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Seven Deadly Sins at the Latcham Gallery February 18 - March 25, 2006 By Maura Broadhurst, Curator What is the relevance today of the Seven Deadly Sins? Outlined officially in the sixth century by Pope Gregory I the seven deadly sins were surely intended to give the Catholic community, largely an illiterate population, a guideline of clear offences to God and thus a defined code by which to live. In Canada today, in a time when secular life is dominant and religions of all kinds are practiced across the country, it would seem that the moral code established by the Seven Deadly Sins is outdated. When we look at our contemporary culture, however, these "sins" are still being explored, limits may be pushed and certain areas blurred but there still seems to be a fascination with the qualities found in the deadly sins. Consequently the Latcham Gallery asked seven contemporary Ontario artists to contemplate these issues, to choose one sin to focus on and present their interpretations through a new work of visual art. The result is a diverse exhibition with work in a variety of media. Some of the work is quite personal, others address the sin in terms of the role it plays in today’s society and others present a historical interpretation of the sin. Each of the seven artists have provided us with visual images that begin to answer the question of the sins' role today but not without posing their own. Although the seven deadly sins - lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy and pride - were never specifically mentioned in the Bible, they are tightly associated with the Christian religion. The ideas behind them were included in writings by many Christian theologians but it was Pope Gregory I who authored the seven as we know them today in his writings, Moralia in Job. But their presence and the concept behind them exist in other religions and indeed secular society. The Buddhist religion, for instance, identifies the five hindrances: sensual desire, anger, sloth, worry and doubt that impede practice and need to be avoided, as well as the three poisons: greed, hatred and delusion, that must be overcome. There is no lack of references to the deadly sins in literature and in fact many works that focus directly on them. The most famous of these is probably Dante’s Divine Comedy in which the poet outlines the fate of those who suffer from the sins. But there are interpretations of stories like the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that suggest that each character represents a deadly sin. Similarly, there seems to be an undying fascination with the sins in popular culture, in the movies, in music and on TV. Examples include the 1995 Brad Pitt/Morgan Freeman film Se7en, a thriller that focused on murders by using the deadly sins and TV shows like Cheaters or even Survivor where the deadly sins are prevalent in the behaviour of the participants. The artwork in this exhibition portray both the historical references as well as the contemporary experiences. Some speak to the continued dangers of the sins and others seem to suggest that we are surrounded by their influence and somewhat helpless in the face of such indulgences. Nevertheless each of the seven artists offers a particular message. Toronto artist David Hannan has used video to depict lust. Generally accepted to be the least severe of the seven deadly sins, lust might be defined as unnatural sexual desire, although how one chooses to interpret that definition is debatable. According to the Catholic Church, and the reason that lust is considered a deadly sin is because it suggests sexual desire without love and in order to indulge a personal physical desire in absence of God and even in absence of another human's need. Hannan's work is clearly a reaction to the abundance of lust and the availability of what might be defined as lustful objects in our society today. Pornography has a tremendous presence today mostly because of the ease of access on the Internet. Porn web sites, for instance, are the most visited sites of any kind on the World Wide Web. Even prime time TV shows have become looser with their definitions of appropriate language and behaviour with such contentious examples as Sex and the City being rebroadcast at 7 p.m. on a channel available to any young viewer. Hannan used this idea, but plays with it and flips it around to make viewers consider their own perspective. In his piece he presents two small video screens. On the lower screen he shows portions of faces of people in the midst of reaching sexual climax, audible if the viewer chooses to listen on earphones. On the screen above, Hannan has a camera focusing on the viewer and thus involves the viewer in the act. One asks therefore, which act is lustful, the person visible in the lower screen or themselves caught in the role of voyeur? In depicting gluttony, John Deal used food as his medium, creating a sculpture out of chocolate and presenting photographs of decaying candy. Gluttony is a sin because of its pure overindulgence. In addition to its excess, the implication of gluttony is also that it is wasting food and consequently potentially depriving others. In the first part of his work, Deal presents an uncomfortable group of several views of heads and skulls, made out of pure chocolate, covered with icing and decorated with marzipan. A sweet, somewhat attractive but also simultaneously unappealing smell radiates from the piece. The photographs, which make up the second half of the work, are deliciously colourful but offer somewhat offensive images. Originally the subject for the photographs were candies easily found in the corner stores: hard candies, sweet berries, gummy bears, M&Ms, etc. By photographing these common candies up close and spraying them with water, thus watching their colour run and their make-up decompose, Deal turns these treats into repulsive abstracted objects that disgust. In both these works Deal is able to capture both the allure of overindulgence and the repugnance of this sin. Frederica Tomas chose to present her sin, greed, by way of a fable in the familiar tradition of using an animal as the protagonist. Greed – the insatiable desire for more - was considered a sin because of the danger of conflating the owning of things to happiness again in absence of God. And of course, the problem with greed is that it is insatiable. When thinking about the sins, and greed in particular, Tomas reflected upon fables like the Aesop Fables, which tell a story with animals to teach a moral lesson. With further thought, however, Tomas considered how sometimes life works in the opposite way, rewarding bad behaviour instead of punishing it. In her fable, then, the "greedy dog" desires beer over the water he is given. When it is spilled and he is able to drink it he is pleased and goes off to his bed for a well-deserved nap. Tomas’ story is narrated in a linocut print, which is highlighted with watercolour paint. Its visual simplicity echoes the tradition of the fable and adds a light-hearted touch to show not only the presence of these sins in our world but of how they can be rewarded. Sloth - a combination of tristitia and acedia - refers to a laziness that results in the avoidance of spiritual work and thus is sinful. It can be defined simply as laziness but probably more accurately as apathy, simply not caring, or even as severe as despair or depression. In Dante's Divine Comedy, the slothful are destined to eternity submerged in the river Styx with their sighs creating ripples on the surface. In creating her work for this exhibition Fiona Kinsella considered the significance of sloth in the Catholic religion but also how it was represented and referred to in many literary as well as theological sources. She chose to present five cakes, lying sloth-like on the ground, but laid delicately on lacy pieces of linen encased in pristine boxes. The result of this line of cases is somewhat like a row of coffins or tombs. On each of these cakes Kinsella has placed a series of symbolic objects like perfume bottles, silver chalices, feathers and human hair. Entitled Wing and Stone each cake pits the temptation of sloth against the desire for eternal salvation with God. The object at the bottom of the cake behaves like a stone weighing the subject down and ties us to earth and earthly desires and leisures, whereas the wing, placed at the top, shows us the way to let go of earthly heaviness and take flight to heaven. Tina Newlove began with the word "anger" literally copying the definition of the word as it appeared in Webster’s dictionary onto a canvas. She then painted twelve small abstract scenes on top of the page of definitions in a very personal expression as to how anger has affected her life. This experience is further shared by the poem she wrote, displayed beside the canvas. Anger the sin, or wrath, suggests inappropriate feelings of hatred or revenge. It is the unbridled nature of this feeling that is particularly sinful. Nevertheless, it is certainly a feeling we have all experienced and in her poem, Newlove reveals a vulnerable side by expressing how physical her relationship with anger has been. The importance of words to her work is obvious not only in the large canvas where she has painted directly on top of the words, highlighting those that are significant to her by allowing them to show through or become part of her painting, but also in the poem where she uses words like "tangled", "woven" and "tighten" to describe how anger can take over her physical being. The sin envy has a very particular meaning, referring to one’s desire to have what someone else has and feeling a resentment even hatred towards that person. It can be either something tangible that person owns or a personal trait or their status. The collective WeSee Inc., made up of Roy Kohn and Kate Vasyliw, chose to interpret envy in their work. In their installation piece, This is not a step, they have placed an old ladder against the wall. At the bottom of the ladder is a pile of small clay figures and on each step there are some of these figures but fewer and fewer on each step as you go up the ladder. At the top of the ladder they have placed an enviable scene. A miniature billboard, placed on a ground of astro turf, displays a picture of an ideal tropical landscape with palm trees, sand and water and warm location where beauty is all around and abundance is at our fingertips. It is a place where physical satisfaction is the goal. The way the collective chose to present this image, however, is through a typical commercial advertising at the top of an old ladder. Even if the little people were able somehow to get to the top step they could never achieve the final step, which is physically impossible to obtain. In addition to desiring something we do not have, envy also suggests that we are not properly grateful for what we have now. The final work in the exhibition is Pride by Lynne McIlvride Evans. Pride is usually considered the gravest of the deadly sins as it often causes its sufferer to want to be God-like. This sin originated with Adam and Eve whose desire to have the knowledge of God, caused them to be cast out of the Garden of Eden. McIlvride Evans used the example of Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist active in Montreal in the 1950s and 60s, to remind us of the dangers of pride. Cameron’s treatments of his patience have been labeled as brainwashing, extreme experiments even torture. He was fuelled by his ambitious desire to "cure" his patients, but in the process lost sight of their humanity. Within her mixed media piece McIlvride Evans has painted Cameron’s portrait but has also included layers of references from a map of Montreal, photographs and a series of quotes taken from Cameron’s writings. McIlvride Evans uses all these images and techniques to show how Cameron’s ambitious pride drove him to play God and as such became dangerous rather than helpful. Today at a time when reality TV is the norm and the morality of celebrities, from movie stars to political figures and business people, is under intense scrutiny, our understanding of what is right and wrong is shifting, but certainly still important. The artists in this exhibition have each approached their chosen sin in individual ways, presenting personal experiences, interpretations and feelings. Nevertheless, underneath they ask some fundamental questions, which disrupt our comfortable idea of how we live our lives and ask us as viewers to probe deeper into the motivations of our actions and to consider what today's moral code is if one exists at all. Maura Broadhurst, Curator The Latcham Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council, Gallo Real Estate and Stouffville I.D.A Pharmacy. The Latcham Gallery is the public art gallery in Stouffville, Ontario. Throughout the year there are ten temporary exhibitions of contemporary art by Ontario artists. It is funded by donations, memberships, fundraising events as well as grants from the Municipality of Whitchurch-Stouffville and the provincial government through the Ontario Trillium Foundation. The Latcham Gallery 6240 Main Street, Box 3 Stouffville, Ontario L4A 7Z4 (905) 640-8954 fax: (905) 640-6246 |
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