66 PIECES OF ART ON THE WALL
The City of Ottawa displays the year’s art acquisitions, from ink drawings of hardscrabble New Brunswick to staged Dionne quintuplets photos
There’s no theme to the exhibition of new acquisitions to the City of Ottawa’s art collection, so the vague sense of dark humour I immediately felt was probably due to a quartet of pieces hung together near the entrance.
Walk into the City Hall Art Gallery, where 66 pieces that were purchased by or commissioned by or donated to the city in the past year are on display to Sept. 29, and the first thing you’ll see is a pair of wickedly stark ink drawings by Amanda Balestreri. They’re depictions of farm life in New Brunswick, and what a merciless, hardscrabble existence it seems to be.
Balestreri’s work is reminiscent of that of David Blackwood, the Newfoundland-born artist whose etchings have become synonymous with the rugged culture of his home province. In Balestreri’s New Brunswick, primitive figures and skewed perspectives add to the suggestive, dark themes — titles include The Wedding Chicken, and In Death We Parted.
Next up on the same wall is Clown 17, from Richard Nigro’s recent exhibition of enigmatic and disturbing photographs he created almost 20 years ago, before he turned his focus to being a fulltime chef. The series has small children dressed in clown gear (creepy enough for some people), staring into the camera while standing in featureless rooms. In Clown 17 the child is slightly blurred, which adds to the photograph’s dark strangeness.
Up next on the wall is one of Genevieve Thauvette’s elaborately staged portraits of herself as the Dionne quintuplets. Thauvette stands in as all five quints, identically dressed in peppy yellow dresses while munching watermelons in a checkered room full of the giant gourds. Thauvette didn’t use Photoshop to make the portraits, and everything seen in the photos was physically there.
Thauvette had great success with the series a few years ago (I hereby declare that a portrait from the series hangs in the Big Beat Central collection.) The quints led a sadly exploited life as an international sensation from the moment of their births, and Thauvette’s self-portraits are compelling in their potent mix of wit and melancholy.
These tinges of dark humour continue here and there throughout the exhibition, such as Caleb Speller’s dry and cryptic homage to the work of famed Ottawa photographer Yousuf Karsh. In Kristin Bjornerud’s watercolour-andgouache drawing Paths to Wisdom, a woman loops her long ponytail over a tree branch as if to hang herself, as crows — those omnipresent symbols of darkness — look on.
Another piece that shares the darkness, if not the humour, is a spectacular painting by Marc Nerbonne, whose nightmarish scenes incorporate his photographs of roadkill. In Sparkling Deer, Nerbonne has re-animated a deer so it seems to burst through the sky in a giant manifestation of unquenchable life. If only, Nerbonne seems to be saying, nature was so immune to the predations and indifference of humans. It’s the first time in the city’s collection for Nerbonne, and for 18 other artists, says Jonathan Browns, the collections officer of the city’s public art program.
Other paintings new to the city’s collection include a piece by Amy Schissel, whose abstract acrylics give a tangible form to the cyberspace in which we now all live, even if we never otherwise see its bones and tissues.
Don Maynard’s Snow Storm, a large encaustic on panel, gives a similarly new view on winter’s wrath, which made me think of the bubbles and spots you’d see when the projectionist started a new spool of film at the cinema, back when movies were actually on film.
Snow Storm almost seems part of a diptych as it hangs next to Andrew Smith’s equally large acrylic-andcollage piece Colony 1.
Stare at Smith’s piece long enough, and it becomes the busy word of bees that it is.
Elsewhere there’s much to be found in the exhibition of pieces that, once the exhibition is over, will be distributed to the walls of city spaces.