On the Introverts by Forest City Gallery

the Introverts

MĂŠlanie Myers Robert Taite David Woodward the Introverts

Forest City Gallery June 17 - July 29, 2016

Like Coming Home From Vacation Written by Jenna Faye Powell

Since the Introverts was installed at Forest tainty. The story I wrote, of the same name City Gallery, we’ve been talking about Maggie Nelson’s Bluets a lot. Not because this exhibition is particularly blanketed in shades of cobalt (to my surprise), but because the works created for this show were inspired by a similarly biographical short story steered by the colour blue.

as the exhibition, ended up being only four short paragraphs. The artists were not privy to the fact that these four paragraphs made up the middle chunk of a longer and more specific narrative. Meyers, Taite and Woodward only received the sleek and abstract centre of the narrative. The complete story is as follows. The bolded text indicates the section that was provided to the artists.

Using the story as material and/or conceptual inspiration, artists Mélanie Myers, Robert Taite, and David Woodward created original works to react and respond to its themes and imagery. For instance, the artists were encouraged to consider how memory and colour informs their practice. They were invited to follow the story’s conceptual threads as they saw fit, with encouragement to consider ideas around sanctuary. This exhibition was my second experience with curating, and this strategy of bringing new works together—without seeing them prior to the exhibition—was carried out in a cloud of excitement, anxiety and uncer-

Her best friend grew up in a lovely suburban home. It was a warm home that was covered in dog hair and always smelt of pasta sauce. It was a home that had multiple junk drawers, and outside were three semi-manicured boxwoods. It was a house not unlike her family’s house. The tv was always on too loud. His bedroom was painted a deep navy blue and where they spent most of their time. The colour was way too dark for the

small space and it dimmed every object in there. It usually took a few minutes for her eyes to adjust to the atmosphere. In stark contrast to the easy beige of the rest of the house, his bedroom blue was wet and rich. In the daytime the whole space was blanketed in a comforting haze. At night it was too dark to navigate, even with a lamp on. They never figured out how to reconcile the depth of the space. She often banged her right knee on his computer chair even after he strategically moved it as far into the corner as possible. The consistent bruise on her leg was a different colour blue.

pillowcases. She eventually gave up trying to keep them mounted, and one year for his birthday she gifted hundreds of her old stars in a wrapped shoebox. His dad swore, told her it was a waste of petroleum and helped hang them all the next day.

Before catching the bus in the morning, he would open his blinds to let the sun at the stars. The stars closer to the window recharged faster, and always shone a saturated, alien green. Further from the energizing light, the stars above his bed emitted the familiar hazy Blue. Blue darkened the stars, and the stars cast It was a colour you’d expect to see in the back onto Blue. dining room of an interior design magazine, not in a child’s bedroom. This par- One Friday, on the night of their biweekly ticular colour was a mis-tint purchased at sleepover, he received news that his parents a hardware store for an 80% discount. A won the dream home lottery. His family was colour that another family had carefully to own a new, enormous red brick house in selected but never picked up. a neighbourhood with no mature trees and many dusty driveways. His parents arrived Over the course of their friendship home that night with a few friends—all loud, they’d save their allowances and walk all perspiring. Both he and his best friend to the mall to purchase packs of glow- were invited upstairs to celebrate with his in-the-dark stars. They both fixed the parents and the other red-faced adults. The stars onto the ceilings in their respective adults gave them each a half glass of chambedrooms. The ceiling in her room was pagne over the course of the night. None of finished with an extra-textured stucco the rented movies they had carefully selectcoating, so they never stayed up for long. ed were watched that evening. When the stars fell they brought a large dusting of old stucco with them onto her In the morning they helped clean up, find-

ing crusty wine glasses and empty bags of chips stashed in weird places around the house. The parents suggested making a game of cleaning, and the kids were rewarded with waffles. With coarse voices, the parents called the rest of their friends to share the news.

It had a set of three shaped boxwoods in its front lawn. In the new home both she and the dog had to wear paper slippers on the hardwood floors. The slippers were a light, hospital-blue, the only blue in the house.

In the abbreviated version of the story, coShe visited his house five more times over the lour volunteers itself as the protagonist— next few months. When she did visit, it was subtly eclipsing the kids’ narrative. Blue to help pack or move oddly shaped plastic becomes a character, a catalyst and an enviboxes. His new home was only four blocks ronment. It’s a place to find solace, a place away. It was also warm, and was triple the to lose your footing, a blue so dense and assize of their previous linoleum-lined home. sertive it reflects on all of the characters and

objects existing in the navy-coated room. This particular blue rubs off on you with similarly coloured bruises, so you can take it with you. I can imagine as you soak into it, it soaks into you, like a too-soft pillow top mattress.

to stay under and get out from under.” Like trusting the roof above you, this makes me think that when colour is immersive it feels warm and safe. With so much weight on blue in the story, it was shocking the works in this exhibition weren’t more … blue. They were overspread with beautiful and dirty oranges, greys and organic tones. When blue appears in the works, it is as punctuation. the Introverts’ artists avoided using blue strictly as a personality or character, but instead used it as a marker of a moment. Surveying the blue

Blue in this story resists easy connotations. The colour isn’t cold or unwelcoming. Blue produces an environment that is simultaneously comforting and uncertain, the perfect terrain for an adventure of mental kind. To return to Bluets, the experience of blue is “as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought

in the works, its deep indigos, I am reminded of a sharp pin piercing a map: a marker of a time or memory, a marker that shuffles you back to a designated and earmarked moment that you’ve called upon before— a feeling you visit from time to time. In Robert Taite’s sculpture-painting-hybrid, “consistence interior atmosphere,” blue/black is a feeling that fits snuggly into another feeling. In Mélanie Myers’ drawings, it is a texture that can’t be put into words, but you can feel blue in the back of your throat when that specific smell or noise crosses you. In David Woodward’s collages, blue is when something hits against your shin, but you feel it as an itch on your elbow. Blue becomes that thing you can’t quite describe but that nonetheless remains specific, like a temporary synesthesia—so much so, that a recently published guide to the condition, describing the confusing or mixing of senses, was titled Wednesday Is Indigo Blue.

haze. Her large-scale drawings depict wildly ubiquitous narratives constructed with pencil crayon. Her work feels like a lukewarm cup of coffee, filled with the promise of sharpening our midday minds. With murky reflections of license plates in puddles, and depictions of skewed orange-bricked schools, Myers’ spaces are non-specific places that we can all recall with ease. They feel like talking about tv. Evoking the feeling of corporate logos, Taite’s paintings are equally familiar, but less domestic and more symbolic. Stylish, not but quite sleek, the paintings feel like something digital until closer inspection, the specks of rogue paint and corners of stretched canvas remind us of the artist’s (skilled) hand. Yet these constructions are not readymades. As exemplified in Taite’s work, “deep stark easy,” some shapes simply want to be together, like a triangle roof desperately seeking its square base.

Resisting the urge to simply depict the narrative, and knowing that memory is a deceptive and pliable thing, the exhibiting artists have contemplated what form memories can take. Works in this exhibition negotiate between the shared and the intimate, between simple symbolism and the profoundly personal. Myers’ work might offer the clearest example of this. Her drawings remind us of not being alone when we sink into the everyday 4 PM work-induced and chalky

Blue becomes less important at the end of the short story, and through the process of curating the show, the short story became less significant to this exhibition. Woodward’s cement sculptures, as potentially the least representational work in the exhibition, point to this miniaturization or loosening. In On Longing, Susan Stewart states that to “speak of miniaturization in narrative is to engage in fiction,” and—in a sense—it

is also to speak about amplification. Woodword’s works are their own stories: stories that have been shrunk, edited and focused. With miniaturization comes concentration. Spending time with Woodward’s collages, all visceral impressions feel amplified even in their miniature forms.

reotypes and clichés, on the futility of categorizing people or things as introverted and extroverted. It isn’t the artwork or the artists in exhibition that are ‘introverted.’ It’s not even the characters in the story. Instead, it is the experiential quality of this particular intimacy with blue. the Introverts speaks to the paradox of being meditative, reserved, Throughout the Introverts, as in Bluets, co- yet still self-assured. We are in the comfort lour isn’t just a character or environment. It and confidence of being alone, and in knowis a medium in which to address and reflect ing others are alone too. The exhibition feels on personal and ubiquitous memory, on ste- like coming home from vacation.

CITATIONS 1 2

Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Seattle: Wave Books, 2009), page 1. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), page 65.

IMAGES 1 2 3

computer design home, Robert Taite, 2016 Installation image of the Introverts, 2016 Installation image of the Introverts, 2016

Acknowledgments Forest City Gallery gratefully acknowledges the operational support of The Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council, The London Arts Council and The City of London. Thank you to Lynn Davis for the sponsorship of Forest City Gallery’s Publication Project. FCG also acknowledges the support of its Memberships, volunteers, and past and present Board of Directors & Staff. Thank you to Brenda Fuhrman for the sponsorship of Forest City Gallery’s Artist Talk series since 2012. Thank you to Chris and Lina Bowden for the sponsorship of Forest City Gallery’s Hear Here music series. Thank you to Colin Miner and Liza Eurich for beginning this project, and Julia Beltrano who was the Gallery Director in 2012. Thank you to all of the past exhibiting artists: Raymond Boisjoly, Amy Lockhart, Anthea Black, Thea Yabut, Amélie Brisson-Darveau, Christine Negus, Aryen Hoekstra, Jen Aitken, Mélanie Myers, Robert Taite, and David Woodward. Thank you to all of the writers: Henry Adam Svec, Jon Davies, Kim Neudorf, Jennifer Kennedy, Daniella Sanader, Vanessa Brown & Jason Dickson, Jenna Faye Powell, Mack Ludlow and Dylan Macaulay. And, a huge thank you to Aylmer Express for the printing of this publication. Images copyright of Forest City Gallery Current Gallery Director: Jenna Faye Powell Design by Liza Eurich, Programming Chair and cover by Lucas Stenning, Member at Large This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Sharealike License. ISBN: 978-0-9692001-2-3 © 2016 Forest City Gallery