In the Middle of Something (2024)
Essay accompanying the exhibition In the Middle of Something,
curated by Marnie Blair for the Viewpoint Gallery, Red Deer, Alberta
September 6–October 25, 2024
including works from Red Deer print artists Marnie Blair, Ayden Fox, Daylan Hecht, Luke Johnson,
Yvonne Moorhouse, Jewel Shaw, Theresa Towers Rickard, and Jim Westergard
Essay accompanying the exhibition In the Middle of Something,
curated by Marnie Blair for the Viewpoint Gallery, Red Deer, Alberta
September 6–October 25, 2024
including works from Red Deer print artists Marnie Blair, Ayden Fox, Daylan Hecht, Luke Johnson,
Yvonne Moorhouse, Jewel Shaw, Theresa Towers Rickard, and Jim Westergard
If there’s a thread, it’s a bit tangled. Knotted, gnarly, run rolling away under the furniture and down the back steps, collecting spider webs and dried leaf bits and confetti squares of cellulose insulation leaking from cracks in the ceiling, raining down shredded messages in red, yellow, blue, and black ink on their felt-edged borax-dipped scraps. It’s the red thread connecting us here on the shores of the Red Deer River, half way to Edmonton, halfway to Calgary (or in the other direction, the approximate midpoint between Fleet and Nordegg—a trip that I can’t imagine gets attempted with any regularity, if at all).
In her book Printmaking in Alberta 1945-1985, art historian Bente Roed doesn’t have much to say about Red Deer. There’s a short profile of James Agrell Smith, the town’s post officer who made intricate wood engravings by night, and an acknowledgement of the founder of Red Deer College’s printmaking courses, Joseph Reeder, his colleague Jim Westergard, and their former student Jeanette Walker. Beyond this, Roed summarizes that central Alberta “has had few printmakers as the province’s flourishing print community focuses on Calgary and Edmonton.”
The issue then is focus; an apparent lack of artists which is more so a lack of visibility and attention from the outside. Unlike the cultural centres to the north and south, here in the middle there is no public hub for print artists to gather in. Without a collective space to convene, printmakers in Red Deer make their work in various studios, both formal and makeshift, and with a certain do-it-yourself ethos. While no single aesthetic or technique predominates among the print artists who call central Alberta home, when brought together here in the Viewpoint Gallery, what commonalities are revealed beyond the happenstance of place?
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Jim Westergard has been printing here in Red Deer the longest. His primary medium has been wood engraving, utilizing a carefully sharpened burin to cut tiny marks into smooth, dense end-grain wood. Noted wood engraver Barry Moser once said of Westergard and his methods that “wood engraving is a dark medium… I don’t know how Westergard does it, but he has an uncanny ability to pull humor out of that dastardly valley of shadows.” Looking at his output of ‘wee beasties’ and ‘oddballs,’ Westergard’s particular brand of humor is driven by attention—to language, to expression, to overlooked detail—and the recognition of the strange and absurd accessible within the everyday.
Like Westergard, Theresa Towers Rickard’s portraits rely on a close examination of her chosen subjects. Utilizing a mixture of digital and analogue processes to achieve the contemplative atmosphere of her portraits, the three women she portrays appear at different stages of life, posed in thought. Her layering of colour and pattern over and around these individuals hint at the interiority that exists beyond their facades, and within all of us. They are reminders of the complexities we inherit and pass on in our relations with others and the world at large.
Ayden Fox’s prints are the products of such an inheritance: inked root vegetables from the family farm, squished through the press, sending juices seeping past the bounds of ink and paper in unruly rivulets of colour. With material metaphors embedded within them, Fox’s prints act as contemplations on rootedness, community, and nostalgia. The actual imprinted roots are complimented with anthropomorphized drawings of these same vegetables, clustering together in families or floating off towards the margin, always embracing or reaching for connection with each other.
A similar mindfulness of material is at play in Daylan Hecht’s prints, which utilize blotter paper as their substrate. Blotters, which absorb excess water from the dampened sheets of paper to be run through the printing press, develop an unruly topography through repeated use. Hecht draws upon the textures of this material to develop abstracted landscapes populated by simplified—nearly archetypal—human and natural forms. The circular cuts within each panel of the work impose upon the stochastic texture a reference to eternal cycles of growth, change, and loss. Personal reflection becomes part of these patterns, allowing one to find one’s place in an all-too chaotic world.
Yvonne Moorhouse’s symbolic imagery refers to acts of navigation in response to life’s complexities. Her mixed media prints are assembled from minute gathered parts—tiny lines etched into a copper plate, or laser engraved onto canvas; stitches poking through the picture plane to create lines or threading together the punctuation of bead work. Each component aggregates into the whole, to be unpacked by the viewer as a kind of nonlinear narrative puzzle. The title, “With Reverence. Places and Travellers,” acts as a clue, suggestive of the permanence of place and the impermanence of experience, and the act of attention as a form of reverence shown in respect for what we are given the opportunity to experience.
Jewel Shaw’s work takes on the act of making a mark as both form and content, presenting a print and its matrix from her series "The Migration of Grief." If the line—drawn, traced, transferred, cut, inked, rubbed, repeated—stands for existence in Shaw’s work, then the process of their making reminds us of the wear and tear that go along with our existences, and the marks left on us physically and emotionally as we move through life. The accumulation of these imprints become our identities. Like the woodblock that bears these marks, we who are shaped by life have the ability to transfer our marks and pass them on. It is a responsibility to be carried out with consideration, respect, and care.
Marnie Blair’s prints are also assembled from accumulated fragments, less literally decipherable in service of a singular meaning than constructed to create space for individual reflection. In her etching “Stringer,” she presents a school of fish, connected not by a literal fisherman’s string but by the sensorial accoutrements of the fishing trip, and by the central anonymous body, opened to allow the viewer to see its component bone, muscle, and flesh. Each drawn element maintains a distinct identity, but they approach, loosely gather, and sometimes overlap, always in implied relation. The surrounding atmosphere becomes a space for divining the ways in which we assemble meaning from the people, places, and things that pass through our lives.
When Blair invited me to participate in this exhibit, I had just completed a series of rubbings taken from the floor of the classroom we shared last year at Red Deer Polytechnic. Purpose-built as the visual art program’s painting classroom, it has changed use over time and been impacted by the changing movement of people, the laying-down and stripping-up of tape, and the periodic dripping of water from the roof. The floor has taken on marks of this history, while the dripping water passes through on its way to the next stage of its continuous route downhill towards the far-off ocean. It is a contemplation of our shared space and all those who have been there with us and before us.
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So, what ends up being the thread connecting all of us who share space here in Red Deer as artists making prints? The thread, like Blair’s fish stringer, might initially appear invisible, but the more time one spends with these prints the greater the connections grow between their imagery, their subject matter, and between each other. There are recurring universal themes of memory, connection, the natural and the human, and an insistence that a subject is more than it might initially appear. Through pathos and occasional humor, these prints remind us to take nothing for granted, to take joy in looking, and to savor and reflect on what we are lucky enough to have seen.
— Luke Johnson, 2024
Above, left to right, prints by Theresa Towers Rickard, Luke Johnson, and Ayden Fox