TRANSLATING PLACE

Mackenzie Art Gallery exhibition essay by curator Timothy Long

When asked recently to describe his intellectual project, French theorist Jean Louis Schefer responded with disarming simplicity: “I am what I am looking for.” 1 Schefer’s remarks reflect his profound unease with the notion of objectivity in the interpretation of painting and other cultural objects. For him, viewers and object are enmeshed: paintings do not generate meanings apart form the personality of the viewer, and viewers are not independent of the paintings which they have looked at and absorbed. According to Schefer, “we are actually part of what makes up the objects we interpret and decode—part of their historical puzzle as well as of their formal solutions.” 2

Schefer’s ideas provide a helpful way of looking at the paintings of Regina artist Holly Fay. Conversely, Fay’s paintings offer a specific instance of the new philosophical spirit so eloquently expressed by Schefer.

The five large abstract canvasses in this series at first appear to be latter day examples of high modernism, offering a lush and smoky sublime. There is a comforting sense of continuity with the great masters of colour field parting. But where exactly do these paintings fit in? With this question, doubt begins to creep in.

To start with, the paint quality varies from canvas to canvas, from dense skin to a transparent veil. If paint handling gave a unique identity to the modernist painting, this work embraces multiple personalities. And then there are the flickers of recollection that these works kindle. One work takes the appearance from a Turner sky, while another recalls a magnified detail of Rembrandt’s impasto brushwork. These impressions are not entirely accidental. Fay recently completed a MFA at the University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The experience of Belfast and the great museums of Europe was a significant influence on her.  

Beyond that the paintings also carry an allusion to place which is difficult to define. There is a sense of capturing a mood or rendering a significant detail of somewhere you might have been. Again, this may be related to the artist’s working process. For each work in the series she has taken as a staring point a remembered time or place: a street at night in Belfast, a verdant botanical garden, a dazzling Caribbean seascape.

But none of this can be defined precisely, and the knowledge of her sources does not truly answer the basic question: why do I feel like this? Her memories are not our memories and yet there is a persistent sense of déjà vu. 

How does she do this? By taking landscape and art history—what we think of as objective contexts—and rendering them wayward and subjective. As viewers we are thrown back on our own resources, which turn out to be those errant desires and memories that we bring to the act of viewing. And here is the enigmatic draw of her work: the sense of something already encountered and the recognition “I am what I am looking for”.

Timothy Long

Notes

1 Jean Louis Schefer, “Critical Reflections,” Artform (March 1997): 73.

2 Schefer, 73.