What Remains: Curated by Mireille Eagan

 

What Remains

Manicured by choice or modified by circumstance, every body is a portrait of knowledge, histories and politics, both real and imagined. What Remains considers the interwoven issues of vision and space, gender and representation, politics and pleasure, while showing how contemporary artists have drawn on insights of diverse media.


The internal and external are inextricably linked, with interior circumstance influencing what may be seen. The skin provides a boundary between these two worlds, acting as a sensitive surface capable of capturing and recording the fleeting moments of experience whether chosen, or as a result of unforeseen events. These changes broadcast who we believe ourselves to be, and influence others perceptions of ourselves. Jeff Wilson, a tattoo artist by trade, bases his style on a long tradition of “body art,” creating a large back tattoo for an imaginary individual. Conversely, on her 27th birthday, Lisa Steele made a record of her scars, accumulated over her lifetime. Birthday Suit is an autobiographical depiction of Steele's falls, stumbles, and surgeries, lovingly caressed as she describes each story associated with a particular mark.


Juxtaposing her mother's back with an image of the cancer inside her, Genevieve Cadieux’s large photograph, Rubis, refers to the colour of the cancer cells, and ultimately to the abstract beauty of the microscopic image. Vessna Perunovich's sculptural works manipulate the everyday material of nylon into imaginative evocations of the physical body and the use it incurs. Sarah Saunders explores awareness of one's body as it refers to family history by constructing physical representations while incorporating actual family heirlooms. Kim Vose Jones’ studies in form employ contrasting soft and hard mediums to open up the human body and create an enlarged vision of the intricate web of shapes within, similar to those found at all levels within the natural world, from cellular to the topographical. Scott Saunders' projections record facial features in extreme close-up, emphasizing the alien nature and high abstraction of the visual.

Other artists consider the body as a site for politically charged conventions and stereotypes that delineate entire groups of people. In the video LANDSCAPE, Terrance Houle subverts what he describes as the “Hollywood Indian” in all its colonial, cartoonish, cosmetic traditions. Joyce Wieland’s lithographic work of the early seventies, entitled Oh Canada, transposes musical sound to serial imagery through a series of lip imprints that mark out the syllables to Canada’s national anthem, and discusses competing ideologies of nationalism and feminism. Sarah Maloney's series of embroideries, based on the life-sized proportions of a five-foot woman, challenge the conventions of medical illustration by moving beyond traditional representations of the female body as an objectified figure and looking below the surface. 

The body also imposes elements of constraint, physical limitations that bring with them unique challenges and perspectives. In a wheelchair for most of his life, Rick Burns stated: "I always get asked if being in a wheelchair affects my artwork. Of course it has to affect it … I can’t pretend that I don’t exist in this particular form. But I think the issues are much larger …. Essentially, I’m concerned about the body as subject matter …primarily, the absence of the body.” Irene F. Whittome, herself full-sighted, is drawn to realities that exist for what she considers initiates, as found with Braille transcriptions. 

As with art, so with the body—it is through abstraction that one describes one's experience to others, in an attempt to transcend one's particular limitations of the corporeal. We work with what we have, we may choose to change what is given. The ongoing journey of self-evidencing, the results of a continuous process of becoming, these are what we carry with us.
 

List of artists: Joyce Wieland, Rick Burns, Terrance Houle, Genevieve Cadieux, Sarah Maloney, Jeff Wilson, Sarah Saunders, Kim Vose Jones, Irene F. Whittome, Vessna Perunovich, Lisa Steele, Scott Saunders.