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Reviews / Essays / ... | |
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The Latcham Gallery - 2001 Sister ~ Family ~ Home By Maura Broadhurst, Curator Fiona Kinsella & Paul Lisson "Nothing says the skull must remain hidden forever. What is concealed will come to light. What is hidden will be found. You can see that invisibility grows. The belly expands. The Egg cracks. The doll will twist and open." This quotation is an excerpt from a piece written by Robert Clarke Yates in response to the mixed-media art work of Hamilton artists Fiona Kinsella and Paul Lisson. In their work, Kinsella and Lisson investigate the complexities and contradictions that exist, though often hidden, in both our society and in each individual. Kinsella creates her work out of materials generally associated with the domestic life of girls and women. Within a frame, she delicately places rows of eggs, nestled into a background of lace table runners and cloths. Each eggshell has been cracked open to show the vulnerability that lies within, illustrated sometimes in images and other times text. In other work Kinsella superimposes photo transfers onto beautiful hankies and doilies and combines these in one frame with other objects like hair and medical drawings. In his work, Lisson juxtaposes the familiar and safe image of the Babushka doll with the surprising revelation of a skeleton. Through a variety of medium, Lisson reduces things to a simpler state, like removing skin to reveal bones. He destabilizes order and makes the grandiose ordinary, divluging the "everyperson". The images of both artists are disturbing and contradict our expectations, but at the same time are mixed with irony and immaculate beauty. By referencing objects associated with childhood and the intimacy of home, like dolls and stuffed animals, table cloths and doilies, the artists call into question assumptions of safety verses vulnerability and love and family. Through peeling back layers, opening the contained and searching behind, they reveal truths that are often hidden under surfaces. The works result form the personal journeys of each artist, but are also entrances through which the viewer might question their own lives. Lisson and Kinsella have been exhibiting their artwork together and independently for over a decade. Kinsella was one of this year’s recipients of the Canada Council for the Arts Emerging Artists Grant. An exhibition at the Latcham Gallery of work by Fiona Kinsella & Paul Lisson The role of the artist is an issue that has been debated for ages and is not easy to define partly because it shift from culture to culture and time to time. More often than not, however, artists are seen as people on the fringe of society, people who don not quite fit into society’s norms.1 A simple explanation for this positioning may be because those members of a society living in the margins have a better view of the centre. Their perspective allows them to see what’s going on. The art of Fiona Kinsella and Paul Lisson does this for me. Their art displays beauty and ugliness, life and death, fantasy and tragedy. Sometimes artists need to point out the obvious because it is the obvious that we often forget to consider. By taking objects from our everyday and placing them in different settings they are forcing us to consider their uses, their meanings and their impact in our lives. Whether it is an old lace doily placed in the same frame as a medical drawing, an egg housing images from the Wizard of Oz, or a doll containing a skeleton, each of the components are very familiar to us, but by putting them together they look odd, funny and maybe even disturbing. By doing so, the artists are asking us to take a another look. In addition, both Kinsella & Lisson seem to be trying to define their identity and simultaneously offer the viewer a space to do the same. There are many ways by which each of us defines ourselves. It can be through biology, through DNA and our physical make-up; it can be by way of our genealogy; or it can be by the people and objects we choose to have surround us during our lives. These two artists present all three possibilities. In her work, for example, Kinsella brings together mementos. These objects like spoons, hair, photographs and tablecloths are objects that we associate with family heirlooms and souvenirs of past times and past people. Hair in contemporary art can be read as a reference to the Victorian practice of making brooches, wreathes and necklaces out of hair as a symbol of mourning, friendship or loyalty. It is also a live object and a piece of the physical being. In her essay on the use of hair in art, Sarah Quinton has stated, "In the presence of human residue such as hair, old clothing or family heirlooms, we are called upon to elaborate our complex relationship with history."2 Similarly, Lisson uses bones, the skeleton of our bodies and hence of our existence, to communicate. The skeletal structure exists in part to protect the internal organs of the body (organs drawn in many of Kinsella’s work). Our association with skeletons, however, is usually one that relates to death. Lisson is using a symbol, then, that is at once life-affirming and morbid. Maura Broadhurst, Curator Fiona Kinsella is an artist based in Hamilton, Ontario. She received an Honours B.A. in Fine Art from the University of Guelph. She has recently had solo exhibitions in Winnipeg and Hamilton and is one of this year’s recipients of the Canada Council for the Arts Emerging Artist Grants. Paul Lisson is a writer and visual artist with degrees from McMaster University and the University of Toronto. His plays have been performed throughout Ontario s has his artwork been exhibited. Paul is also the originator of Red October, an independent initiative to raise funds to fight AIDS and to promote art, music and writing in Hamilton. |
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No. 56 Number Magazine-06 J. Hamilton Nashville Scene-06 D. Maddox Latcham Gallery-06 M.Broadhurst Nashville Scene-06 D. Maddox J. Marx Cambridge Galleries-06 I. Jurakic Hamilton Spectator-05 R. Haggo Nashville Scene - 05 D. Maddox Hamilton Spectator-04 E. Hujer Artichoke, Kohli & Brace VIEW Magazine J. Deal Women's Post K. Somers Sieved.com Peter@sieved.com Paper Wait - Ace Art D. Lemieux The Latcham Gallery M.Broadhurst Hamilton Spectator J.Mahoney Sister ~ Family ~ Home R. C. Yates ID Magazine P. Molotov Scene S. Curtis-Norcross Hamilton Spectator J. Mahoney VIEW Magazine C. J. Klaassen The Silhouette H. Ormerod Galerie Sans Nom G. Leblanc Hamilton Spectator J. Mahoney Hamilton Spectator J. Mahoney |