Literati

Jan. 15

Susan Schelle
Mark Gomes*
July 14 – September 30, 1988

Susan Schelle, Literalists of the Imagination, 1988; concrete, photo silkscreen on plexiglass; 8' H x 12' L x 8' D installed

Mark Gomes, Margaret's Table…remembering Margaret Laurence, 1987; white oak; 24' H x 40" W x 26" D

Artist Statement

In Susan Schelle's installation, Literalists of the Imagination, three cast concrete Italianate benches serve as a framing device for an image of a 16th century fountain which has been screened onto a sheet of clear plexiglass. If one examines these elements carefully, certain visual inconsistencies become apparent. The benches do not look 'quite right'. It is, of course, so many generations removed from its source that the detailing is only a crude approximation of the original, but we can be and are satisfied by the references of this surrogate. Likewise, the 'fountain' is more a 'fountain view' than an effort to replicate the physicality of the original. Its parasite-like positioning inside the Sculpture Garden's permanent waterfall draws attention to the absurdity of this modernist 'water for water's sake' display. Schelle has suggested, through the most modest of visual devices, a hypothetical 'garden within a garden', and has introduced another history and another vista into this site.

Mark Gomes' sculpture, Margaret's Tables….remembering Margaret Laurence, occupies another culturally disrupted space. The work, a 24' high construction of nine identical white oak tables stacked on top of one another, is both a monument and an homage to the late Canadian writer. Rather than succumbing to the heroic inevitable we have come to expect from monuments, Gomes, through a conscious use of unpretentious materials, transforms an act of bravado into a metaphor of humbleness. If Schelle's bench suggests a place of rest and contemplation, then Margaret's Tables suggests a place where the exchange of ideas takes place, or in its specific reference, where the abstractions of language are developed into cultural reality. And, where Schelle has provided a 'view through a brick wall', Gomes' work draws the eye upwards, to some metaphorical triumph of the creative spirit. The pen may not be 'mightier than the sword', but it can cut with equal ferocity.

There is an implicit but inescapable irony in these installations, not only in the historical and allegorical concerns held within the works themselves, but in how the references are animated and understood in the context of the space they inhabit. Both of these works invoke a sense of irony, addressing misplaced notions of romanticism and sentimentality by means of considered visual devices and references. At the same time, they have discretely shifted the psychological space of this 'garden' (it's meaning as a site of history and now, of cultural activity), from the public to the private domain and have introduced the possibilities of personal refuge and serenity.

Text by Ihor Holubizky