HOUSE: thinking my way home update and revise our homilies: dollar-store welcome mats vie for attention with target paintings and gilt-edged china plates whose central images are domestic objects or appliances.
On the other side of the installation HOUSE: thinking my way home and the more than 300 images that comprise Confessions of a Former Toddler lie Urquhart’s notorious fax- and mail-art projects. Ironically, they are presented in single iterations in a suspended display case that contains a range of small graphic items. These include Urquhart’s diaristic colouring books documenting trips to Banff and elsewhere, which provide a hilarious glimpse of the artist’s private rhetoric.
Lost boy indeed! Urquhart is lost in the enterprise of wrenching meaningful symbolism from capitalist iconography.
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