Embodied Presence
Exhibition Essay
Work by Michel Boutin and Holly Fay
Despite its public popularity, landscape is rarely addressed by contemporary artists - either because it is difficult to create landscape images without falling into worn out visual clichés or because it is understood at this point in time to be a topic largely depleted of meaning: it seems that there is very little that can be said about landscape that is new or even interesting. Yet, provocatively, here we find two serious and respected contemporary Saskatchewan artists - Michel Boutin from Prince Albert and Holly Fay from Regina - each deeply engaged in landscape painting. If their unusual, intelligent approaches to the subject shows us anything at all it is that the 'idea' of landscape has not been put to rest at all and that indeed it can provide us with a vehicle to consider other ideas that originate in landscape but have social and cultural meaning outside the confines of the visual frame.
Neither Boutin nor Fay affirm traditional landscape models in their work. Each actively interrogates the ideas back grounding the spatial environment we inhabit and seek to express their own personal relationship to it: for Boutin the land is simultaneously a spiritual idea and a socio-political proposition while for Fay nature is a psychologically and physically 'felt' space outside of actual perception.
Working in Saskatchewan as contemporary landscape artist and as a French-Canadian Catholic-raised Métis means to Boutin that his work has had to respond to and in some ways even resist the history of landscape painting that we are so familiar with in this province via the paintings of such artists as Ernst Lindner, Dorothy Knowles, Terry Fenton and Wynona Mulcaster - all representative of the now-traditional Saskatoon school of Prairie landscape abstraction. While Boutin does indeed appear to depict the geographic terrain of the Saskatchewan landscape in an equally abstract though more 'muscular' manner, he interrupts it by overlaying it with a second visual plane consisting of red linear symbols which originate in aboriginal culture. By imparting symbols of spiritual origin to the visual field - elements which do not visually exist in this place - Boutin decodes the traditional genre of landscape and prompts us to consider both landscape painting and the land itself in new ways.
Boutins's linear symbols 'tag' the land and in that they resemble petro-glyphs and petro-graphs made by early peoples in this geographic region, his red marks signal man's ephemeral presence in and engagement of the land. He uses them to overwrite traditional European landscape models and in doing so, he de facto denies those models: here we are meant to understand the land as spiritual space beyond claim or ownership and not to see and it merely as material space. At the same time however, these symbols are integrated by the artist into the landscape - a gesture which fuses the divergent European and Aboriginal views of the land and the way it is represented. Clearly, Boutin's approach integrates both aspects of his heritage as a Métis person: there is a wise reciprocity in his images.
At first glance, Holly Fay's images appear devoid of any discussion of social politics whatsoever. Resembling gestural color-field abstractions that suggest the landscape rather than literally depict it, her work seems to spin largely on her own private response to the land itself - to her connection to it. Fay is not painting a recognizable place here but rather encoding her 'felt' connection to nature. What is more, she embodies nature via the thick impasto paint she uses which metaphorically stands for the body of the earth itself.
Fay's almost-Romantic embrace of nature through paint and painting is in some ways an attempt to both 'know' it and to gain knowledge from it. Here we find little clusters of uncertain forms, dark hollows, crusty patterns skittering across an image surface - all resides of her painterly actions and metaphorically the residue of unseen activities and ephemeral processes operating on and within the earth itself. These images in part then refer to migratory pathways followed by animals for millennia; waterways flowing toward the sea, some now dried up; and even genetic pathways buried deep in DNA.
Indeed, many of these images explore the notion of genetics and its relationship to the environment. Here Fay worries the idea that if we continue to alter the natural environment - the body of the earth - with such intrusions as genetically altered seed crops, we will inevitably alter our human bodies as well: the health of the body is tied to the health of the earth. Fay deploys marks within the landscape (unlike Boutin who imparts marks atop the landscape image) which refer to cells and corpuscles, seeds and seedlings, plants and spores - all generative, organically alive, evolutionary - all ripe with life but also ripe with the possibility of mutation. In this body of work, the positivist idea of 'growth' becomes problematic.
Both Fay and Boutin turn away from the specifics of mimesis and geography toward another kind of cartography. Their images map unique ways of knowing nature beyond the descriptive facts of place, instead encoding a personal ethic about nature that points to alternative ways of understanding, interacting with and representing it. Here we are prompted to consider the landscape beyond its surface materially and engage it more as a place that encodes lived feelings, beliefs and ideas.
Jack Anderson
2011