An Improbable Place: Part Two

Last week, The Review presented the first installment of artist Richard Stanford's piece, An Improbable Place. The following is the second part of a four-part series:

It was here at the Arbor Gallery that I was introduced to the photography of Jeannine St. Amour. She fixes an intense gaze upon seemingly ordinary Nature - ice, marsh reeds, mud - and shows us a Nature of fantastical abstraction. We can list the elements, the details that appear in her photos, and yet are unable to explain why the image haunts us.

We imagine we will get closer to the heart of the work instead of merely staring at it from across a divide: the gap between a poetic or visual language.

"I want my abstract work to be an experience of exploration for the eyes which holds endless possibilities," says St. Amour. "I aim to provoke the imagination of the viewer, and as a result, create a pause in their life."

The curator at the Arbor Gallery, Jessica Sarrazin, (M.F.A - University of Windsor '05) oversees a dizzying programme of exhibitions and art classes at the Arbor Gallery.   There is an average of 12 to 16 groups and solo exhibitions a year, which cover myriad themes and disciplines; one month you could walk in to find works with a water theme and the next month, it could be feminism.

There is not a day that goes by where there is not something on the walls, on the floors, in the windows; on canvas or burlap; photo paper or handmade paper; mortar or rope. The courses include drawing, painting, mixed media, photography and framing workshops. It is a testament to Sarrazin's intelligent hard work and to the dedication of the artists that the Arbor Gallery was recently awarded a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

The Arbor Gallery dares to move into the future with the art graduates of the University of Ottawa. Several of these artists were given the opportunity to flex their young artistic muscles in the summer of 2009 in the Incubator show: Amy Mackay's Tire Path, a plaster-cast sculpture recording the passing of a car; Brad Snow's abstract birch tree paintings; Emily Sova's drawings of the mapping of rural roads; and Veronique Guitard's photographs of miniature spoons, knick-knacks conjuring up the personality of the owners. There can be nothing more thrilling for an artist than to have their work seen in a gallery for the first time and the fact that the Arbor gives young artists this experience is a testament to its role in the community and its chutzpah.

Sarrazin's curatorial skills mean that she maintains a high level of artistic integrity in the exhibitions without having a bureaucratic haze imposing on the gallery's will. There is simply Sarrazin's calm assurance that whoever comes through the door with a work of art under their arm will find a clean white wall to hang it on - and a receptive audience.

Artists always move into realms that are seemingly foreign to their environments. In the paintings of Marianne Faguy, the spindly human figures can barely stand upright, seemingly consumed or about to be consumed by the intense glare of the sun or of the television.

Her characters occupy a world which resembles Mars more than the lush green hills of this valley. Faguy's vision suggests that it is the artist's imagination that drives them more than their environment.  Otherwise, we might just have another landscape.

On the other hand, Erica Taylor's Mare's Nest introduces Surrealist influences into the mix. The polymer clay miniature horses curled in a nest of horsehair harkens to a distant time of Meret Oppenheim's Fur-covered cup, plate and spoon (1936). Taylor has 'filled the cup.'

The whimsy of Mare's Nest belies a sense of deliberate dislocation of reality, of the weirdly conceived: a nest of horse hair is entirely possible but 'hatched horses' is in another cup of tea altogether. Perhaps Taylor's background as a professional sign painter has much to do with it - advertising in any form requires the juxtaposition of the bizarre with another bizarre.

Look out for the third installment of An Improbable Place in next week's issue of The Review.