Emily Andrews at NAC

Emily Andrews’ work in the Denis Tourbon Members Gallery at Niagara Artists Centre requires attention and consideration: but that doesn’t bely the playful nature of it, and that several of the works made me smile, if not laugh out loud.

Upon examination, you’ll notice recurring images and recurring themes, and start to see how the pieces seem to have conversations with each other as well as the viewer. At other times they seem to reference external narratives, from Alice in Wonderland to other pop cultural discourse (whether high fashion of the current or historic eras) that all combine in a way both amusing and entertaining. But the figures that appear also go further back than that, appropriate to a show that references dreamscapes: the many animal headed players (often very meticulously dressed) can either suggest A Midsummer Night’s Dream or older, more disturbing archetypes of beast men / women and the roles they’ve played in myths, folklore and dreams.

A small, but lovely work is Mary Ann! Fetch Me My Gloves This Moment!, with the white rabbit ascending the stairs, several clocks, an old fashioned key and a small pig to the side (A favourite scene in Alice in Wonderland of mine is the baby that turns into a pig, and the baby / pig’s caretakers – before they foist him off on Alice – singing a song about how you should “speak harshly to your little boy / and beat him when he sneezes”). None of the clocks have the same time, and the cool, refined woman sitting in the foreground is obviously the one giving the order within the title.

The titles (Celestial Paradise, Flame-Curtained Horizon, The Butterfly of Versailles) are all dramatic: these are all tableaux, scenes constructed (literally, in collage format) by Andrews. There is a very “post modern” mash up at play with several works, too, where you can attempt to recognize the historical figures that are “sampled”: this “flattening” is also apparent in that some of the figures display a cool fashion style that indicates that Mad Men may be done, but that the interest it generated in vintage / retro fashion is alive and well, and that sometimes making the old new again is very good.

The images sampled are iconic on a variety of levels (Alice appears in Far From Ordinary, along with some Llamas, and they’re also in Llaminoes, while she walks through several other works – like the images on the wall are really windows and the characters pass from one to the other with us, as we move along the gallery wall) that in their repetition in the images suggest a larger conversation, and almost act as quotes or footnotes.

But that all sounds very academic and staid, and there’s definitely a sense of humour in the works: here’s the statement for the show.

Far From Ordinary: A Series of Dreamscapes Made with Very Precise Slices, is the second solo exhibition for Andrews and includes a collection of surrealistic scenes in the form of hand-cut photo collages.  These intricately crafted pieces explore a whole new level of phantasmagoria that balances on the line of reality and imagination.  

Two images are on a different wall, facing the longer one that holds the majority of the images. Both of these are a little different, as they seemed very jammed, and extremely dense in their composition. Shades of Grey is glossy and deep, and you can recognize an image of the iconic Frida Kahlo among others, and Dream Factory does play like a reverie, with incompatible architecture and scenes mashed together, like any dream where the rules of reality are more fluid, or flexible, or simply irrelevant.

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The Flame Curtained Horizon
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Dream Factory

I saw this exhibition on the Saturday evening, having arrived in St. Catharines a bit more than 24 hours before, on a hellacious trip that brought me from the Prairies. Dreamscapes was the first show I saw here, after arrival, and its humour and quality made it a very good one. Or perhaps I’m still reeling from my experience in Northern Ontario, where I was unsure if I was awake or dreaming on the bus as we left Sudbury, all darkness and odd nightmares, and in a landscape both hauntingly familiar and incredibly foreign, like any dream country we’ve all experienced…