Cruel Aspirations: Some Thoughts on 'Elusive Utopia'
catalogue essay (excerpt)
by John Kissick
2018
The exhibition Elusive Utopia, curated by Lisa Daniels, brings together four artists (Matthew Carver, Ian McLean, Renee Van Halm and Kevin Yates) whose works present quite distinct perspectives on this slippery thing called the domestic sphere. Generally speaking, the art on display can be said to coalesce around the complicated relationship between architecture and lived experience. As the title suggests, the works ponder the nature of want and need, and of desire and deliverables, in a world of small dramas and complicity played out on the uniform, flattening stage that is the domestic experience. This thing we share, with its objects of desire displayed around us like stage props or still life objects, is, as Daniels points out, fundamentally "elusive" because, as we all find out at some point, wants and desires have the nasty habit of slipping through even the most tight-fisted of fingers. And the vision is ultimately "Utopic" because, like most puffed up things that offer the promise of emancipation through consumption, the whole damned thing is, in reality, a fiction, a lie and a cheat. The perpetual quest for "the better" - the better house, the better car, the better lawn, the better life - is a well-marked path to nowhere (or at least a "somewhere" that you never really wanted to visit in the first place). But, as is the case of most time-honoured tragedies, you never find out that your chosen trail is a dead end until you've already run out of enough food and water to get back. Elusive Utopia is thus a cautionary tale, with each artist both a chronicler and a conjuror of sorts, teasing and tempting the viewer down the well-trodden path towards, well, the big fat nowhere. But what a nowhere!
There is something of the conjuror in most painters. After all, the medium is all about tricks and licks, and good painters have the uncanny ability to create whole new universes; ones that are often so enticing that you inevitably give into your weaker instincts and throw any critical distance out the window. Exhibition artist Ian McLean and Matthew Carver offer up (or perhaps "present" is a better term, like real estate agents present properties) seductive alternative worlds, resplendent with chromatic exuberance and dream-like possibility. McLean's emotionally wrought depictions of bungalows with requisite swimming pools, enveloped in storms of hyped-up colour, speak with a kitschy romanticism that can only be described as "high sublime in low places". The skies are always aglow in these types of places, and one gets the sense that the homeowners are away on holiday, or somewhere in the house either cowering or bonking, or probably vaporized. There is something oddly unsettling in McLean's light, which hovers between Turner's nocturnes and forest fire skies at night. Not quite threatening but at least a little disconcerting (disconcerting enough to maybe wake the neighbours ... as long as it isn't too late because you know they get to sleep early).
"Elusive Utopia" Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery, Sarnia, 2017
catalogue essay (excerpt)
by John Kissick
2018
The exhibition Elusive Utopia, curated by Lisa Daniels, brings together four artists (Matthew Carver, Ian McLean, Renee Van Halm and Kevin Yates) whose works present quite distinct perspectives on this slippery thing called the domestic sphere. Generally speaking, the art on display can be said to coalesce around the complicated relationship between architecture and lived experience. As the title suggests, the works ponder the nature of want and need, and of desire and deliverables, in a world of small dramas and complicity played out on the uniform, flattening stage that is the domestic experience. This thing we share, with its objects of desire displayed around us like stage props or still life objects, is, as Daniels points out, fundamentally "elusive" because, as we all find out at some point, wants and desires have the nasty habit of slipping through even the most tight-fisted of fingers. And the vision is ultimately "Utopic" because, like most puffed up things that offer the promise of emancipation through consumption, the whole damned thing is, in reality, a fiction, a lie and a cheat. The perpetual quest for "the better" - the better house, the better car, the better lawn, the better life - is a well-marked path to nowhere (or at least a "somewhere" that you never really wanted to visit in the first place). But, as is the case of most time-honoured tragedies, you never find out that your chosen trail is a dead end until you've already run out of enough food and water to get back. Elusive Utopia is thus a cautionary tale, with each artist both a chronicler and a conjuror of sorts, teasing and tempting the viewer down the well-trodden path towards, well, the big fat nowhere. But what a nowhere!
There is something of the conjuror in most painters. After all, the medium is all about tricks and licks, and good painters have the uncanny ability to create whole new universes; ones that are often so enticing that you inevitably give into your weaker instincts and throw any critical distance out the window. Exhibition artist Ian McLean and Matthew Carver offer up (or perhaps "present" is a better term, like real estate agents present properties) seductive alternative worlds, resplendent with chromatic exuberance and dream-like possibility. McLean's emotionally wrought depictions of bungalows with requisite swimming pools, enveloped in storms of hyped-up colour, speak with a kitschy romanticism that can only be described as "high sublime in low places". The skies are always aglow in these types of places, and one gets the sense that the homeowners are away on holiday, or somewhere in the house either cowering or bonking, or probably vaporized. There is something oddly unsettling in McLean's light, which hovers between Turner's nocturnes and forest fire skies at night. Not quite threatening but at least a little disconcerting (disconcerting enough to maybe wake the neighbours ... as long as it isn't too late because you know they get to sleep early).
"Elusive Utopia" Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery, Sarnia, 2017