FRESHLY PICKED
Museum-quality exhibition includes works borrowed from private and public collections across Canada
Artist Gathie Falk’s bright ceramic apple stacks feel just as crisp as they did when she made them in the ’60s and ’70s.
Gathie Falk: The Things in My Head Until Dec. 19 | Equinox Gallery
Gathie Falk’s stacks of bright red ceramic apples may have been made in the 1960s and 1970s but they look completely contemporary. I’m reluctant to say timeless because of how that word has been misused when applied to art. Let’s say they’re not in any way dated.
They’re piled in neat, ordered stacks that recall pyramids or structures built on geometric grids. Yet, because each apple is individually crafted, the stacks of fruit aren’t as sterile and harsh as you’d fine in hard-edged minimalist sculptures. The edges of Falk’s fruit are softer. They’re much more inviting to look at and think about.
There are several stacks of Falk’s stacks of ceramic apples along with different size stacks of grapefruit and oranges in an exhibition of the artist’s work at Equinox Gallery in The Flats in east Vancouver.
Falk is 87 and keeps on creating new work. Included among the ceramic stacks of fruit are recent bronze stacks of white snowballs. While the orderly stacks of fruit always reminded me of stacks of munitions or bombs, Falk has made the connection explicit with the bronze snowballs by titling them Arsenal, as well as with the number of snowballs in each one. The biggest pile, for example, has 140 snowballs.
The idea of a bronze snowball is perverse: something soft and transitory is represented by material that is hard and permanent. The title really heightens the clash of opposites in a work which references — global warming notwithstanding — a quintessentially Canadian winter weapon.
In the novel Fifth Business, the action is set in motion at the very beginning when a stone in a snowball is thrown by a youngster and hits and injures a female character. The act sets off a series of long-lasting and lifechanging events. Falk’s snowballs are more than just snowballs: they suggest that a culture of violence starts in small, hardly noticed events such as snowball fights among children.
The reference to weapons isn’t incidental. Born in Manitoba, Falk is the daughter of ethnic German Mennonites who emigrated to Canada from Russia. As a Mennonite, Falk believes in the tenets of the Christian denomination which includes a commitment to pacifism.
“I never try to put a message into my work, but I very often get one out of it,” Falk said in the catalogue for a 1985 exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The exhibition isn’t a retrospective but a survey of some of the highlights from Falk’s career of more than 50 years.
Called The Things in My Head, it brings together her justifiably famous stacks of red ceramic apples along with several examples of her paintings, a video of her performance art, as well as other three-dimensional works such as ceramic shoes in glassfronted cabinets and bronze dresses. One of her rare photographic works is Crossed Ankles. It’s comprised of 90 silkscreen images of crossed ankles dramatically displayed on one wall.
Falk’s solo show fills the entire gallery. None of the works appear crowded together in the retrofitted former industrial space. One exhibition room with chairs is the perfect place to sit, stare and admire Falk’s magnificent paintings of the bright red poppies and flat, concrete sidewalk in front of her house. The museum-quality exhibition includes works borrowed from private and public collections across the country.
One of the qualities of works in the exhibition is that many of them look uncanny in the surreal sense of familiar objects that have been tweaked in some way to make them feel strange and unusual. The reason for that is because Falk listens to her subconscious. A partly formed vision will flash in her mind. Then she has to literally work it out of her. And the process of working it out relates to the form and the material she finally decides will best represent her vision: will it be, for example, a two-dimensional painting or a three dimensional sculpture in ceramic?
“I have to work it out until everything fits and the piece is perfect, emotionally and visually,” she has said. “Then it’s like a piece of music without words.”
One of the uncanny works in the exhibition is The Problem With Wedding Veils. It’s a white wedding veil and long train made from papier mâché that projects forward. It looks like it’s taking off, but it can’t. It’s weighed down by two boulders which are weathered in a way that suggests they have as much of a history as the wedding veil. As a whole, the work is a model of frustration: the promise and hope of moving forward combined with the reality of being held down and unable to break free.
Falk’s wedding veil looks exactly like the kind of work that you might meet in a dream. Similar to Falk’s other sculptural works of shoes, shirts and dresses, the body is absent but not forgotten. Falk has described her work as “a veneration of the ordinary.” I find her best pieces are exactly those that transform ordinary, everyday objects into something new.
“You’re never going to be able to see things in detail unless you can look at your kitchen table, see it and find significance in it — or the shadow that is cast by a cup, or your toothbrush,” she has said. “Seeing the detail around you makes you able to see large things better.”