The City Envisioned

by Marion Gauzer
from Mosaic Magazine, Fall 2008

    The city roars and murmurs, welcomes and shuns, delivers and disappoints.  In the urban embrace, the human animal aspires, falls, reaches out, hides, consumes and hungers.  

Using a variety of media and styles, nine artists at Art Central investigate the tensions and polarities inherent in urban environments with intriguing results.  Together, they offer a view of the city and its denizens as a complex negotiation between competing elements.

    In his studio on the lower level of Art Central, artist Eric Louie paints urban scenes infused with paradox and ambiguity.  Nocturnal images of youthful revelry in a parking lot collide with expressions of unease and isolation.  Outside a nightclub, young habitués collect under a streetlight and disperse into the darkness that bleeds off the edge of the canvas.  Streaking brushstrokes suggest energy and movement but also the transience of youth.  Inside a club, distracted and bored looking urbanites assemble together, their faces illuminated by the cool violet, throbbing red and lurid green of pulsating lights.  Louie’s colour palette lends an alien quality to this most familiar of youthful experiences, as if a deep desire for social contact has led his subjects to the wrong place.

    Although his urban venues are fictional, Louie admits to a kind of wistful nostalgia for the haunts of his youth.  Finding few formal meeting places in the city, youth culture pitches them where they can.   

    For Jacqulynn Mulak of Burst and Bloom Studio, the city is a point of convergence for diverse and sometimes disparate elements.  In Many Ways to Get into Calgary from her Big City Series, yellow taxis float alongside commercial trucks and cyclists pop wheelies atop an LRT car.  Her title suggests the varied ways in which we make our way into the urban culture of a specific time and place—in this case, Calgary.  Mulyk mixes inks, oils, pastels and photographs into fantastical collages that propel the viewer on a joyous voyage through the highlights and pitfalls of city life.  In Lyndsay Park View from the Talisman, the city co-exists with nature—joggers, cyclists and strollers share a pathway, all under the watchful eye of a spectral deer.  Mulyk’s figures seem to float on the surface of the work like passing spirits.

    Over at Axis Contemporary Art, Verna Vogel’s meticulously structured canvasses explore the hidden and the visible, the fleeting and the enduring.  Vogel stitches together swaths of canvas, often layered with other textural materials, and then applies translucent glazes of oil colour to create almost abstract cityscapes where foreground and background shift and dissolve into one another.  Featured in a show at Axis from November 6 – 16, works like Rising I invite contemplation of inner worlds and human activity housed behind the glossy facades of engineered structures.  Vogel’s use of long-lasting archival materials counterpoints the shifting nature of the urban milieu.

    Also at Axis, Michael Markowsky whisks us through the foothills of Los Angeles where passing glimpses of the view from a car solidify into a single image.  In paintings like Automobilist Approaching the City of Light, Markowsky creates visual composites of split-second moments painted while driving.  Using kinetic line, flowing form and often bold colour, the artist’s work both recreates and deconstructs the way we see things in the fast-paced modern metropolis.  He articulates and offers a personal solution to a particularly urban dichotomy:  our capacity for moving faster and seeing less. 

    Susan Marczak at Swirl Fine Art & Design is also concerned with speed and technology and their relationship to urban life.  Marczak’s night street scenes are marked by streaming light and movement as if captured with the low-shuttered speed of a camera.  In her acrylic painting, Gauncho, the attempt to slow things down is hijacked by the relentless pace at which things move in the city.  People’s lives get measured out against the scale and speed of urban technology, and yet the city also crackles with an irresistible energy in Marczak’s work.

    A feeling of urban liveliness also marks Gina Yung’s Everything Old is New Again at Swirl.   For Yung, “life is just like flames,” and the city flickers and dances in her work.  Rendered with impressionistic strokes in vibrant pinks, blues, yellows and reds, Yung’s work reminds us that the seemingly immutable structures of the city are ultimately molecules of energy bouncing off each other.  Just as the city can steal dreams, it also burns with the possibility of transformation.  
 
    In mid-October, Keystone Art Gallery will showcase Mychael Barratt’s whimsical hand-coloured aquatints.  Barratt plumbs familiar literary, theatrical and art works to create fanciful urban worlds in an illustrative style reminiscent of children’s storybooks or the caricatures of nineteenth century artist Honoré Daumier.  London’s Old Truman Brewery district is affectionately portrayed in Life Imitating Art III, but Barratt irreverently inserts some of the iconic images and figures of early modern art, like van Gogh and his sunflowers.  In Barratt’s city there is room for highfalutin and lowbrow, beer and beauty, business and art.

    A quite different view of the city is offered at Keystone in November by Quebec artist Étienne Côté.  Côté’s city is jagged, claustrophobic, dizzying.  Côté heaps red upon angry red in Arrabbiata, crowding his acrylic canvas with angular shapes that mimic archetypal houses.  In Favela, painted in cool blues, blacks and brilliant whites, houses totter upon one another as if bulldozed together, while a clouded sky threatens overhead.  The title alludes to the shanty towns of Brazil, but Côté’s elemental shapes and simple palettes describe a phenomenon of many big cities.

    Rapidly growing cities test the adaptability and wisdom of human beings.  Proximity can breed frustration, intolerance, violence.  But being close also allows people to bridge the differences that divide them, as Vietnamese artist Nguyen Dinh Hien seems to propose.  In his series of oil paintings, Living Together, at Trouvé Gallery, Hien’s cities are built-up villages that ascend to the top of his large canvases.  His harmonious colours and complex but balanced design communicate an optimistic view of modern cities.  Repeating elements like the graceful arcs of bridges in Drifting Together temper urban dissonance with a soothing rhythm.

The city is rife with beauty, ugliness, decay, growth, violence, love.  With their own distinctive visual styles, these nine artists are among the many at Art Central who probe its complicated soul.

© Mosaic, 2008.