During my short tenure as a professor at the University of Waterloo, the school was a site for a lot of thought about abstraction and the limits of painting. Undergraduates such as Ricki Oltean-Lepp and graduate students like Mike Murphy sustained a discussion that I felt privileged to be part of. They were the teachers and I was the student, which is how art education should work. Ideas were in the air about how the pictorial support could be bent, cut and folded; about how pictures could become objects and objects, illusions; about the expressiveness of reduction and the emotions released through analytical rigour. None of these directions were absolutely new, but six or seven years ago, in the context of the more visible art of that time, they seemed fresh.
A recent show in a small warehouse space in Kitchener that exhibited Barb Hobot, Lauren Hall and Patrick Cull—younger UW graduates not part of that earlier discussion—holds out the possibility that interesting abstraction might have some momentum in this region, that creative ideas about the elements of art might continue to emerge. Another indicator is the presence in Kitchener of an artist as ambitious and original as Gareth Lichty, someone who has never had any connection with the university. Is it possible that Kitchener-Waterloo might become a centre for experimental abstraction?
It’s important to recognize and embrace the fact that today geographical location is no impediment to greatness in art. It should be very encouraging to any artist to realize that they can live anywhere and make their work count. Artists in Kitchener have as much chance as anyone anywhere to make art that really matters, yet they all seem to have a kind of involuntary belatedness. But then what counts should be the potential that they exhibit, and each of the three here have made a step forward in this show.
Barb Hobot first emerged as a maker of strange semi-abstract creatures composed of diverse materials and fabrics. Stitching and tying were two of her techniques. Her works were funny, striking and quite professional. However, whatever pleasures they gave seemed to fade on reflection; no matter how unique they may have been in their particulars, they still resembled other things. From Berlinde de Bruyckere in Europe to Luanne Martineau in Canada, the large-scale macramé abstract figure just seems generic—by which I mean that if these artists hadn’t done it, someone else would have. The idea succeeds by virtue of its utter obviousness, and for every single recognized practitioner, there must be a hundred more in the provinces, equally good but unknown. This is a trap that I’m glad Hobot has escaped. Her recent work takes on much more interesting material, namely the boundary between nature and art. She wraps found branches, sticks and rocks with papier maché and then rubs them with charcoal. The results look anthropomorphic, but that‘s less important than the way that they foreground the physical boundary between the natural ready-made and the artist’s gesture, which is satisfyingly restrained. The important precursors here are Arte Povera figures such as Giuseppe Penone, and that will have to be dealt with, but the nature/art dialectic is intrinsically more productive than invented animals made of fabric.
Lauren Hall has attracted attention with work that plays off Canadiana imagery such as Lawren Harris’ mountains and icebergs. I was never sure how opportunistic it was, but to play to a provincial context is an opportunity missed in any case. In this show, she arranged pieces of styrofoam of decreasing size into an inward-turning spiral atop a base of sand. The resemblance to Robert Smithson is clear, and again, she will have to step up to that challenge. Certainly one’s time is better spent with Smithson than with Harris, and younger artists need to wake up to the fact that the artists they take as models set limits to their achievements. By their associations you will know them. In any case, Hall has thrown away her conceptual crutches and taken a chance on an object that thinks for itself.
Hall has set course for an MFA, and Hobot works in public galleries; Patrick Cull probably has the least creatively damaging lifestyle—he works at an industrial job. He can use the CNC machines (computer-guided cutters) in his workplace to make his art. Here he shows mostly drawings of grids that have all become slightly shifted out of true, with the result that the intervening rectangles begin to tilt in space. Another piece, made with a CNC, is a painting on plastic that’s been cut into nested triangles. The piece hangs on a nail on the wall and the triangular segments sag because of the amount of material removed by the cut; the applied image then falls out of alignment with itself. While I find the work engaging, I must note that it revisits possibilities recognized years ago by Latins such as Waldemar Cordeiro, Hélio Oiticica and Gertrud Goldschmidt. That doesn’t eliminate Cull’s chance to make something fresh, but the fact that he is apparently not aware of his predecessors just might.
Today there are no excuses for not knowing. Information about art is easy to get. While I would never suggest that there is only one way to relate with the past, how can someone find their own approach if they don’t do the work necessary to understand what sets it apart? Some younger artists think that we should be less concerned with differentiating ourselves from our precursors and more celebratory of their achievements. This I have no argument with, but this healthier, less competitive attitude toward the past should not become an excuse for laziness. Boldness and confidence are required, along with curiosity and knowledge.
