Lori Mairs The Bones of Tobias An exhibition at the Lake Country Art Gallery June 1st to July 13th, 2012
The diverse forms of the earth still speak and offer guidance to humankind, albeit in gestures that we cannot always directly understand. ~ David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
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Curatorial Statement
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n the Bones of Tobias, Kelowna based artist Lori Mairs asks us to honour the sacred quality of our very essence, its mystery, its density and lightness and in turn recognize these same qualities in the natural world around us, all through contemplation and creations of bones and metal. In the history of art, bones, or specifically human skulls, represented the fleeting quality of human existence in the vanitas paintings created in the seventeenth-century by noted Dutch painters such as Joannes Vermeer and Pieter Claesz. In the 1930’s, the skull paintings of American artist Georgia O’Keefe showcased the beauty of our bones; skulls appearing as talismans of the mystical and sacred. In contemporary Canadian art, first nations Canadian artist Brian Jungen’s sculpture “Shapeshifter”, a 21 foot whale skeleton made of mass produced white plastic deck chairs, complicates our relationship to bone by substituting plastic structures for a material that is instantly intimate and identifiable. Looking at bones, antlers, teeth and horn, each of which is quite different structurally, creates simultaneous feelings of fear and excitement. In contemporary society, a personal encounter with bone is more often than not reserved for the hallowed halls of natural history or anthropology museums, where the skulls and skeletons of our ancestors and their prey are preserved. In Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds expositions that travel all over the world, real human bodies are plasticized and presented for display in a whole manner of poses and types of dissection. Here the revulsion and fascination with the internal workings of the human body is palpable; the fact that these bodies once housed a living human being never far from the mind. In Lori Mairs’ work, her treatment of her materials elevate and honour the life forces that generated the bones, teeth and antlers she works with. Whether gifted to her by friends or the land or the Captain of the Hunt, a title given to a member of a Metis hunting party, Mairs works with these materials to enrich their inherent intimacy and power by transmuting them through her artistic insertions, compositions and reconsiderations. She creates work that brings the inside out. In the following texts, Carolyn McHardy examines the insides, or history of Mairs’ work, to look at where it has come from and how it has changed in its process of exhumation. Nancy Holmes ponders the magic of bringing the inside out, of making the rarely seen into pieces of adornment for unknown beings or powers. Katie Brennan, Curator, Lake Country Art Gallery
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Full on Exodus
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xodus, one of the signature pieces in Lori Mairs’s installation entitled “Pleroma: The Middle Point of Equilibrium”, was first exhibited at the BFA graduating exhibition at UBC Okanagan in 2005. Other works in the ensemble carried titles such as “Albert Magnus”, “Palengenesis” and “Abraxas”. Together they mounted a complicated allegory about one of humankind’s oldest quests, the search for self. Reflecting on these works seven years later, and upon the occasion of an exhibition of Mairs’s latest body of work, it seems to me that Exodus was quite possibly the seminal work in the 2005 installation, the point of the compass, as it were, that not only showed where Mairs’s work was coming from, but more importantly, where it was going. Exodus is now in a private collection where it sits quietly on a knoll overlooking a small creek, its boat-like form covered in cherry blossoms in summer and snow in winter. It looks like an archaeological fragment, a sort of rotting trireme, that might have washed up on the shores of Lake Okanagan thousands of years ago. It isn’t, of courseit is a thoroughly contemporary early twenty first century construction comprising twenty pounds of beeswax, four hundred feet of jute and seventy pounds of steel. But it feels very old and suggests ancient maritime sagas: Odysseus’s unnamed ship, Jason’s Argo or the ships of the Achaean army that sailed to Troy. This engagement with mythology as the basis of cultural rituals which continue to be performed in the present informs much of Mairs’ work: thus this Exodus is not a re-telling of the specific historical event that is linked to its name but rather seizes on the etymological Greek roots of the word meaning “going out”. Within the original installation, the seeker in Exodus, in Mairs’ words, “cast off”. This nautical reference suggests the rich possibilities presented by metaphorical journeys across oceans and seas. Has Mairs’ work cast off or gone forth from Exodus in the years since it was done? I believe it has. The fervent attachment to the possibilities of ordinary materials made extraordinary remains: jute and steel have given way to bone and metals such as copper and silver but the fragrantly pungent beeswax continues to fascinate her. So do ideas of working with individual items that have deeply personal meanings, sometimes because they have been given to her, often because they are part of her autobiography. But the sense of quest remains deeply embedded in these new works. Exodus (and of course the other works in the installation of which it was part) clarified a number of things for Mairs, perhaps most of all the idea that art can continue to be about the big issues in this world: life and death, our relationship with the earth on which we live, and those stories we tell ourselves to help untangle the bewildering threads of humankind’s many narratives.
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Carolyn MacHardy, Associate Professor, Art History Department of Critical Studies, UBC Okanagan
Exodus, 2005, steel, rope, beeswax, 7.5’x3.9’x4.5’
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Seeing the Unseen: Lori Mairs’s The Bones of Tobias
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ori Mairs helps us see what has been unearthed. Her primary materials are metal and bone. Metal, as miners know, is the bone marrow of the earth, the rich seams and clots inside rock. And bones are the organic girders buried in our flesh. Unearthed—to be pulled out of the earth or uncovered, dug up. But her work is not de-earthed— her pieces remind of us inner workings, what churns and forms inside things: magnet, metals, rocks, skeletons, teeth. We are reminded of what’s inside us and the planet. A skeleton of bird in a nest of metal—the piece writhes with its hidden energies exposed, the energies of inward things. This unearthing is not necessarily gentle: she twists the metal, makes it spin and turn, or become patina-ed in encounters with the fierce forces of outside – oxygen and fire and acid. What is inside becomes honed, stressed, and bristling in display. She does this inside-out process with nearly every piece she makes—including her infamous feces plates or her horse’s umbilical cord floating in a glass jar, both of which she created during her BFA years, or in her Woodhaven Eco Art Project pieces that erupt out of sites of human habitation that have literally been buried beneath the litter of time. She turns the inside out, forces us to see what’s concealed, to celebrate it as feast, monument, or festive ornament. Hence the jewellery. What is inside, usually darkened, hidden, and buried—whether it’s bones, metal, archetypal forms—becomes adornment, becomes something to cherish and be seen as precious, some inward thing to flaunt on the outside of the body. She is known in the community for her lovely bone and shed antler necklaces and earrings. But who is wearing these giant pieces of jewelry in this exhibition? Who are these ten foot necklaces and ten pound earrings for? Who is to be festooned with the inner workings of the planet now? I suspect she is decorating the forces of the earth itself. Some invisible, powerful beings who live among us, the forces of the natural world that, in other cultures more intimately affected by nature’s powers, have been incarnate through deep mythology but that we no longer even imagine. She is creating her ornaments for these ignored powers. Her work is trending towards such explorations of what is unseen around us, unseen even in the light and air. In the past, she has delved into the body of animal and earth; she is now trying to manifest what is unseen all around us, not what is buried, but what we are walking through. She is thickening the flesh of the skin of the planet, making visual the sea of air and currents of light, gravity, and sound we live in. She is asking us to celebrate and see as dazzling, decorated, and tangible the powers of the physical world.
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Nancy Holmes, Associate Professor, Creative Writing Department Of Creative Studies, UBC Okanagan
In the Age of the Ram it Was So, 2011, deer bone, copper, brass, 12.5”x3”x5”
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Toby 2012, moose skull, copper, 12’
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Toby (detail)
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We’re in This Together, 2012, various teeth, wood, copper, 12.5”x6.5”x6”
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We’re in this Together (detail)
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I’ve Heard There Was A Secret Chord, 2012, various teeth, deer antler, onyx, sterling silver, 19�
Ring, 2012, brass, moose bones, rose quartz, diameter: 17�
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I Have Tried In My Way to Be Free, 2012, bird skull, wood, copper, feather, 9”x13”x8”
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The Paladin, 2011, animal skull, paint, Swarovski Crystal, 5”x3.5”x2.5”
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Remember Me When The West Wind Moves, 2011, bones, brass, paper, 6.5�
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They Shielded Her For three Days, 2012, deer skull, copper, 4”x9”x16”
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Bracelet, 2012, moose bones, copper, 7’6�
Waiting On The Wave, 2012, bone, wood, brass, copper, 9.5”x9”x6”
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The Mission of the Lake Country Art Gallery is: To celebrate art as an essential part of the human experience, enhancing our community through art and art experiences.
Special Thank You to: Carolyn MacHardy Nancy Holmes Marie Carlson Katie Cornish Lisa Finch Jeannette Fox Lane and Denise Ketler Gerry Mairs Gwen Torgunrud The Lake Country Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the District of Lake Country, BC Arts Council, Central Okanagan Foundation and the United Way.
Š 2012 Lake Country Art Gallery 10356A Bottom Wood Lake Rd Lake Country BC, V4V 1T9 20
Designed by Shauna Oddleifson Printed by UBR Services Photos courtesy of the artist Cover Image: Beyond The Zero Point (detail), 2012, bird skulls, wood, steel, brass, copper ribbon