Fiona Ackerman - G L A S S L A N D S

GLASSLANDS

Fiona Ackerman Winsor Gallery Vancouver, 2016

Arcadia, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 66 x 66�

Wishful Images in a Mirror Dr Peter Johnson Bath, UK. 2016 Gardens are involved in the histories of leisure, of social classes, of religious symbolism, of utopia and paradise, of jokes and festivals, of journeys and exploration, and of theatre; and they touch on the theories of sculpture, painting, perspective, geology, botany, medicine, and hydraulics, to name a few (Elkins).

Fiona Ackerman makes a mirror box, an enclosure, a theatre, a disruption of images, as both an invention and exploration of gardens. Rather than the tradition of depicting gardens, bounded spaces, the canvasses embody the process of gardening, cultivating an impossible space: a medley of sculptured cut-outs, with branches, grasses, leaves entangled and entangling. The density of foliage is ceaselessly reflected and refracted in texture, colour, size and dimension to produce something that is both a display and a performance. Am I in a glass house or outside? These inventions seem in-between.

I am positioned close-up as if I could reach inside or outside, but to get where? Glasslands prompt the questions: what is a garden and what are the possibilities of these curious spaces... ?

Some etymological lessons The landscape historian John Dixon Hunt explains how the Old Persian term pairidaeza derives from pairi (around) and daeza (wall). The word was Hellenised as paradeisos and reaches us as ‘paradise’. The derivation of the English word ‘garden’ itself is also closely associated with notions of a boundary: Old English geard (fence), Indo-European gher (fence) and ghort (enclosure), and Vulgar Latin gardinum (enclosure). The Hebrew origin of the word ‘garden’ carries a range of connotations linked to enclosure: ‘to protect, to shelter, to save, or to be passed over and survive as one survives a storm in the desert’.

Gardens are a special space marked-off from the everyday. But what makes these places so distinctive?

Philosopher David Cooper takes a phenomenological position, suggesting that the distinguishing feature of a garden is ‘atmosphere’ or a certain deep ‘elusive feeling’.

Gardens possess a presence. He cites fellow philosopher Roger Scruton’s Heideggerian reflection: a ‘tree in a garden is not like a tree in the forest or a field. It is not simply there… accidental. It stands and watches… converses…. with those who walk beneath it’; trees ‘gather’ other aspects of the garden in a network of ‘between-ness’.

And gardens are also persistently related to utopian thought and desire: The garden provides an image of the world, a space of simulation for paradiselike conditions, a place of otherness where dreams are realised in an expression of a better world (Meyer).

The Invention of Nature, 2016 Oil on canvas 76 x 86�

Interestingly, the garden features strongly in Thomas More’s Utopia published in Latin in 1516. The conversations that form the basis of the book take place in a garden in Antwerp; the narrative suggests that the founder of utopia must have had a ‘special interest’ in gardening; and the inhabitants of utopia are said to be particularly fond of their gardens. The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch goes so far as to suggest that in More’s utopia: …. life is a garden.

In his own utopian reflections Bloch describes the building of certain gardens as ‘wishful images in the mirror’, or manifestations of hope. Domestic gardens are described as ‘the open air shaped in accordance with our wishes’.

Garden and gardening have also become prominent in recent narratives about utopia. For example, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, the invention and production of a new planet is expressed through the creation of a dazzling range of gardens: Some of the gardeners.... worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus....

Jennifer Atkinson links the above to what she perceives as a utopian impulse in the recent development of ‘guerrilla gardening’, the often clandestine practice of creating gardens in neglected and derelict spaces, conceiving horticultural potential in the most unlikely places.

In two radio broadcasts in the 1960s, the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault reflected on our fascination for utopias, the mythical spaces of our imagination, our dreams. What particularly interested Foucault was what he termed ‘local utopias’, or heterotopias, dreams that become real, that are impressed with time. As a sort of halfway illustration, he describes children’s imaginary games played in huts or tents at the end of the garden or perhaps on their parents bed, becoming for a time a ship tossed by the waves, threatened by pirates, or perhaps today a space-ship journeying into the unknown, meeting and overcoming dangers.

But Foucault suggests such imaginary spaces are not just the preserve of children.

He evokes diverse examples from gardens, to cemeteries to prisons, to brothels. In different ways, these inventions are both unreal and real, in place and out of place, in time and out of time.

Gardens both mirror and transform what is outside.

Gibson Burrell and Karen Dale have reflected that garden utopias are also ‘riven with paradoxes and contradictions’, embracing organising and disorganising tendencies that involve boundary, formality, planning and design, as well as spirituality, fecundity, pleasure, transgression, playfulness and unpredictability. Each tendency sustains the other in a concentrated enclosure.

Others have suggested that the experience of a garden overcomes the customary distinctions between head and heart, ratio and emotion, instinct and intellect and encapsulates a ‘utopian time’ (Dean).

Corners in the Glass, 2016 Oil on canvas 67 x 88.5�

The semiotician Louis Marin’s study of the textual play within Rousseau’s ‘Le Jardin de Julie’ - a letter within Rousseau’s epistolary novel La Nouvelle Héloïse – is a wonderful illustration of such a utopian time. Marin delights in the ambiguous textual play within the description of Julie’s garden. He travels through the text as if taking a stroll. The garden, Rousseau’s text and Marin’s own commentary become digressions, simple delight and pleasure, a form of daydreaming, a certain idleness. Marin reflects on how the garden in Rousseau’s text is an intensely ambivalent place. A typical example is found in the way Julie describes the construction of the garden: …. nature did it all, but under my direction, and there is nothing here that I have not designed.

There is for Marin ‘the antique paradox’ of a garden: the unsurpassable contradiction, where art and nature, artifice and truth, imagination and the real, representation and being, mimesis and the origin, play hideand seek.

Marin goes on to conceptualise Rousseau’s text as capturing a ‘non-place’, without perspective, neither inside nor outside, both opening and enclosing. He explores how Rousseau encapsulates the otherworldliness of the garden through a ‘promenade-reverie’, evoking a place that ruptures both time and space.

Marin makes a concluding appeal to garden designers and artists – a call that reverberates throughout Glasslands: You who build gardens, don’t make parks or green spaces, make margins. Don’t make leisure and game parks, make places of jouissance, make closures that are openings. Don’t make imaginary objects, make fictions. Don’t make representations, make empty spaces, gaps…...

References Bloch, E. (1986) [1954] The Principle of Hope volume 1, trans. Plaice, N. et al, Oxford: Blackwell.

Burrell, G. and Dale, K (2002) ‘Utopiary: utopias, gardens and organisation’ in M. Parker (ed.) Utopia and Organisation, Oxford: Blackwell.

Cooper, D. (2006) A Philosophy of Gardens, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dean, M. (1997) ‘Nature as Book – a Book as Nature’, Journal of Garden History (17).

Elkins, J. (1993) ‘On the Conceptual Analysis of Gardens’, Journal of Garden History (13).

Foucault, M. (2009) [1966] Le Corps Utopique, Les Héterérotopies: Clamecy : Lignes.

Marin, L. (1992) Lectures traversières, Paris: Albin Michel.

Meyer, S. (2003) Midlertidige Utopier [Temporary Utopia] Oslo: Museum of Contemporary Art. More, T. (1965) [1516] Utopia, London: Penguin.

Hunt, J. D. (2000) Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory, London: Thames & Hudson.

Robinson, K. S. (1996) Blue Mars, London: HarperCollins.

The Riddle of the Universe l, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 56 x 48�

The Riddle of The Universe ll, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 56 x 48�

La Bleu, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 54 x 60�

Hypno Rockery, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 57 x 57�

Glassland l, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 66 x 66�

Glassland 2, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 66 x 66�

Claire de Lune, 2016 Oil on canvas 40 x 30�

The Moons, 2016 Oil on canvas 40 x 28�

Somewhere I have Never Traveled, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 57 x 57�

The Promise of More, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 60 x 75�

Winterland, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 40 x 30�

Physis, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 66 x 66�

Sleepwalk, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 66 x 54�

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. – Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620 Glasslands looks at the garden on canvas as both a site and symbol of imagination, a wholly artificial construct where we harness the wild and reinvent our world. Defined by boundaries and dependent on enclosure, a garden occupies an in-between space reflecting seemingly opposing forces. A proposed utopia, it is a re-writing of the wild through exclusion and curation.

These new paintings emerged from a process of exploration beginning with pieces of painted paper cut in shapes of foliage, placed inside a mirror box (hence, glass-land). The resulting three-dimensional mirrored images shatter, amplify and disrupt conventional views of nature rendered on a flat surface, giving rise to lush compositions with depth and unexpected juxtapositions. In this restrained inventory of sources, the artificiality of the parts contrasted with recognizable flashes of leaves, branches, blades of grass, offering a breeding ground for invention.

According to Foucault’s concept of Heterotopia, a garden is an other place where the true wild is reflected but subversively controlled. It both imitates and contests reality by simultaneously presenting a wild environment and its opposite, an orchestrated performance of nature, a choreography of growth. Like the garden, a painting also acts as a heterotopia, both reflecting and re-envisioning elements of human experience. On canvas, the limitless potential of colour and form are steered and directed. As with a garden, a painting emerges by defining limits, following a system of radical subtraction. The decisions of colour, composition and style a painter makes must necessarily fit within parameters defined by each new painting. A successful painting acts as a functioning organism. When all aesthetic elements align, a healthy eco-system prospers.

While exploring the many incarnations of artificial gardens on canvas, I also considered ways in which the garden as a concept organizes our experience of the natural and social worlds alike: the garden as structural blueprint, an organizational system of exclusion whereby dominance is secured and naturalized.

Civilization invents gardens by engineering race, culture, gender and economics, to name a few. In these systems, any idea, belief or person who challenges the defined perspective is excluded – or weeded out. The result is a dominant system, presented as a natural order. Our metaphorical gardens are numerous and overlapping. They are artificial, heterotopic organisms which reflect a natural structure, and in doing so, pervert it.

As individuals we are not able to see ourselves except in mirrors, through these series of reflections, called society, civilization, polity, nationality, gender, race. Perhaps it is through building and then experiencing metaphorical gardens that we can come to know and define who we really are as a society, a culture, a species.

Historically, the garden has also been a site of refuge. One escapes to the garden for reflection, to go into the self. One is not challenged by the garden, but freed to explore in its protective utopian safety, artificial though it may be.

As creative creatures, we come to know ourselves through what we imagine. The painter becomes a painter through painting. Our society continually reshapes itself by reinventing, then experiencing different systems of order. By creating and then experiencing one structure, we initiate an opportunity for reinvention. By recreating the wild through our own hand, we come to know it, and ourselves.

Fiona Ackerman - 2016

Time Landscape, 2016 Oil and acrylic on canvas 30 x 60�

Elysian Fields, 2016 Oil on canvas 48 x 72�

FIONA ACKERMAN Education 2002 BFA, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Visual Arts, Vancouver 1998-2000 Concordia University, Painting and Drawing, Montreal Solo / 2 Person Exhibitions 2016 Glasslands, Winsor Gallery Vancouver 2016 “Mimetic Workshop: Studio Still Lifes of Fiona Ackerman and Kelly Lycan, Surrey Art Gallery, BC 2016 Spiegel im Spiegel, Galerie Kremers, Berlin 2016 “Chaos Theory” Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary AB 2015 “Night Driving” p|m Gallery, Toronto ON 2015 “Aus der Wunderkammer des Friedrich Meckseper”, White Brush Gallery, Düsseldorf Germany (+ Catalog) 2014 “What has Already Been Said is Still Not Enough”, Galerie Pfaff, Schwarzenbruck, Germany 2014 “It’s not You, Ir’s Me”, Winsor Gallery, Vancouver BC 2014 “Amplifier”, Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary AB 2013 “Die Ordnung der Dinge”, White Brush Gallery, Düsseldorf Germany 2012 “Expeditions Through the Mirrror” Galerie Claus Steinrötter, Müster Germany 2012 “Heterotopia”, Winsor Gallery, Vancouver BC 2011 “Celebratory Gunfire”, Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary AB 2010 “Artificial Kingdom” Parts Gallery, Toronto ON 2009, “A Harlequin Escapade” Diane Farris Gallery, VancouverBC 2008, “Reminiscence” View Art Gallery, Victoria BC 2005“Heavy Sky Over Surabaya” Galerie Jurgen Kaspar, Nuremberg, DE Collections Richard Ivey School of Business Bankhaus Bauer HT, Stuttgart Germany BMO - Bank of Montreal Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada Polygon Awards 2015 Sobey Art Award - Longlist 2009 Honorable Mention, Kinston Prize Portrait Competition, Kingston Arts Council

Eden, 2016 Oil on canvas 60 x 70�