Ron Shuebrook and Carol Wainio: Black and White with Storylines
Ron Shuebrook Dark Spring 2008
What do you give the artist who has everything? In honour of Ron Shuebrook’s recent retirement from teaching, Dalhousie Art Gallery director and curator Peter Dykhuis asked Shuebrook to select a younger artist with whom to share exhibition space.
“Black and White with Storylines,” an overview of Shuebrook’s recent black-and-white paintings and drawings—there are two collages from the 1970s, but the majority of work was produced in the last 10 years—is a suitable match for Carol Wainio’s broken-down fairy-tale world.
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Carol Wainio Puss n’ Boots #10 2007 / photo Richard-Max Tremblay |
Besides their painterly approach and fascination with history and personal memory, both artists share an obvious literary connection. Shuebrook’s well-known Monkey Rope series refers to Moby Dick—Melville writes about a system of lines that keeps whalers safe on uneasy waters. Wainio’s cast of characters floats out of childhood stories. Paired together, there’s a lovely and surprising symmetry.
If I were to select one piece that best represents Shuebrook’s latest body of work, it would be 2008’s Dark Spring. Enormous in scope (and more than three metres wide) the painting dominates the entranceway to the gallery. Two sections of varying sooty grey hues are interrupted by tracks of winding monochromatic lines, which weave around and then drop off, like streaks of burning rubber along rural roads. Portals of small crosses and rectangles are almost surgically cut into this morose landscape, suggesting uncharted territory beyond its thick charcoal walls.
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Ron Shuebrook Monkey Rope #3 2001 / photo Steve Farmer |
While Shuebrook employs deliberate, meaty lines to suggest containment and systems of thought, Wainio’s open books provide structure for her post-Grimm fairytales. Puss in Boots, from Charles Perrault’s fable of wealth and deception, is a prominent character here. The book frames appear to be built with junkyard scraps, with illustrations ripped out and recreated on raw wood or discarded sheets.
Wainio’s mini-Easter-egg palette diffuses the initial response to her capitalist wastelands, where abandoned plastic bags transform into playful, animated animal heads and much-despised Crocs litter the dusty ground. I’m reminded of a friend who, on a recent trip to Ghana, spotted a local man in a small town wearing a Halifax pub-crawl T-shirt. Everything we eat, wear and use is attached to so many international systems that we’ve been stripped of any autonomy or individualism.
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Carol Wainio Jack and the Cornstalk 2008 / photo Richard-Max Tremblay |
This scrutiny of globalization continues with Wainio’s Jack and the Cornstalk, where tire marks interrupt a pastoral setting, parting a small field of corn. Once a staple food, corn has become Michael Pollan’s worst nightmare. So what do we make of corn in Wainio’s world? In an unpublished statement to Shuebrook, she writes, “Magic, genetically modified or destructive seeds. Corn for food or fuel. Transformed environments. Wishes and unintended consequences. A spell to put one to sleep.”
“Black and White with Storylines” may only be a one-time pairing, but it’s worth multiple visits to absorb all the painterly nuances and details from these two like-minded artists. (6101 University Ave, Halifax NS)
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“Black and White with Storylines” 2009 Installation view / photo Steve Farmer |
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