I wanted a dialectic between one’s perception of the place in totality and one’s own relation to the field as walked…a way of measuring oneself against the indeterminacy of the land. I am not interested in looking at sculpture which is solely defined by its internal relationships. (Richard Serra)
Simplicity of form is not necessarily simplicity of experience. (Robert Morris)
Afterimage fills all the galleries at Rodman and is on display all summer. The two “side rooms” that have been in play for the last few exhibitions have been amalgamated into one larger space (in the rear of Rodman), and this serves Afterimage well. Gayle Young’s audio (Cedar Cliff- “oo”) wafts out over the space, and the denseness and richness of John Noestheden’s paintings (or sculptures – we’ll explore that momentarily – titled, respectively Spaceline 20a, 20b, 20c and 20d) are balanced by the emptiness between and around them. Reinhard Reitzenstein’s 6000 laser cut trees, one of which would easily fit in your hand, made of recycled paper that creep like ivy upwards and outwards (in Ghost Willow) also employs a denseness balanced by gaps that allows for a conversation between the artists. It’s not that the artworks in the side gallery, closer to the front, aren’t worthy. But the rear gallery functions so well in terms of its curated installation (unsurprisingly, if you remember Gunilla Josephson’s exhibition Houses and Whispers, as that show was also curated by Marcie Bronson) that it’s where I find myself, with every visit.
Noestheden’s works in this back space are acrylic on aluminum, with “stardust” mixed in. Their execution and texture are earthy, like furrows of mud. The forms – too solid, to be painting – resemble earth works or dirt mounds, in colours that alternately suggest “black earth” or others in powerful primaries (the yellow Spaceline 6 shimmers reflection “in” the floor, so it’s like the floor work Spaceline 13 that stretches out is a diptych to the mirrored work, or like all “three” function from floor to wall to floor again, to remaining in our eyes after we look elsewhere….). Others are in pale blue (higher up, in a corner, almost to be missed) and another is lower, on the same wall but opposite end, in a reddish chartreuse. These softer tones seems too delicate for the whorls and chunks and bumps that form these acrylics and mixed media on aluminum blocks of paint and minerals.
The trio of artists here don’t interact in a prescribed manner, nor a fully equal manner: despite my praise of his works in the back gallery space, Noestheden’s work in the front two rooms is the weakest, and his repeated citation of “stardust” and other ideas during the tripart artists talk served to make his work less interesting and more affected or pretentious. Perhaps the weight he attached to this lecture about his pieces was inversely proportionate to how uninteresting they are visually.
Its unsurprising that he spent so much time on the Prairies: there’s more than a little of the self involved Karaoke Modernist in his work, mistaking aspects that are perhaps important to him as being universally so, or that by the citation of the term “stardust” that it might have wider or deeper meaning. His works in the front rooms (Artefact Echoes or 1389 Breaths) are failures visually, and any larger pedantic prose doesn’t remedy that, though some of the pieces improve by association with the works by Reinhard, leeching some meaning and depth from Seed Tree or Forest Emerging. Perhaps this is also why the front rooms are less impressive than the back one: Noestheden has some quality in the front rooms by implication, whereas in the back gallery all three artists function as one larger installation.
This high ceilinged and predominantly empty room, wide and high, is the dominant and dominating gallery: an engaging and visually exciting environment that seems sparse, but isn’t.
Gayle Young (whose history is impressive) spoke eloquently and simply about her audio works, offering some nuance and depth, and options to how we might experience it. Rodman itself is intrinsic to the melded experiential audio (“the resonance of the building is important”), and there’s a spot where you can hear all three “streams” flow together. Young declared the sound as much “ours” as hers, and “you create your own mix by moving through the space” through her “swathe of noise” sampled / assembled from the Bruce Trail in Grimsby (from river and highway to raindrops and fauna and other walked ambience…). While standing in the back space, Reinhard offered the following, encompassing Afterimage in its entirety: “All these works are derivative of memory, of larger ideas, of past experiences, of pasts both universal and personal.”
Reitzenstein’s Willow is meant to evoke how a gigantic willow was removed to facilitate the back expansion of Rodman Hall, and he spoke of how its roots are surely still under the floor of the gallery in back of the building. His works in public space, from the Lutz Teutloff Collection at Brock University, or around the Niagara region all “observe and chronicle trees under siege. Displaced by architecture and manufacturing, they adapt to changing and extreme environmental conditions, supported by mutual relationships within their ecological communities.” Ghost Willows is a memento mori: just as Young’s work is an echo, a recording, of a temporal and remembered, now past, experience. The chunkiness of Noestheden (Spaceplot F) to the recycled, disposable components of Reitzenstein (needing to be repaired, sometimes replaced, daily) to the ephemera of Young’s audio (Cedar Cliff- “ah” or Cedar Cliff- “ee”) that fills the space – and none of it – is an enjoyable dialogue of remembrance: what has been, what was, what is all meet and highlight their similarities, and contrast their differences.
An afterimage, by definition, is an ephemeral thing: sometimes it exists only in memory, or as a degraded version of the original, like the spots we see after staring at the sun. It’s almost an act of negation more than affirmation: what it references is, by definition, gone, no longer existing, solely in memory. Its past: and the past is fleeting. The formal definition is “a visual image or other sense impression that persists after the stimulus that caused it is no longer operative.”
This Afterimage will be visible until the 20th of August, 2017, at Rodman Hall; it will be followed by Material Girls, a show touring from the Dunlop in Regina.