Let’s begin with praise for the Grimsby Public Art Gallery. The two Biannual exhibitions I’ve experienced since my relocation to Niagara, and several individual shows I’ve seen there in that same span, have acted as introductions to various excellent artists. Many regional galleries in Canada punch above their weight, so to speak, and GPAG is among them. One of those artists is Janny Fraser, who’s sculptural works in the less recent of those shows was a highlight of somewhat disjointed exhibition (or diverse, to put it differently, in terms of media and concept, but group shows based on regional frameworks are often that way). Her Dwellings Lights Sculpture was one of only two ‘floor works’ in that show, but it played symbolically with ‘house’ in terms of some of the forms in the self lit sculpture.
This aspect of place and domicile is an interesting one to consider, as I recently spoke with Fraser in Welland (where she lives, though she has a significant history with Niagara Artist Centre in St. Catharines). Our conversation was as much about the history of the ‘Rose City’ as expressed in heritage sites (I’m a walker who likes to roam the cities I visit in this manner), and also about the future of Welland in terms of who lives there, who can live there, and who might live there in the future. This concern of Toronto ‘flight’ and the demographics in the ‘rust belt wonderland’ (to quote Welland artist / cultural instigator / activist James Takeo) informs my response to her work, but is something, in terms of her materials and her own history, that is implicit, if subtle.
A quick teaser: over my last month in Welland I’ve engaged with a number of artists and instigators in said community, posing a simple question: What is the state of the arts, especially as pertains to visual arts, in Welland? The seed for this was planted at a larger conversation that took place at AIH Studios on East Main there, as part of the Rodman Hall 5 x 2 Visual Conversation series. That evening, a lively debate took place over whether this is a site with untapped potential or if it is as much of a spent wasteland as the Atlas Steels site. I’ve written a few things, available online, that touch upon works installed in Welland that give some base to that conversation (Bas de Groot’s Welland Workers Monument, or Rod Dowling’s tubular metalwork that seem like the industrial arteries of the city bursting out of the ground, like a past trying to assert that its not ‘gone’…). I’ll be offering further takes on this, citing ideas put forth in dialogue with cultural producers and proponents here; the taste I offer now is that sometimes there is a ‘profound negativity’ (unsurprising for a community that took a hit like the 2009 John Deere closure) but also a renewed will (as Takeo puts it, and I’ll expand on in the future, the city is eager to support the arts, but with stutters in the past like the Murals and Canoe project, are not sure how to go about doing that….).
Returning to Janny’s sometime ‘industrial’, sometime delicate in their fabricated assemblages: her artworks “deal with time as the vehicle of change and transformation visible in landscape and urban overviews. I use photography and photo-collage as part of these mixed media and porcelain mosaic constructions, contrasting human and natural habitats. Convex and concave mirrors, lenses and magnifying glasses draw the viewer into the pieces.” A wide selection of her works can be seen at her site (jannyfraser.com) or at the Jordan Art Gallery web site, as Fraser is a founding member of that space. Perhaps the way I’ve framed this overview of her work is because that first piece of hers I saw had little ‘houses’ (displayed like a neighbourhood in the GPAG work from three years ago, or on box-like plinths, or skeletal structures that raise them up in other arrangements) and often the source objects of her constructions suggest a ‘domestic’ referent. In that piece – Dwelling – there are also branches ‘below’ the ‘housing’, and this use of wood and branches and such materials, sometimes more worked or woven in one instance (as in Gathered Environments, a very monochromatic exhibition – but Fraser’s palette is often restrained, but this allows for the details to come forth, as in pieces like Late Day Sun or Remains of the Day). In the few examples mentioned there, you can clearly see how certain motifs repeat in her practice, just as some formal elements of construction recur and straddle respective bodies of work. Fraser often employs “multiples and repetition of smaller works to create the elements of a larger installation.”
Landscape Transformations, Gathered Environments or Sense of Place are all titles but also serve accurately and evocatively as descriptive responses. Organic elements are often incorporated into her works, and elements of the everyday (chairs, boxes, books) take on a new life and different meaning through how Fraser augments and enhances their appearance and thus changes their being and how they’re ‘read’ as works of art. The ‘tables’ in Fragments, when it was at the old NAC space, or Parallel Metaphors in Cambridge, or the ‘cases’ that seem like tiny toy houses but when opened up reveal innards that are both intricate and reminiscent of clockwork are all objects that transcend their ‘original’ source or state.
In Time Images, when it was at the Dundas Art Gallery, the works on the wall and the manner in which the ‘chairs’ have been worked by Fraser make them a singular artwork more so than individual pieces. In several of her descriptive notes about her works, you can see how though focused upon a certain piece, that it can also be applied to others: The porcelain mosaics are imprinted with numbers, found objects, letters, and timepieces to suggest the fossil remains of traces left behind in the process of change, fracture, and transformation.
As she uses somewhat banal objects (wood, chairs), Fraser also has an “ongoing series of altered books [which] provide a narrative, questioning the sustainability of high density urbanization, congested highways, as well as the loss of a sense of place as a result of globalization.” Its interesting to consider that in the century since Duchamp’s ‘appropriated’ the mundane and by positioning it in a gallery to isolate and highlight what we might look at everyday but not ‘see’, that numerous artists have expanded that sentiment; oftentimes taking the best of that immediacy and still insinuating the artist’s ‘hand’ to guide how we might interpolate this simple thing that is, perhaps, not so simple, and that is not so much inanimate as a repository for ideas and ideologies. After all, Fraser’s ‘house’ work Dwelling, that I saw at GPAG, also came to mind when I reviewed The Tent Project there, several years later, when that show fell significantly short artistically and conceptually. In that respect, Fraser’s works are both amalgamations of objects but also ideas, and offer different points of access to the viewer based on what they bring to them.
Janny Fraser’s work can be seen at the Jordan Art Gallery, or at her own site (jannyfraser.com). All images are courtesy of the artist, or from her own site or that of the Jordan Art Gallery. The header image is Horizon Lines, from the Urbanization Series.
