Ottawa Art in Two Hours or Less

By a certain spontaneous turn, I’ve ended up in our nation’s capital for the weekend, which has afforded me a couple spare hours between quality family time to peruse the happenings in the local art galleries. You may note the conspicuous absence of the National Art Gallery in my travels, but when time is of the essence, the prospect of several galleries at ground-level tends to make a more compelling meal than the Group of Seven.

As it is, the Ottawa Art Gallery seemed a prolific enough starting point. Their current contemporary exhibition ‘Buildup’ is a survey of six artists purportedly examining the accumulation of contents ranging from high culture to kitsch objects, but is probably most accurately summed up as latter-day pop art. This isn’t necessarily a derisive comment, as some of the work was quite accomplished - my personal favourite was Wendy Walgate’s clusters of like-coloured earthenware animals crammed into various found containers - laboratory flasks, birdcages, and so forth - with their numbered metal discs evoking a subtle darkness in the kitsch collector’s art despite their intrinsic brightness. Michèle Provost’s contributions - small beaded replicas of famous album cover art and large glass-tile renderings of lyrics from various rock songs - were also appealing for the simplicity of their strategy. The underlying concept is neither challenging nor new, but there’s still something interesting happening in the initial vague recognition of a song lyric before you understand its source; in this case, it was Radiohead that did the trick.

The rest, unfortunately, consisted of less-than-fantacular paintings, some of which had an appropriate density of material and imagery, but none that managed to eke any valuable meaning out of their repetitive exercises. Such is pop art.

By virtue of the cultural compound that is the Arts Court, a trip around a corridor and down a stairwell brought me into the SAW Gallery, which happened to be on the last day of ‘Then + Then Again,’ a Clive Robertson retrospective that’s been on display since November. As a survey of Robertson’s involvement in artist-run practices in Canada and the UK since 1969, it was frustratingly difficult to access - perhaps the consequence of having the show’s subject serve as a curator. The exhibit contains a variety of video, publication ephemera, audio and - horror of horrors - didactic text panels, none of which have sufficient visual presence to convey a specific notion of Robertson’s practice or role in artist-run culture. Some stubborn plumbing of depths did reveal the usual insights into social networking, some observations on the meaning of work as both toil and necessary play for the artist, but none of this proved sufficient reward for the hard graft of examining this archive of a fairly broad history.

I deliberately sought out La Petite Mort on the recommendation of my sister-in-law’s sorta-cousin, and while explicitly commercial galleries are not usually my thing - there’s something about the dense stacking of mixed 2-D works that puts me in mind of puppies in a pound - this one proved exceptional in representing a diverse range of unconventional work, the sort of work you would expect of a gallery owner proud to proclaim that his space is the only one in the Ottawa art guide to have the word ‘orgasm’ in its description. Guy Bérubé is an admirably enthusiastic advocate of Ottawa’s art community, honest enough to recognize its conservatism while optimistically pointing out the other galleries on the local map that may yield some more interesting finds. I did happily take his advice and end up dropping in on a few more commercial spaces that I would otherwise have ignored, but still found his current exhibition of Jules de Niverville’s photographs of male sex workers in New York, ‘Lucky Numbers,’ to be the most successful showing of the afternoon. For all their modesty of presentation and dubious digital print quality, these photo diptychs were perfect referents to their own low-fi fragility, showing an alternate form of commodity culture surrounding the body as trade for a cheap decadence.

The other highlight of this commercial foray was one of the younger puppies in Guy’s particular pound, Lindsay Campbell. Her drawing of a boy and a polar bear on a wooden panel is quite illustrative - really quite similar to Audrey Kawasaki in San Francisco - but with a remarkable sensibility in her use of line that takes it away from simple attractiveness and throws it towards something more tense and tremulous. She does have a website as well as a blog that updates even less frequently than my own so you can see what I mean there. Given her significant youth, it’s somehow reassuring to see someone at such an early stage well represented in the Ottawa community, adding a fringe flavour to what was, admittedly, a largely conventional landscape.

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