EXPLORING EXCESS
Artist’s sculptures illuminate culture of consumption
Jude Griebel’s Crafting Ruin Where: dc3 Art Projects 10567 111 St. When: March 10 — April 15; walkthrough Saturday, March 11, 2 p.m. Admission: free
Taken on the surface, Jude Griebel’s intoxicating sculptures come off as political cartoons of environmental disaster, smartly personified. Each of his artworks warns of excess, overconsumption … images of humanity going too far.
An oil tanker’s payload spills down all sticky into the shape of a tar-feathered yet human form, vulnerable with its glassy stare. A different scale: a supermarket bag — with real dentures as teeth — is dubbed Plastic Ghost, floating up to haunt us because, well, that’s what plastic bags do. Ejected by garbage strata crowding the ocean floor, shells burst upward into a different Homo sapiens-shaped golem — this figure’s swirly-pastel exoskeletons topped with a giant conch for a head.
I keep noting movement, because even though the works are still, they’re hyperkinetic. They slide into anthropomorphic horror, full of headline tension.
Yet most have an almost grandmotherly sense of humour, like a jar full of pickled bums made of cotton and stitched pantyhose. You’re taken aback as you helplessly move in to examine the details.
Starting with resin, wood and oil paint, Griebel’s sculptures can include metal — or in the case of his exercise-ball-sized skeletal head All the Animals I’ve Ever Eaten — sterilized bones and shells.
“My family farms, so they’re from animals we’ve raised and consumed. They’re all hand-bleached and I had to go through all that thinking of those animals. It’s like an ossuary.”
Griebel, who began as a painter, explains, “I was building these ephemeral figures built of natural material that I was documenting through painting. I was finding those were way more interesting, maybe because they occupied space — I didn’t care as much, they were more absurd.
“The only sculptures I’d made was Halloween costumes out of papier-mâché as a child — everything came from there. I think of them as something you could wear and move in and operate like a puppet.” That’s important, but we’ll get back to it.
Even his flatwork — hand-carved rubber-stamping on thin veneer — animates the in-and-out digestive system of farming, familiar images from Griebel’s rural Alberta upbringing near Castor east of Red Deer and Saskatoon.
“On the farm,” he notes, “you raise animals, consume them, and see the bones surface.”
But here’s the thing. Griebel’s metaphors of environmental tension are actually treated as metaphors themselves — a highly personal examination of the way we habitually mistreat ourselves.
The artist explains, while he’s conscious of the environment, “It’s something we often separate from ourselves. In this context I’m taking away those barriers we make and putting it all back onto our bodies to speak about it. I don’t want to do it in a really cut and dry way where I’m saying, ‘Don’t do this, it’s wrecking the world.’ Because we’re all involved in that. So these sculptures are the result of wrestling with those ideas and my own consumption.”
Griebel notes, for example, that in moving between Edmonton, his workspace outside of Sundre 255 south and his studio in New York City, “these things go in crates and take fuel when they’re moved around. I don’t drive a car, but I’m using energy in ways that are totally non-sustainable.
“Through being playful, that cartooning you mentioned, a lot of real issues rise to the surface. There’s humour in (the sculptures). But there’s also those grotesque images of animals we’ve all seen of animals struggling in oil slicks. But I’m part of it. A consumer.”
Many of the figures stand on stained cinder blocks, a little courtyard. The show is intentionally arranged like a Parisian sculpture park with a central fountain. “The idea of a garden is it’s a place we go to reflect on nature — but we’re also manipulating it. My garden’s been paved over,” he laughs, sweeping his arm out over dc3’s cement floor. “The only natural elements left are on these bodies — these little bits of nature left, being compromised in various ways.” He laughs again, “And the fountain is full of brackish water and litter!”
This is actually tea, but I did go over and smell it — just in case. It’s almost disappointingly neutral but, you know, health codes.
“These works are very personal, they’re not broad, sweeping statements. They’re about me thinking about my own body and how I’m consuming.” After all, including our minds, he notes, “We all pollute ourselves in various ways.”