The Grimsby Public Art Gallery is a site that merits regular visits; there’s more in this region than is perhaps obvious, as I recently visited the TAG Art Gallery again, and found some enjoyable new photographic works (by Danny Custodio) amongst familiar works. Along those same lines, in doing some recent research regarding art in the public sphere, it’s another way in which stories and contested narratives are rich in this area, if you pay attention.
GPAG’s space is a fine one: and although it’s a standard “gallery cube”, in a library building, this seems to be taken as a challenge in terms of past exhibitions there (Carl Beam’s works as a part of the Canada 150 events, or Jordyn Stewart’s Public Ice Installation, or a recent screening of Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance all testify to enlivened programming).
Fabulous Fictions & Peculiar Practices is an exhibition that incorporates at least three individuals, and considering its original incarnation at the Peel Art Gallery (curated by Tom Smart, in 2016), and that it includes several folios, could be said to intersect with several more. Dieter Grund of Presswork Editions was invaluable in execution of many of the works, as any artist who’s ever worked with a master printmaker knows.
The works in the gallery are text heavy: this is somewhat balanced by two massive paintings by Tony Calzetta, on the immediate right as you enter. CRY! CRY! CRY! and Dirty Boy are both acrylic and charcoal on canvas, with a strength and directness that makes them powerfully simple. The stylized waters, the spurting and flowing lines, and the boldness of the framing of both works in black offers a contrast of bright colour and childlike shapes.
But although those two works will immediately engage you as you enter, the rest of the space will pull you away to interact with the smaller, more detailed and intricate pieces. Whether you read all the text, or some of it on multiple visits – or enjoy it as mark making you needn’t decipher – is up to you. Some are reminiscent of book page layouts: others play with fonts and text in a way more graphic than typeset (The Ravenous Beasts At Fairy Godmothers House are white scratchy words on black, bracketing above and below a sketch of the named house), and words “speak” in scribbly scrabbly ways, or in more insistent, detailed and tiny tidy insistent forms. Some works are cruciform in shape, furthering the planes in which text and image meet and meld or meander around and with each other. The titles betray a wry humour: Ms. Smith Is Hard Put To Explain To Her Husband How She Came To Spend The Night Unexpectedly in Phillip’s Nightgown is one. Other evocative titles that hook you in: Comma Fucked, or Those Lousy Pessimists Sometimes Make a Guy So Blue All He Wants to Do Is Run Amuck, or Sullenness in Machines in Advance of Outright Rage. I suspect these are speaking directly to me, but that’s a consistent quality of good artwork, to reach out in that manner.
Sometimes a random fragment offers a portal to the whole: GOD TALKS IN HIS SLEEP, proclaim wobbly globby letters, sharp white on black and yellow, in the work How God Talks in His Sleep and Other Fabulous Fictions. That succinct sentiment is what I took away, and still hold, and have been applying elsewhere (the same way I quote my favourite stories and books incessantly). It may also favour my use of literature in approaching art, as I thought of Neil Gaiman’s wonderful character Sam who posited that maybe God created the world and went to hang with her girlfriends….or perhaps it’s more sinister, like “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn / In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming…”
Fiction’s conception was this: “Tony Calzetta [painter, draughtsman and printmaker recently relocated to Welland] and his printmaker friend Dieter Grund … were looking for a project they could work on together. Tony suggested they collaborate with … [Toronto based Governor-General Award winning novelist, poet and painter] Leon Rooke to produce a limited edition livre d’artist [artist’s book, but that’s almost too confining a term]…instead of the customary practice of the artist illustrating the writer’s text, they would approach the Fabulous Fictions project the other way round.
Tony presented Leon with a number of small drawings [and he] wrote sketches for nineteen of the images, which artist and author then winnowed down to a select nine ‘Fabulous Fictions’. Tony reworked the original drawings and combined them with Leon’s texts and media that included intaglio, woodcut and digital printing. In addition, one of the drawings and its text, How God Talks in His Sleep, was reimagined as an interactive paper sculpture and attached to the front of the slipcase.” (that comes from the notes from The Porcupine’s Quill publisher, Tim Inkster, and it’s worth considering the intersection of how this project is part of GPAG’s annual spring celebration of the book arts, which is a wonderfully fluid and fun area, that many artists reconfigure playfully. This year, Waygooze 2017 continues this nearly four decade long tradition; by the time you read this, the April 29th event will have passed, but anthologies of the contributors from this year, and the past years, are available).
Fabulous Fictions & Peculiar Practices runs until the middle of May, and is open seven days a week; and this show requires multiple “readings.”
Images here are courtesy Tony Calzetta and the Grimsby Public Art Gallery. There is also an artist talk with Tony Calzetta this Sunday, May 7th. More information is available here.