Inspired by family
There are touching stories behind Hussey’s works
The prevailing theme in Danny Hussey’s work is family, though it’s seen only indirectly as both allusion and muse.
Hussey’s exhibition at Cube Gallery, his first solo show in a gallery since 1997, is a survey of his work over the past decade or so, with a few new pieces. Most are inspired by his family, and the stories buried within them are touching in what they say about the artist’s love for those who begat him, or were begat by him.
“With this series I was associating these movies with my dad, and doing still lifes of things that I associate with him,” Hussey says during an interview in the Wellington West gallery. We’re standing among a series of old movie scenes that are cut into the screen area of wooden, vintage-style TVs that Hussey built, and then paired with still life
What: Collected works by Danny Hussey
Where & when: To March 3 at Cube Gallery, 1285 Wellington West. Vernissage 2 to 4 p.m. Feb. 24
More: See more images at ottawacitizen.com/bigbeat
paintings. One TV has a scene from the 1954 movie Them!, and above it hangs a painting of a single apple.
“When we lived in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, in the fall he used to pick apples to make extra money to buy us things that we wanted for Christmas, things like that,” Hussey says.
These sparks of memory are seen in the TVs and still lifes and also in prints made from the woodcut TV screens, and in a quartet of spectacular, vintage-style movie posters done in creamy, silk-screened tones.
The background of his poster for The Day The Earth Stood Still, for example, is a lightish brown, like a fawn that rolled in ochre, and it’s so rich that I, too, stood still.
Hussey’s father isn’t directly seen in the works, but a meaningful picture emerges of the man through the assemblage of images. It’s as if the images, isolated from any larger context, are like pictograms.
In fact, pictograms are everywhere in the exhibition. A series of photographs have incongruous shapes printed upon them, so a screenprinted dustpan floats over a photo of a woman who looks as if she’s standing on the water of a large lake. In another, a bunch of bananas — which I initially mistook for a Haida-like drawing of a pod of killer whales, and now can’t see otherwise — swim over a photo of a ski village landscape.
The screened items are random, ordinary objects. The photographs were taken by others — Michael Ross and Tony Fouhse, for example — but the actual prints were defective in some way. Above the ski village the words “Bad Reject” hang in the sky, scrawled there by Lorraine Gilbert when she rejected the print. The photographers gave the bin-bound prints to Hussey for his project.
Hussey says the resulting, modified photographs are secondary to the “negotiation” between artists, the willingness of the photographers to let go of their work. My bet is that viewers will find more lasting interest in the inexplicable juxtaposition of formidable photographs and what are, essentially, pictograms.
This language, this use of images as words, is no whim. Thirteen years ago, Hussey’s daughter was born with a condition that makes speech impossible, and pictograms became an essential tool of communication.
Give, a larger piece, is more than 100 small wooden blocks, joined to create a pixelated screen grab from The Simpsons, a TV show watched by Hussey and child. Pictograms appear throughout and, as in all of the collections of woodcuts in this series, they are not just a language but also a transcript of communication between father and daughter; a block bears an image of a child’s doll, while another shows a tape measure from an artist’s studio. In Bumblebee, a collection of one-foot-square blocks, an electric drill sits between two flowers.
I’ve seen Hussey’s woodcuts before, but I never knew the true meaning of the pictograms. What an eloquent revelation.