Saturday marked the first of many visits to the Oakville Galleries. The Galleries are locally known as Og2, which refers to two locations, one gallery nestled into the downtown library, while the other overlooks Lake Ontario on a gorgeous waterfront estate.
Each location hosts a discreet exhibit, together comprising their winter programming (click here to view their Akimbo). Both are on par with——if not better than——any public programming in TO right now!
Downtown, Centennial Square
Hyper Spaces*: José Manuel Ballester, An Te Liu & Lynne Marsh (26 Nov, 2011 – March 4, 2012)
* see Part 2!
Waterfront, Gairloch Gardens
Chris Kline – Bright Limit (Nov 26, 2011 – Feb 19, 2012)
& participatory site-specific experiential work by Janet Cardiff
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| FIGURE 1: Oakville Galleries, Gairloch Gardens location. |
It was a perfect day to experience the lakefront location——crisp, cloudy, with strong sunlight breaking erratically over the water… one of those pale days hinting at winter, when a strong flash of colour would take you by surprise. Apart from a few birds and a small wedding party, the grounds were quiet [Figure 1]. Mark and I were the first visitors to the pristine Chris Kline exhibit.
If you are familiar with Kline's work, you know that he embraces an oriental simplicity that brings to mind Japanese paper. Hailing from Montreal, can be considered an abstract minimalist painter who works with a deliciously simple palette, using translucency and tiny variations in tone to create paintings that are often just two pieces of fabric pulled taught over a stretcher. Occasionally bars of paint will float on his surfaces, but overall Klein softens the 'hard edge' so endemic to minimalism and colour field painting, quietly guiding viewers into contemplation of beauty.
The paintings in Bright Limit connect to the lake views through the gallery's generous windows. A horizon line is especially pivotal in the largest work in the show, titled Raft (2008) [Figure 2]. The gently curving horizon is crafted by a seam joining two pieces of fabric, each with a very restrained tint of colour which immediately brings to mind a clear dawn with receding fog.
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| FIGURE 2: Chris Kline, Raft II, 2008, poplin, thread & wood, 60 x 72. Image courtesy of Gallerie René Blouin |
The work is utterly simple, completely devoid of artifice. In an effortless gesture, Kline recreates the sensation of floating alone on an endless body of water. The sheer atmospheric truth of Raft evokes suspense,… suspense of the day that is about to begin… and the a phenomenological experience of being held by the tensile strength of water.
Though I could have happily immersed myself in Raft for hours, there were other works to see, particularly Kline's three opaque canvases, coated in acrylic, gesso, enamel and clear, finely ground glass. The glass work in the first room Breaks 2.1(2010) is best lit. It is an unassuming off white, fading to the slightest hint of eggshell blue at the edges. Again, Kline honors his materials, finding the essential beauty within them, and presenting it entirely free of complications. These glass canvases are attractive, yet static; moving in close and looking carefully from different angles brings them to life. The ground glass catches and refracts the light, leading to the dazzling effect of transforming the surface into the mirror of a heavy shimmering satin, deepening the saturation of the blue and the richness of the cream enamel. Breathtaking.
The idea of floating is further explores in a series of three canvases with bars of paint that range from blue to green to a kind of chartreuse. Overall, Kline's work brings to mind the most recent explorations in tone and field by Korean/Japanese Monoha artist Lee Ufan created for his Guggenheim retrospective Marking Infinity —— I recommend watching the video through the end when curator Alexandra Munroe discusses his Dialogue series. Dialogue involved three seemingly single brushstrokes painted directly on the walls [Figure 3]. In the introductory video to Marking Infinity, Munroe says, "They literally begin to hover in space, so that what is material and what is immaterial, what is light and what is shadow, disappears."
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| FIGURE 3: Lee Ufan, Dialogues mural from Marking Infinity, 2011 Guggenheim retrospective. |
At his best, Chris Kline employs the simplest of aesthetics to untangle the knots of your worries and clear your mind with an overabundance of uncontrived beauty. He is a Western master of Zen, a rigorous artist whose work will leave you lightened, calmed, and joyful. Similar to Lee Ufan, Chris Kline's artwork is quintessentially unobtrusive, but should you look carefully, it offers a taste of infinity.
After drinking in Bright Limit, stop by the front desk and ask to trade in your ID for an iPod, hit play, and allow new media artist Janet Cardiff to take you on a twenty minute walk through the Gairloch Gardens and along the waterline. Famous for her use holophonic or binaural sound, Cardiff's experiential participatory work melds reality with fiction. By creating a soundtrack that allows you to locate exactly where a sound is originating from in relation to your body, being lead through the Oakville Gallery grounds becomes a guessing game of what is real and what Cardiff has manufactured——be they Cardiff's footsteps in front or beside you, geese flying overhead, or the crashing sound of waves [Figure 4]. Particularly uncanny is the experience of crushing dead leaves underfoot while the soundtrack's crisp leaves differ ever so slightly from what you expect to hear.
Nothing can compare with the real-time experience of this piece. Even holophonic sound changes sensorially when you are walking outdoors as opposed to, say, listening to a binaural recording of a thunderstorm at home on the couch. I won't try to describe this work… but I will leave you with an excerpt:
"Hans once said that time is like a river,… it doesn't move at the same speed everywhere. Like today when I woke up, I had a cup of tea, read the newspaper, and then I looked at my watch, realized that it was time to go to bed."
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| FIGURE 4: In A Large Slow River, Janet Cardiff instructs her participant to walk up these stone steps with her & along the rock wall at the water's edge. Janet Cardiff's A Large Slow River, 2000 (permanent collection, participate May - Nov) |
Bright Limit is curated by Marnie Fleming.
Many thanks to Mr. Mark Scheibmayr for his willingness to participate in my art-related adventuring.
