Hannah Doerksen: A Story We Tell Ourselves About Ourselves

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RBC New Works Gallery Art Gallery of Alberta December 2, 2016 - February 20, 2017

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Hannah Doerksen pre-visualized the exhibition, A Story We Tell Ourselves About Ourselves as a paper collage of images culled from magazines, vintage product catalogues and Internet screen-grabs of film sets. As a storyboard, the images tile together, telling how the exhibition’s installation eventually takes shape. This ‘mood board’ begins with an image-based selection of Art Deco vases and various fluted vessels, and progresses in its abstraction until Doerksen’s catalogue and Internet references seem to morph into a study of funerary urns. The images in her collage develop again into elaborate bouquets, many clearly indicative of the late 1980s, some clearly c+p’d from an online flower shop, the words ‘i’m sorry’ arching in hot pink Arial over a cheap selection of white lilies.

Collage and découpage techniques are central to Doerksen’s process: work often includes obsessively hand-made paper flower arrangements made of recycled magazines. Her studio is littered

I Am A Hole in Walls of Buildings (video still), 2014 Collage, duct tape, wire and plaster plants. Bathtub with running jets, floor tiles, vinyl digital print, acrylic and crystal beads, fans, coloured lights, mirrors and speakers playing mp3 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Opening Theme) by Jack Nitzsche.

Photography: John Dean

Flowers say, ‘I don’t know what to say’

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with boxes of potential source images. Her incised, deliberate selections have evolved from glossy travel brochures of island destinations and product catalogues to, more recently, choice images from gently used porn magazines from peers in her Calgary art community. These coveted images are concealed within the laborious folding, twisting and wrapping, as Doerksen works them into elaborate flower bouquets and imitation foliage.

The artifice of this ancient craft of collaging paper flowers (originating from the early Egyptians), is now reanimated with the kitsch desires of contemporary Calgarians, reflective of Doerksen’s complex understanding of her regional natural landscape. A professional dog-walker by day, Hannah frequents parks during her daily derives, meandering through areas that have been set aside as amenity spaces for suburban developments that were conceived as areas of respite from the stresses of the city’s corporate business interests. While traversing the streets of Calgary, she often considers her connection to the built environment: her position as a woman, as an artist, within these constructed communities that generalize and prioritize values that oppose her own.

Extending beyond the construction of paper flower arrangements, Doerksen began to craft sets with more still-life simulations rife with components found in her own environment. Beginning with the singular element of plant-life, her work has evolved into assembled large vacant installations, appearing as a set for the viewer to inhabit. In her 2015 work, And We Have No Place To Leave And Nowhere To Come To, a faux waterfall of resin pools over mirrored glass, while recordings of prairie coyotes howl mournfully in the distance, blaring through a boombox behind a curtain that floats gently, buoyed by the circulations of a tinny fan.

Hannah Doerksen’s obsessive re-creations [are] of the accoutrements of leisure environments, of golf courses, funeral homes and “artificial natural spaces.” The ambience Doerksen fashions from découpaged ferns speaks to the death of the real in the prefabricated institutional spaces we routinely inhabit.1 4

Communities, or designated neighbourhoods in the Calgary area, often feature the name of a distant place. Once a prairie grasslands home to Indigenous peoples, Calgary was developed

And We Have No Place to Leave and Nowhere to Come to, 2015 Collage, vinyl, wire and plaster plants. Mirrored plexi-glass step pyramid with a resin waterfall and styrofoam, acrylic paint rocks.

Found objects, hidden fans and speakers playing audio recoding of running water and howling coyotes behind the curtains Photography: M.N. Hutchinson

To accomplish these larger installations, Doerksen creates sets that are replete with furniture products such as 1980s mirrors, faceted designs and mirror blocks intent on creating a transparent and magnified aura of reflective space; dim lighting suggestive of the aftermath of seduction and projected moving collages are bound to her aesthetic but projected or screened on vintage equipment.

Here, the colour palette and image selections found in her collages are prescient of the immersive cool tones and reflections forged by the cheap and accessible materialism of the installation’s construction, all of which is connected to Doerksen’s perception of the materials and aesthetic found in her immediate environs.

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from colonial settlement established first as a fort in 1876 and renamed after Calgary Bay on the Isle of Mull, Scotland. 2 After the discovery of oil and subsequent oil boom in Alberta, the downtown skyline rose with the 1980s relocation of many international oil company headquarters.

Meanwhile, the city’s suburban sprawl bloomed in four directions, many neighbourhoods again featuring the luring names of far away places: Tuscany, Marlborough, Coventry Hills, Hamptons, Hidden Valley, Queensland, Killarney, Glengarry, Bel Aire. The community standards requirements guiding the mass construction of many of these neighbourhood developments often impose strict design covenants.

Colour schemes and a limited menu of façade features reference the source of these far-off locations: faux colonnades, plastic manor doorway fascia, distressed villa window shutters that do not open.

These cheap and artificial building materials (imitations often forgotten as such) and their futile attempt to simulate some original other are a source of fascination for Doerksen. She employs the same materials in her installations: faux marble linoleum, snap on plaster pediments, spray can stucco.

Doerksen’s cool environments are intentionally designed composites from memories of spaces she once occupied, left with a trace of ennui.

She describes one artwork sourced from her previous experience working as a caretaker at a funeral home franchise during the boomera of Calgary’s lush early millennial days. Smoking at the edge of the memorial grounds, she became obsessed with the plumes of smoke as a symbolic vapour of life within an otherwise synthetic landscape: The small trees were planted, somewhat carelessly and in very close proximity to each other, at Fish Creek Park in southeast Calgary. The little fake pond where I would sit and smoke and pass And We Have No Place to Leave and Nowhere to Come to, 2015 Collage, vinyl, wire and plaster plants. Mirrored plexi-glass step pyramid with a resin waterfall and styrofoam, acrylic paint rocks. Found objects, hidden fans and speakers playing audio recoding of running water and howling coyotes behind the curtains Photography: M.N. Hutchinson

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I Come To Believe We All Gunna Drown, 2015 Near Replica of the bar from the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining built with plexiglass, LED strip lights, mirror and various kinds of wood.

Photography: Rita Taylor

the long days separated the provincial park from the brand new neighbouring golf course on the other side and further behind that—the fresh, massive, identical suburban homes. My only accountability was to the ghosts memorialized by the trees. For the first few weeks the place seemed haunted, but quickly it just became very beautiful and very boring. 3 There is a deep pathos, dangerously veering along the edge of pathetic, about one’s tolerance for adapting to these superficial circumstances and settling for the cheaper facsimile in one’s place of origin, when it may seem futile to create any real, systemic change. After her ruminations while walking the city, Doerksen settles on a masochistic methodology of mirroring her environ in her work, in order to see and feel it better.

Under the Influence Core references for A Story We Tell Ourselves About Ourselves are images induced by John Cassavetes’ film A Woman Under the Influence.

Exactly what kind of woman is a woman under the influence? Perhaps a woman submerged, affected, bound beneath circumstantial interior and exterior conditions that she can neither control nor adequately respond to. Doerksen’s storyboard for the exhibition découpages the Cassavetes’ film description: “A Woman valued, exploited and shamed for their emotion, expression, passion. Diagnosed hysteric…” the descriptor is left cut off towards a cliffhanger of pixilated, deserted film stills. Cassavettes’ film portrays tense family turbulence in the wake of the female lead’s psychological episodes, after her hospitalization in a mental institution.

The dramatic pallor of the shots of this institution reverberates through Doerksen’s sardonic aesthetic, as her installation revolves around the two plaster and wire figurative works situated on the marble linoleum island. The masculine figure, I know Not, is crouched in tortured repose, modeled after a work Doerksen encountered in the midst of the lush Glasgow Botanical Gardens, when she was seeking respite during an artists’ exchange. The original work of Victorian sculpture, Cain, My Punishment is more than I can bear, was created by Edwin Roscoe 10

I Come To Believe We All Gunna Drown. 2015 Near Replica of the bar from the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining built with plexiglass, LED strip lights, mirror and various kinds of wood.

Photography: Rita Taylor

Mullins, known for his stylistic “simplicity and restraint.”4 The more feminine figure that Doerksen situates proximally, The Beauty of a Youthful Body, is inspired by the Whore of Babylon from the 1927 film Metropolis and the marble sculpture Genius of Evil by Guillaume Geefs. Lost together, the dénouement that binds these two central figures to the gelid ambiance of their carefully constituted surroundings seems also very distant.

Dead Malls What does this failure of consumption and the hope of consumerist Utopia symbolize, in reference to Doerksen’s choices in creating archetypes of these cold, inanimate spaces?

Her film, Same as it Ever Was and the two figurative sculptures, crafted to appear like their marble inspirations, are highly

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I Am A Hole in Walls of Buildings, 2014 Collage, duct tape, wire and plaster plants. Bathtub with running jets, floor tiles, vinyl digital print, acrylic and crystal beads, fans, coloured lights, mirrors and speakers playing mp3 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Opening Theme) by Jack Nitzsche.

Photography: John Dean 13

rendered replicas fashioned from basic craft and home improvement supplies. The unspoken narrative hanging in the air is about a relationship of a failed economy: the transaction of exchange has faltered, something is not wanted any longer, unrequited, indebted to the other and left abandoned with the weight of failed expectations left to dismantle or undo. This type of “live currency decay,” a crumbling of the value of the present in front of your own eyes, is part of a tenuous hope and despair Doerksen is communicating, to herself and others.

It was Hannah who introduced me to the wormhole <deadmalls.com>, a virtual proponent of “Retail History” collectively narrating the demise of arcade sprawl across America. The images are haunting due to their desertion: it seems that the crowds have just abandoned the lonely spaces with urgency suggestive of an apocalypse that might have been missed on Twitter (since it too no longer feeds live media). Middle class malls across middle America are in a state of “devolution:” in January 2015, The New York Times reported that sixty malls were on the verge of death, 5 abandoned to the forests of weeds flourishing under shattered skylights, graffiti gracing the sides of stalled escalators. By death of course they mean a more understated anthropomorphic decline.

Hosting Doerksen’s installation in the capital city of mall culture only serves to remind me that Edmonton was once home to the largest mall in the world, a dubious record held for a generation.6 This palatial architectural scourge disavows any principle of multifunction or density advocated by today’s urban designers: the mall was meant to be full of recreational excess, featuring a wave pool with waterslides, four original movie theatre complexes, a pirate ship, a dolphin show, an indoor amusement park. West Edmonton Mall opened on September 15, 1981, in the decade of Hannah’s birth. Usurped of its first-place gargantuan size record in 2004, in alignment with a major hailstorm that shattered most of its ceiling windows, its saggy brass 1980’s glam was resuscitated with the opening of the first Canadian outlet of Victoria’s Secret.

The dead mall phenomenon is evidence of socioeconomic decline, where “impulse buying” and its attempt to assuage emotions with 14

purchases, comes to a creditor-implemented halt, leaving behind the same type of space Hannah Doerksen wants to hand-craft: a haunted “ghostbox.” Paul Virilio denotes this type of architecture as that which “furnishes the matter to an instantaneous and simultaneous collective reception of materiality.”7 Doerksen elaborates in an interview with Shauna Thompson on the implicit desire and futility threading through her work, which is designed to be evocative of an emotional experience: It is important that the objects I make and collect are familiar so that the viewer already has a relationship with those things, but it’s also key that the objects are kind of weak imitations—but weak imitations with heart; they really did put in an effort to be like the things they are mimicking, but they just aren’t made of the right stuff. I think that is where some of the emotion comes from.8 Malleability of Design Doerksen has shifted greatly in what she is willing to reveal in her protracted constructions, since the days of her early exhibitions in the notorious garage art space, Haight Gallery (founded by fellow Calgarian Matthew Mark Bourree). Moving away from works that point primarily to suburban blasée to a practice expansive in its excess emotion, byzantine symbolic references and folded personal memories, she prefers to lay bare her realizations in the making of the bed she lies in. At least she is constructing a world for herself, as a chance to design another outcome. Dan Hill describes this as the “malleability” of design itself, and its ability to reorient one’s world: Design’s core value is in synthesizing disparate views and articulating alternative ways of being. For “articulating alternative ways of being”, read design’s ability to describe how the world is inherently mutable or malleable—how everything is a decision, or the result of a decision—and to suggest and describe alternatives.

Design suggests design, in this sense, as it implies that design has 15

led to this particular state, almost no matter what the scenario, and that therefore another state can exist; we can redesign things, if we see the world in a mutable way. 9 The apparent faux-realism that Doerksen composites is as sincere a nod as can be toward “something that is real, but fake at the same time.” 10 As they say: the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

Kristy Trinier Curator, Art Gallery of Alberta

Endnotes 1 Kristy Trinier, “A Status of Equanimity: Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Arts,” in Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Catherine Crowston, 9-23. Edmonton: Art Gallery of Alberta, 2015.

2 “Historical Information,” City of Calgary, accessed September 26, 2016, www. calgary.ca/CA/city-clerks/Pages/Corporate-records/Archives/Historicalinformation/Historical-Information.aspx.

3 Hannah Doerksen, interview with the author, September 21, 2016.

4 Marion Harry Speilmann, “Edwin Roscoe Mullins (22 August 1848 – c. 9 January 1907),” The Victorian Web, accessed September 21, 2016, http:// www.victorianweb.org/victorian/sculpture/mullins/index.html.

5 Mallory Schlossberg, “Haunting photos of a dead Ohio mall in ruins,” Business Insider, accessed September 21, 2016, www.businessinsider.com/23haunting-photos-of-a-dead-mall-in-ohio-2015-8/#you-can-actually-feeland-imagine-the-memories-he-wrote-23.

6 “West Edmonton Mall,” Wikipedia, accessed September 21, 2016, www. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Edmonton_Mall.

7 Paul Virilio, Grey Ecology, trans. Drew Burk (New York: Atropos Press, 2009), 61.

8 Hannah Doerksen, interview by Shauna Thompson, “I am a Hole in the Walls of Buildings,” Esker Foundation, accessed September 21, 2016, www. eskerfoundation.com/exhibition/hole-walls-buildings/.

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9 Dan Hill, Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2012),102.

1 0 ‘Faux Real,” Urban Dictionary, accessed September 21, 2016, www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=faux%20real.

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Artist’s Biography Hannah Doerksen is a Calgary based visual artist who received a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2012. During her studies, Doerksen spent a year abroad at the New York Studio Residency Program in Brooklyn, NY and the California College of Art in San Francisco.

Since graduating, Doerksen has exhibited in Brazil, United Kingdom, USA and throughout Canada. Recently, Doerksen has developed installations for the Esker Foundation’s Project Space, the 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Alberta and The Walter Phillips Gallery.

Doerksen combines collage, sound, light, kinetic devices and re-appropriated objects in installations that aim to create a framework for an experience. Taking as an assumption that wanting provides a richer emotion than having, her work is an investigation of longing, contradiction and a cultural condition of loneliness.

Writer’s Biography Kristy Trinier is a Curator at the Art Gallery of Alberta. She previously was the Public Art Director at the Edmonton Arts Council, where she managed the City of Edmonton’s Public Art Collection, as well as related exhibitions and public art programs. Trinier holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Art and English from the University of Victoria, and a Master’s degree in Public Art from the Dutch Art Institute (DAI, ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) as a Huygens scholar in The Netherlands.

List of Works A Story We Tell Ourselves About Ourselves, 2016 Mixed media installation

A Story We Tell Ourselves About Ourselves is curated by Kristy Trinier.

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The RBC New Works Gallery features new works by Alberta artists.

Initiated in 1998 and named the RBC New Works Gallery in 2008, this gallery space continues the Art Gallery of Albertaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s commitment to supporting Alberta artists.

Š Art Gallery of Alberta 2016 ISBN: 978-1-77179-021-5 Editor: Catherine Crowston Design: Cut+Paste Design Inc. and Charles Cousins Photography: John Dean, M.N. Hutchinson, Rita Talyor Essay: Kristy Trinier Printing: Burke Group Printed in Canada

The Art Gallery of Alberta is grateful for the generous support of our many public and private donors and sponsors, as well as the ongoing support of the City of Edmonton, the Edmonton Arts Council, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Cover: A Story, 2016. Digital collage. Courtesy the artist.

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