JANGLE[D] at RAIN

JANGLE[D] – a two person exhibition presenting a variety of sculptural and two dimensional artworks by Susan Low-Beer & Yael Brotman – has been on view at RAIN (Rodman Art Institute of Niagara in downtown St. Catharines) for the majority of the summer of 2025. It’s an engaging exhibition, a very smart and evocative pairing of two artists where it becomes more than the sum of the parts (the fact that the works are not labelled, but numbered with a helpful sheet you can refer to, keeps you guessing in a wonderful way as to where one artist’s aesthetic ends and the other begins….).

Stepping into the space and encountering the plethora of sculptures (that seem to be like some of Philip Guston‘s paintings brought into three dimensions, with their tangled and struggling cords and limbs) and the more reserved but just as intense and layered (in a different manner) drawings, a number of immediate impressions came to mind.

I’m reminded of one of my favourite artworks from my frequent visits when younger to the Detroit Institute of Arts : a nkisi nkonde, or the great nkisi, sculpture, which is a Nigerian figure with many nails hammered into it, that served in that space between Art (something to simply be admired for its aesthetic sensibility) and a Work of Art (something that serves a wider societal purpose, whether worship, like an altarpiece, or like this figure did, in “terms of served as a “container” for powerful medicines and a spiritual force. It performed specific functions, including settling disputes, ratifying agreements and contracts, healing illnesses, and harming enemies.”)

Jangle[d] inspired these thoughts in a variation of Jean Randolph’s notions of the amenable object, where art objects act as repositories for the emotions and ideas of the viewer.

Ah, first, my people, let us speak of the Rodman space (this is not inappropriate, as many of the works on view are sculptural, and thus space matters more to your potential enjoyment of them, but this is also because RAIN is the inheritor or successor of Rodman Hall Arts Centre, so the long history must be acknowledged). It’s a storefront space, being a site on St. Paul Street in downtown St. Catharines.

It’s a slim space, but that just helps the work, formally (as the sculptures are smaller and the drawings bracket the room and the three dimensional works, so you step into an almost enclosed art space, moving among and amidst Low-Beer and Brotman’s art, but also in terms of a sense of anxiety and compression and unease, which is a premise of the artists’ works. These are, in a metaphorical sense, self portraits, or portraits of a larger world. But isn’t that what all artist do, in terms of trying to encapsulate or offer commentary on their – our – reality?

An excerpt from the artists’ statements : “The ideas behind our work have to do with knots, interlacing, and chaos contained. The emotional residue of covid’s isolation has created feelings of being discombobulated and not quite what we were before the pandemic. We don’t always understand what we are feeling. Thrown into this mix is anxiety about the environment and unmanaged natural disasters, and the bullying and hate mongering that has become common discourse on social media. Psychologically, boundaries seem to be hazy. We are unsure how the private and the public realms should be separated. The boundaries between nature and humanity are additionally blurred. We are bewildered.”

After visiting this show for the first time, I wrote the following : We shall give a shape to our obsessions and anxieties, and if this does not make them good, it makes them like an encased and controllable fetish, that we might then separate from ourselves, or that others will also recognize in themselves and through this external recognition, these difficulties lose their power over us.
Art has often, through the ages, been a repository for unwanted and vexing feelings, and I’m not even talking about Aristotle’s notions of catharsis, but just that we might look upon something and through a meeting of feelings and sentiment have a release, and a sense of each other’s humanity.

The images below are from the RAIN social media feed.

More of Susan Low-Beer’s work can be seen here and more of Yael Brotman’s art can be seen here. More about this exhibition, from the Rodman site, can be found here.