Today is the last day of ‘Art and Cold Cash’ at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie before it ostensibly makes its way to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, which made my visit yesterday something of an eleventh-hour effort, snuck in as it was on the morning after a late-night birthday party. Or rather, the afternoon after.

What becomes readily apparent in viewing this exhibition is the vast territory being negotiated by these works. The Art and Cold Cash collective comprises artists from the Inuit community of Baker Lake in Nunavut as well as ‘Southern’ artists and teachers presently based in London, Ontario; together, they claim an interest in addressing the role of an emerging capital exchange in the working lives of Inuit artists, with a wider brief concerning the larger role of commodification in art itself. This makes for a somewhat dissatisfying gallery experience, insofar as the works exhibited can barely scratch the surface of such a broad research project and tend to act as illustrations of that research rather than creative solutions in their own right - with a handful of pleasant exceptions that prove the depth of thinking in this venture.

As it happens, the surface incompleteness of ‘Art and Cold Cash’ as a showing is well justified given the vast quantity of material archived at the collective’s website: the project has adopted a breadth of approaches and ideas that make any single comprehensive visual exhibition a near-impossibility; this does make me curious about the prospect of the show’s other half being shown at Lake Simcoe airport - in accordance with the exhibition’s mandate to house part of its work in airports local to the gallery - but not enough to venture the journey to such a remote setting with a hangover in tow. In essence, the traveling exhibition in conjunction with the related website comprise an act of fine art research touching on history, sociology and economics in excess of any particular art-making mandate - it is a long-term effort for which the exhibition itself comprises a minute introduction at best, or an alibi at worst.

The experience of parsing through ‘Art and Cold Cash’ has put me in mind of Dr. Bruce Brown’s remarks at York last October. Art and research are still in a self-defining honeymoon stage, one that presents a possible pitfall in which creative output becomes a mere illustration of facts and findings - for instance, the overt renderings of money changing hands depicted in Sheila Butler’s Reach for a Hand in the Dark, which accomplishes little in its imagery that could not have been conveyed in conversation or other evidence of the collective’s research. Dr. Brown’s position - and one I agree with completely - is that art made in the process of research must employ its difference in a transformative manner in order to generate new awareness of the question at hand, in a way that would not be possible in words alone. ‘Art and Cold Cash’ has examples of that approach as well - Jack Butler’s touch-activated sound work embedded beneath a drawing’s surface, and Patrick Mahon’s Drawn Like Money series both create unexpected cultural associations and evoke the uncomfortable joining of colonial and native Inuit modes of living in a non-explicit form only possible in art, and in part redeem an exhibition that is otherwise a convenient venue for the dissemination of information in limited doses.

As a footnote to my visit, the MacLaren Art Centre was also presenting ‘Collective Thoughts’, an exhibition of emerging artists studying at Georgian College, in a set of peculiar basement spaces. The prospect of inviting three students to respond to works in the MacLaren’s collection is an interesting research venture in itself, but once again largely proved that lamentable lapse between thinking and making towards the creation of something new. Nicole Laviolette’s prints were both painfully derivative and socially dated, while Andrew Scott’s response to Will Gorlitz seemed to ignore the selected painting in favour of addressing the man he happens to know as a printmaker, just as I’ll ignore both painting and prints to quizzically recall that Gorlitz once called Barrie ‘the Rome of Ontario’ in a visiting artist lecture during my McMaster days. Conversely, J. Lindsay Ramolla’s two paintings featuring wire-stitched bird forms share a healthy relationship to their source in Teresa Cullen’s Chronos Mnemosyne, which is itself a fairly dull painting but provided Ramolla with a physical springboard for some properly transformative work.

One out of three artists producing work that elevates itself beyond its source material? I suppose it’s a start.

Share This

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « Ottawa Art in Two Hours or Less
• » Roman Erratum

• BROWSE / IN Canadian Art Education Emerging Artists Galleries Research
• « Ottawa Art in Two Hours or Less
• » Roman Erratum