MAin Space
Sweetheart was a Gambler
Chris Down and Paula Jean Cowan
July 8 - August 11, 2006
Reception: July 8th, 2-4p
Chris Down, Compound, acrylic on canvas, 2004
Chris Down
To claim that the ‘inner space’ is an inappropriate metaphor for picturing human freedom is not, of course, to deny that freedom. It is just to deny that human freedom can ever be usefully thought of as ‘inner’. Rather, it is the capacity to make something of that which makes us, and the portmanteau word for that is history. Terry Eagleton, 1990
For me, image-making is a form of navigation, a tactic for making sense of the world. It is a day to day activity that allows me to think through events, keep visual records, get revenge, register discontent, spout vitriol, acknowledge pleasure, come to terms with longing, construct elaborate apologies, mourn, celebrate, or simply use up time. Likely, more efficient means exist with which to examine the circumstances of lived experience, yet there are few which provide as fertile a site for imaginative speculation.
The terms of this image-making activity derive from a web of memories, fears, desires, social systems, ethics, politics, nightmares, introspection, and media input, and are entwined in a complex dialectic of public and private languages. My work focuses on an attempt to account for my own relationship to these elements of daily life, particularly as they inflect constructions and practices of masculinity. Unconscious links between patriarchy and capitalism are implicated in this account and are visualized through layering conventional signs of aggression, heterosexuality, social authority, and class divisions with their less conventional opposites. It is through the tension between these binaries that this work allegorizes (and satirizes) the masculine prerogatives of power enacted in relationships which shift between coercion and subordination.
The combination of images which appear in this body of work are drawn from an archive including appropriated newspaper photos, illustrations, postcard landscapes of “Hell’s Half Acre, Wyoming”, family snapshots, encyclopedias of military vehicles, bare knuckle cage fighting, and internet pornography. These images range from the historically specific to the utterly fictional, although it is not always legible where they fit in the spectrum. Humour and venom are the coordinates by which these combinations are mapped.
Conceptually, my work plays on the traditional pictorial problem of figure/ground relationships, using the formal language of painting and drawing as metaphors for an individual’s relationship to the public space of the media and everyday life. The ground of culture and history determine the figure of personal experience and vice versa. The reciprocal nature of this relationship is examined through the mediation of the picture making process. Images appropriated from diverse digital, photographic and printed sources are photocopied, traced, photocopied, projected and traced again in layered combinations, rendering the distinctions between mechanical reproduction and handmade mark, public media image and private snapshot blurred but intact. The final mediation occurs through the viewers’ experience of the work in which the physical space of the gallery is transformed into a speculative space which invites interpretation and the pleasurable labour of making meaning.
Chris Down is a painter and teacher living and working in London, Ontario. He thinks the world is currently ruled by white men in blue suits.
Paula Cowan
[L]ike art, comedy is a branch of aesthetics. The difference, as Aristotle observed, is that art is the study of beauty and comedy of ugliness.
- F. H. Buckley, 2003
[T]he obese female character functions as an unruly woman who is able to lay claim to her desire and pleasure. In so doing, she releases the “laugh of the Medusa,” breaking down the institutionalized hierarchies and conceptual categories by which social identities are ordered and defined. -Angela Stukator, 2001
The corpulent body is one of the last officially sanctioned sites of discrimination in North America. Fat is unacceptable wherever it is found in this place and time. Specifically, I would argue, female fat. Media hysteria and the titanic diet and exercise industry seem to have been able to convince society at large that fat women are lazy, stupid, dull, and intent on wasting hard earned taxpayer money on the health complications that are a result of the so-called obesity epidemic. Fat is medicalized, demonized and punished and despite increasing evidence that fat is generally less of a health risk than thinness, the media continues to vilify the chubby.
If I decline my body as a battleground, how do I negotiate a place where my own corpulence is a strength instead of a liability?
I have been making a series of animated vignettes in which a large female character encounters (or creates) a series of situations that depict minor and major failures, foibles and absurdities. I perform these roles, or bits of theatre, record them on video and then rotoscope them, re-animating the character in a non-specific space that employs a simplified figure/ground relationship. The simplified figure, ground, setting and the lack of audio create a space for the viewer to relate to the character. The performative origins of the vignettes allow for moments where it is possible to observe the character’s self-awareness and understand that the character is conscious of her own fallibility. The character is revealed as both the wit and the butt, and is empowered by the duality of her role and the constant promise of, though never realized, emancipation.
The animations share formal similarities that mark them as related facets of a single cosmology. When installed, each piece informs the others, altering and extending potential readings. The emancipatory goal of the work unfolds in these relationships, belying the sometimes humourous, sometimes discomforting activities in which the character engages.
Paula Jean Cowan has been a bakery clerk, deli-girl, grocery clerk, produce manager, accounts receivable clerk, bookkeeper, receptionist, children's art instructor, buyer & seller of used books, print & photo technician, truck washer, auto assembly line worker, parts inspector, and switchboard operator. She is also a practicing artist from the London area who works with a variety of media and currently teaches printmaking at the University of Guelph and foundations studio at the University of Western Ontario. She firmly believes that fat chicks will one day rule the world.