A backward glance
Pop-up showcase through a gallery window looks back at some of Hamilton’s leading artists
The front window of a James Street North gallery has become a window into Hamilton’s past.
You Me Gallery is showcasing 45 Hamilton artists who were active from the 1970s to 2000 in Building Cultural Legacies. The pop-up retrospective includes paintings by the Young Contemporaries, a group of talented individuals who came together in the 1980s and ’90s. I’ve chosen three paintings — by Judi Burgess, John Kinsella and Lisa Wohrle — that explore the human figure.
Burgess painted “Quest” when she was pregnant in 1995.
“The meaning of our individual lives is something we all ponder,” Burgess says. “This question inspired much of my work at that time. There was a lot of introspection going on that was reflected in the work.”
The head-and-shoulders woman is not, however, a portrait. Wearing a transparent veil over her hair, she holds a rose. Masklike faces hover behind her.
“The rose — the unfolding of the flower to eventually reveal the depth of beauty within it — was meant to symbolize a sort of life journey that lay ahead.”
Another head-and-shoulders figure characterizes Kinsella’s “Dandelion Man.” Unlike Burgess, who softens facial features, Kinsella picks out parts of the face with emphatic dark lines in the forehead and chin, leaving one side of the face in shadow.
Kinsella says this is a kind of selfportrait.
“It was not focused so much on a physical likeness but rather on the way I felt at the time,” he says. “This is a portrait of a driven young creative person wearing the edgy style of the punk/new wave movement and feeling more like a weed than a flower.”
His father had earlier published “Weeds and Other Flowers,” a book of poetry.
Wohrle’s “Surgery” was a reaction to the death of her brother.
“In 1994, my brother died from melanoma at age 28,” she says. “It was a very sad and frightening time for our family and this was constantly on my mind at that time.
“This painting was inspired by an article I’d read about a young woman who had melanoma. Her cancer was diagnosed early and she survived, albeit after a series of major surgeries.”
Wohrle comes up close to her partly clothed subject, cropping her body so that the scar on her torso stands out.
I wondered whether the three still favoured the human figure.
A “yes” from Burgess, although temptation sometime beckons.
“It’s funny you should ask,” she says. “I have been trying to get away from it and try something less definitive. But even most recently I was compelled to once again use the human figure in my work as the conduit for my thoughts. I guess it is that an image of a human is relatable but also so diverse in expressing all complex ranges of, well, everything and anything human.
“I plan to try more nonfigurative work and see where it leads, but the human figure will probably draw me back in again.”
Wohrle has never left the human figure.
“I always return to the human figure, and mainly to portraiture,” says Wohrle. “I am drawn to the ways in which we choose to present ourselves publicly, and how a person’s lived experiences are expressed in their features. In more recent works, I am interested in how growth, adversity, maturity and strength are reflected in our faces. I am currently working on a portrait of my 80-year-old aunt.”
Kinsella, who is Wohrle’s partner — they met in the art program at McMaster before the Young Contemporaries formed — took time off from artmaking to raise their two children.
“When I started painting again, it was like a release of pent-up creative energy and images of the landscape of southern Ontario came pouring out of me.”
So now he’s a landscape painter.
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator, YouTube video maker and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art.