by Carin Covin

I remember an eventful time when I had the experience of being, symbolically, behind a studio door.  The painter, Harold Klunder gave an artist talk in Wells, British Columbia, during one of the summers he was a mentor at the Toni Onley Project.[i]  He projected images of his paintings during his talk, but he also talked about his painting practice behind his studio door, where the mementos and objects collected, the quality of the light, the scaffolding rigged for painting his large canvases added another dimension to where his ideas and understanding of the visual world came from. 

In the studio, it is a particular space. The painter Mel Bochner describes art as a devise of thinking that begins in the studio space; “Most people consider thinking as a structured thing, but I think about it as a process.  While you’re making something, anything, you’re simultaneously thinking about it visually, emotionally and intellectually. “[ii] Behind the Studio Door is an exhibition about painting; work made in a studio environment that is polyphonic.

David Alexander, Malcolm McCormick, Katherine Pickering and Jeroen Witvliet are presenting paintings in this rotation of the Lake Country Art Gallery exhibitions.  Their artist statements contribute to the viewers understanding of their works, as they articulate the pluralistic thinking that went on behind their studio doors. 
 
PAINTING
These artists have chosen the act of painting to give visual voice to their current investigations.  This haptic medium has a rich history within the art historical discourse.  It could be argued that the Lascaux complex of caves and the Chauvet Cave begin our fascination with mark, colour and form.  Actually, one could stroll through art history and pick one’s favourites.  I think of Giotto and his angels, the flying lovers of Marc Chagall, or jumping ahead to Hockney and his Splash, the intention of Pollack’s drip.  Isms morphed into more isms and many theories, such as Post Structuralism and Feminism, deliberately interrupted the male gendered gaze, the gaze of male white power and privilege.  I think of Mary Pratt’s painted politics of the everyday, the painted gender politics of Jenny Seville, or the painted post-colonial politics of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptan.
​
Painting has been declared dead and then declared resurrected, however, the canon of painting has continually built upon the vocabulary of artists throughout time.
 
THE ARTISTS
I would suggest that David Alexander, Malcolm McCormick, Katherine Pickering and Jeroen Witvliet, with these works, are contributing to this interesting, complicated and varied discourse about painting. 

David Alexander explores mark making in his painting, from small intimate works to works commanding a single wall.  Travel and environmental advocacy inform his process, as he investigates his global interest in our finite resources of land and water through his international art residencies. 

Katherine Pickering has suggested that the world is her classroom, as she also travels the world and participates in international art residencies.  Her research involves the investigation of abstraction through the process of the materiality of paint and canvas, its limitations and confines.

Malcolm McCormick’s recent research examines the intersection of assembling and de-assembling painting and its history; his investigations of the gallery wall as a trope is twined with painted works. 

Jeroen Witvliet studio research involves investigations into the materiality of paint, often pushing the idea to a point of failure; his work is overlaid with speculations of memory, travel and identity of the self, as his travel and understanding of history underpins his practice.

These four artists have allowed us behind their studio doors, and shown us their current painting vocabularies.  The Lake Country Art Gallery has provided this light filled venue to see the works and contemplate the ideas and concepts that these artists are presenting.  And now it is up to us, as we, the viewers, bring our personal and subjective experiences to the act of seeing these paintings.

​Carin Covin
Visual Artist


[i] Harold Klunder is a Canadian painter.  He gave this talk in 2010 when he mentored at the Toni Onley Artist Project with the printmaker Libby Hague.

[ii] Mel Bochner is an American conceptual artist who is interested in language based works. This quote comes from an interview that Robert Enright conducted with Bochner in BorderCrossings, Volume 38, Number 1 Issue No. 149.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness... That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue. (Brian Eno)
 
Like all good exhibits, What’s Still Here, What Came Before Us started with a conversation over a cup of coffee. Liz Ranney and Nicole Young approached me two years ago to pitch their idea for an art exhibition in Lake Country. We sat outside and sipped coffee as Liz and Nicole shared their ideas, thoughts and vision. They wanted to do something that can make some artists shudder, including myself: Collaborate.
 
Painting can be an isolated endeavour. Artists spend weeks, months, and years on their self-imposed islands of creativity, narrowly focusing on their own ideas. For some artist, sharing this solitary experience can be intimidating. But Ranney and Young wanted to jump head first into it.
 
Art, like everything, cannot exist in a vacuum. Paintings do not spring onto canvases fully formed without influences and inspirations. Society, politics, philosophy, culture, and a laundry list of other elements feed into art. Artists take the noise from the world and filter it into something striking, something bold, something that makes us think.
 
Ranney and Young have made that influence explicit with this exhibit. They used the lyrics from Leila Neverland to inspire their paintings. They plumbed the depths of another medium to create a unique vision for the gallery. Three artists, all with their individual experiences, talents, and perspectives, came together to build a unified series of paintings.
 
But when you walk into the gallery, do you see that collaboration? When you study the paintings, do you see the work of one artist? Two artists? Three? Maybe more? Is the collaboration clear as day? Do the two painters’ styles stand out? Or is the line separating their techniques completely blurred? Did Ranney, Young, and Neverland successfully merge their styles into one voice? Does such a fusion matter with collaboration? When artists work together, should they maintain their individual voices? Should they completely meld together? Or should it be something in between? I hope these paintings provoke similar questions for you as you absorb the exhibit.
 
Art history, of course, has many examples of collaborations. Numerous artists have made some their best work when they team-up with like-minded people. Some of the most popular and enduring art pieces have come from collaborations. A quick google search brings up:
 
Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat
Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray
Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns
Pablo Picasso and Gjon Mili
Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali
Chuck Close and Philip Glass
Bjork and Matthew Barney
Marina Abramovic and Ulay… to name but a few.
 
 
When you enter the gallery you happen upon a series of paintings, a wall ‘collage’ and an installation in the back of the gallery.
 
Each painting and installation in the gallery is accompanied with a set of notes. A dialogue
between the three artists is recorded…contemplation, reflection, questions, ideas and lists of colours are scribble across sheets of paper.
 
viridian green + parchment
muted grey + titan buff
phthalo turquoise
yellow oxide
nickel azo gold
quinacridone magenta
carmine
brownish paint water
 
For example, Leila Neverland’s words, ‘You can hide all you want, but those spirits will haunt ya…you can hide, under those covers, but you’ll never see the stars…you’ll never see the stars and the spirits will haunt ya’ , form the foundation for the painting Under Cover. Ranney and Young take these words and build a composition with paint, fabric, line and texture. By interpreting these lyrics and the back and forth of the canvas between Ranney and Young, a final image comes together.
 
As a viewer, you’re a collaborator. Gallery exhibitions create a relationship between you and the artist. You bring your own perspective and experience to bear when you study art. You define the meaning of each piece on your own terms. This exhibition is a celebration of how we all work together to discuss, debate, and build something new. In our daily lives, we’re all collaborators.
 
Even this introduction is a collaboration between writer Sean Mott and curator Wanda Lock. 
 
 
Sean Mott is a reporter, a writer, and an amateur knitter. He’s written plays, short film scripts, theatre reviews, and novellas. His work has been featured in publications in Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. He’s currently based in Lake Country.

Wanda Lock writes for Opus Newsletter January 2019 

going "down the rabbit hole" has become a common metaphor in popular culture, symbolizing everything from exploring a new world to delving into something unknown. ... In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the rabbit hole is the place where it all begins.* [*taken from our friend google…]
 
 Shortly after graduating from art school I was told the worst thing that can happen to your art practice is that your work starts selling, the commodification of art is a trap that sucks you in and dissolves all your ambition for being curious, exploring new ideas, takes away all critical thinking and it makes for weak work that becomes absorbed into a banal, boring, predictable, redundant world that escaping from is pretty much impossible. Making art that is adored by the masses is easy, but to travel down deep into a rabbit hole, now that takes courage…How does that saying go? … If you are making something others disapprove of, you are probably on to something.
 
A bit over dramatic? Maybe. But hey, don’t shoot the messenger…I’m just repeating a warning that I was given some 27 plus years ago. And I must admit, to this day, I keep those words very close to me, they have formed a foundation to which I have built an art practice on. My art work lives in a big messy Black Widow’s web that only I can navigate, there is no map or logical path to take, each studio visit is a mystery. The goal has always been to observe, think critically, do good, solid, work and to never settle for average. Of course, when it comes to my work, this is open for debate. Everything is meant to be challenged, analyzed, dissected, reconfigured and scrutinize over and over again, being relentless is good.
 
The ability to experiment, with subject and/or materials, means to go down rabbit holes, alone, it is what makes one an artist. Anyone can make ‘art’ but to be an artist is something entirely different. It involves taking chances, absorbing the world around you and reflecting it back to others (society).
 
When everything is stripped away, I am an oil painter who draws. When I walk into my studio the smell of linseed oil makes my heart sing… the intoxicating perfume wraps its big arms around me and pulls me into the room where we spend days and nights chatting, sometimes arguing, about the fundamentals of art making and how we can go about deciphering and responding to all that surrounds us. Using all the various art materials that are available to me at any one time helps put the pieces together. Am I an artist? That is not for me to decide.
 
I have no answers or advice for those trying to carve out a living in the arts, and maybe that is a good thing, it means the road is wide open, enjoy the ride and see where it takes you.
 
Wanda Lock

I took the images with me
Packed them up in a case
And sat by the shore, I listened:
 
Water as Noise
As Silence.
 
I wore the images, took them off
I re-sized them, tailored and trimmed them.
I spread them out over the valley and watched them fill every quiet cranny.
 
They didn’t fit.
 
Body. Mountain. Waves of flesh. Wings. Haze. My roots are heavy. Primordial now.
 
I needed to re-sew them so:
Frogs as time tanks
Fish as silicon boatmen
Bones as water thread
Body as horizon, horizon as body
Time as tree fingers
Water as time machine.
 
But when expectation shifts its gaze
It faces the perils of non-truths
And falls into the rhythm of a certain non-history.
 
Time stands still.
 
Much like Alice’s rabbit hole
Much like Eve’s forbidden fruit
We enter, we eat, or we ignore
A curiosity of what comes next
An openness to what came before.
 
The now is dissolving fast underfoot
Droplet by droplet.
 
I don my primordial gown
To hunt the now
To chase the rabbit
And catch something I have yet to understand.
 
I ran to the shore, seaweed green.
 
“Let droplets form and re-form”
Cried the mountain, guiding the water bodies.
“How do you measure it at all?”
 
I didn’t know
All I knew was how the breeze smelled of salt
And how my hands were pillowed secrets I could cup around it all
Never holding it in but only touching each tiny molecule for a moment.
 
I knew the shoreline
Like dad’s hairline
Shifted and swayed
It collected our intentions and swept them away.
 
I knew that wavering watery lines connected all I could see:
The cockroach boats
Fishes freed
Ugly swans
Particularly me.
 
I knew the layers: silt, salt, and silicon
All settled among the layers of my body too.
 
I will keep these images and use them to listen
As long as there is silence and as there is noise.
 
I will keep running fast until I find the space I take up
Or some other useful notion
So I can ask why time doesn’t stand still anymore.

​Catalogue Essay by [1] Sara Ahmed for the exhibition  Paper Jam, Pulp Fiction

LAKE COUNTRY ART GALLERY, July-August, 2018 
 
As a literary critic and feminist academic, I revere paper as it conveys the ideas and thoughts of others in the form of text or image, transcending time and space—and makes my own thinking and writing possible.  In a sense, you might say, paper enables me to be me. But here I am thinking only of paper as a conveyor of a message and forgetting about its materiality—easy to do when I write upon a computer screen with only the ghostly semblance of the original paper in front of me.  Carin Covin’s recent work interrupts that thinking, jams that sense of paper as a medium and asks me to think of the object itself. What does paper mean for the woman artist?  This question is one of many posed by Covin’s compelling and beautiful presentation of her work, of women’s work.
 
As art historian, Dr. Carolyn MacHardy points out, paper and the cloth from which it comes have traditional associations with all sorts of things in the home, in the domestic realm—traditionally, the woman’s realm-- such as bandaging, pattern making, and sewing, wrappings as in gifts, and keeping items of value, both for protection and in order to evade detection. Ragging, weaving, knitting, embroidery—all associated with women’s work, were also means of artistic expression for women who had no access to paint, canvas or clay. Women’s search within the home for the particulars by which they could express themselves records their long history of repurposing non-traditional materials associated with craft. Covin’s exhibit at the Lake Country Art Gallery (August 2018) repurposes this craft and this craftiness, this story of diligence.
 
At the exhibit, Paper Jam, Pulp Fiction, I encountered paper in three dimensional form inhabiting space and speaking of itself as temporal process: here, paper is no longer merely a means, but has become the work itself with a palpable (pulpable?) sense of history: there is certainly some magic in this.  Coloured spools of paper are arranged along the initial wall, dyed, we are told, by means of an organic process called cyanotype.  Covin employs paper made by Laura Widmer (Widmer paper) from repurposed or natural fibres that are often recycled, such as an old t-shirt, soaked and processed, then printed by Covin by means of the light of the sun.  This printing process, colloquially more familiar to us as blue printing, has a domestic application as well, as the blue tinge was not always deemed suitable for aesthetic applications, but found its place, in the 19th century, in what have come to be known as blue prints.  Covin revives this technology in her current work, which imparts a cyan blue tinge to all the works in the exhibit and signals the reintegration of the human actor in the organic world.   She offers a blue print. 
 
While paper is often associated with the ground upon which a drawing or text is etched, Covin’s paper is incorporated in a series of works which are created through conventionally domestic methods such as knitting, weaving, rug-making, transforming the everydayness of knitted and hand-made elements of the home into a gallery installation.  Rather than floors, windows, and tabletops, these weavings gain another dimension hung on the wall of the gallery, directing our focus to their materiality, their history, their uncanny strangeness—haunting yet so very familiar.  This re-purposing moves these items from the background to the foreground and, in so doing, those pulpy fictions--about just what is, or isn’t, art--are relocated as well.
 
The initial spools I encounter are actually skeins of hand-made cyan printed paper, coiled around similarly hand-made yarn bobbins [reference photo], while the next work in the series presents the additional process of knitting: the paper yarn has been knitted on giant circular needles, presented three-dimensionally on the wall, revealing its texture, variations in colour and dye and even a dropped stitch that is never recovered [reference photo]. Covin’s piece refuses perfected mechanistic production; rather, the missing stitch is our assurance of the very human person producing this pattern and a record of the serendipity and spontaneity of any art practice.  It is the symbol of the subject as a woman at work.  The temporal dimension of the creation is also recorded by the dropped stitch, where the weave drags down, weighty, pulling with it the paper yarn, creating a gap, a space for a paper jam.  
 
“Paper Jam” 
 
Jamming suggests many things: the spontaneity of a group in collaboration. Then, also paper jam might be an impediment, a blockage, a resistance, or redirection.  Holding these ideas together despite their tension— tension is, after all, essential to the knitting process--we engage in a field of spontaneity, community and redirection.  Might we share in this relocation as a repurposing of this pulpy, jammy, messy medium of women’s work? 
 
Jamming has a sense of simultaneity--linked provocations of artists--women artists—jamming, dialoguing, reproducing, repurposing woman’s historical positioning in the domestic sphere—a positioning that has often been derided in its imposition of exclusionary practices keeping female artists at home. Reclamations of women artists from the past have often necessarily been accompanied by reclamations of different art forms, particularly those associated with the domestic sphere, folk art and craft, for instance.  This dual reclamation draws attention to the ways in which certain forms of artistic production gain prominence and meaning from the patriarchally inflected social and cultural norms with which we think about art and gender.  Women’s work is domestic and men’s is public—a long standing and imposed notion.  But when Virginia Woolf first called for the woman artist to have a “room of one’s own” in which to work, she was not excluding the domestic from the realm of art: rather, she was moving the domestic into the world of art.  This is an important point that bears repeating:  this is not delegating or denigrating the domestic as the sphere of the woman, but designating the woman’s sphere as that of the artist.   Feminism is home work. 
 
Insisting on the collaborative nature of this project-- between women and water and pulp and sun, Covin particularly highlights her work with her dear friend and fellow artist, Laura Widmer (who makes the paper with which Covin works), but also overtly acknowledges other women artists, some present, some absent, some paper-bound, textual friends. One of the latter, who is a key impetus for the current project, is the Canadian poet Bronwen Wallace (1945-1989) whose collection, Keep that Candle Burning Bright and other Poems (Coach House: 1991), has particular resonance.
 
Wallace’s feminism repudiated the academic trends of the time that were turning to postmodernism and poststructuralism in order to deconstruct received knowledges and the autonomy of the subject, the self. For many feminists, artists and authors at that time, the questioning of subjectivity and of the possibility (or impossibility) of the autonomous self, just when women were beginning to be able to assert a subject position in the larger society, was suspect to say the least.  In response, Wallace mused, “Who needs Freud and Lacan?” [2] Instead, Wallace produced the poetry of the every day woman in all her wonder, articulating the imagery of our daily experiences and refusing the abstractions of high theory, validating those “schools of slithery thought where most of us spend most of our time, just swimming along”(Keep that Candle Burning 45)[3]. 
 
We don’t always know, observes Wallace, whether to be grateful or terrified, when witnessing the miraculous of the everyday as

we all try to make sense of ourselves
that way, which parts we hold on to, which
we hold at arms’ length, squinting
just as we do the photo
of that face some people see
on Mars these days, seeing if we can
make it into mountains. 
What else
can we do?  
 
Despite her repudiation of grand theory, what Wallace does share with Freud, is an interest in the homely and the strange.  What in German is called the heimlich—the familiar (“familiar,” “native,” “be- longing to the home”) is haunted by its deeply connected (and necessary) other--the strange, the unfamiliar, the unheimlich. In English, this is generally understood as the “uncanny” (un-kenned/unknown): that “species of strangeness embedded in the familiar” –that strangeness that often arises in the every day. In Wallace this is caught in her fascination with the expansive expertise of the already dead in the tabloids, like Elvis or Jesus.  Or when she recounts the visitation of a friend, a dead friend:           
on the anniversary,
to the day, of a friend’s death, she appeared,
in the laundromat where I was folding underwear,
by the dryer, putting in a load of towels.  (Candles 56)
 
Or when she writes,
 
….It’s just how we look
at the world sometimes, tensed
with the effort that makes our brains
hurt, all that work, rejecting what
the senses tell us.  No wonder we think
We have to look so hard.  No wonder
We stand here, blinking.
Grateful and terrified.
                        (Candles 56-7)
 
In Covin, this uncanny strangeness is provoked when the everyday creativity of the home, such as making jam, hooking rugs, weaving, knitting, also reveals the haunting of the home by the historical and ongoing dismissal of domestic activity and the displacement of the woman as artist.  In Covin, we glimpse the unseen other-- the behind the scenes--that has us “blinking./Grateful and terrified.” Covin’s historicized sense that the male artist had better access to the public sphere and to the means necessary to communicate in that sphere is “jammed” in this exhibit by her return to the “domestic” work of paper production and women’s aesthetic practice, exposing the unnecessary fiction that genders the pubic and private divide.  Perhaps paper would be more available to women artists, muses Covin:  it could be found here and there by those with little disposable income, maybe available to make shopping lists, to write notes, to create art.  Covin’s process is to recycle the everyday, quotidian and domestic objects and transform such an object exposing it to the bright light of the sun. This process of making the everyday domestic do its work as art is a blueprint, to my minf, for the reclamation of the historical weight of women’s work. 
 
Covin’s work is communicative and collaborative, building on processes visible and invisible, recorded in its very palpable pulpy history.  In this sense, the hidden and haunting history of female artistic production is woven into the present, giving weight to the linkage between traditional women’s work-- weaving, knitting, creating connections—and the weight of the these sculptural forms.  The domestic jams the public, relocating women’s work in place. 
 
Dr. Jennifer Gustar, UBC Okanagan
Kelowna, British Columbia
Jennifer.gustar@ubc.ca
 
References:
Sara Ahmed.  Living a Feminist Life.  Duke University Press, 2017.
Erin Moure and Bronwen Wallace.  Two Women Talking: Correspondence 1985-1987. 
Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets (1993).  Susan McMaster, Ed. 
Bronwen Wallace.  Keep that Candle Burning Bright and Other Poems. Coach House
Press, (1993).

[1] Sara Ahmed.  Living a Feminist Life. Duke UP: 2017. P.7

[2] Erin Moure and Bronwen Wallace.  Two Women Talking: Correspondence 1985-1987. 
Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets (1993).  Susan McMaster, ed. 

[3] Bronwen Wallace.  Keep that Candle Burning Bright and Other Poems. Coach House Press, (1993).

*Note: From my understanding, in First Nations storytelling the exact wording of the original teller is important. David Florence collected these tales from local people, and he read them to us from a paper so he would not “put his own words into it”. I appreciate his permission to tell a small part of it in my own words, and apologise for any mistakes I doubtlessly made in the retelling, having only heard the story once. If you want to read a very similar tale in the voice of a real Okanagan storyteller, check out “The Turtles Won the Race” told by Josephine Shuttlesworth (scroll to the bottom of the page past the error messages). In that one, it’s Coyote himself who gets tricked by the turtles, and it’s even more similar to “The Hare and the Hedgehog”.

Blog post from:

https://amovitam.ca/2018/02/12/fire-folklore-and-family-day/​