You Are Here: Some Thoughts on Hinterland (excerpted), 1997
By Jack Liang, 1997
Some time ago I stumbled across the long narrative history of the true north and its place in our collective consciousness. It was an old idea, really, the one that claims our lakes and rivers and trees played a notable role in forming the country’s identity. An enduring motif to be sure. But as I sat there in my living room, in the center of Toronto (the streetcar sounds flooded in through my open window), that wilderness of our imagination seemed a million miles away from me. It was part of our culture, yes, but not part of my daily life. Never was.
That these sentiments of mine might echo from an exhibition ostensibly titled Hinterland is a reason I decided to offer some words to this project. My familiarity with the artists is still growing, making what follows a reflection of someone intrigued by the ideas an exhibition like this can put forth. I'm stirred, baited really, by the seeming casualness of such a grouping of artists – where a formalist wall work by Greg McHarg can hang beside the suburban landscapes of David Holden, all the while attesting to some sense of commonality. Is it a comfortable fit? Probably not. But I suspect that that's the point.
Hinterland, this exhibition, advances ideas about a shared cultural vocabulary, one that has more to do with Canadian Tire than Canadian Art. It is the collective effort by four artists to explore a mutual fascination with the signifiers of our industrial culture – it's objects, images, materials. But here is neither an effort to transform an object's meaning nor a bid to ironicize it. In these works, references to quotidian origins are undiminished, the “baggage” of the outside world remains intact. Each artist, it would seem, is mining his own obsession with the vernacular, examining a common vocabulary, but on individual terms. The resulting exhibition is a somewhat blurry snapshot of the culture, a limited reflection on this peripheral place still more identified with the wilds of its forests than the suburbs of its cities.
Greg McHarg chooses to eschew traditional art materials for everyday consumer items: pre-printed postcards, linoleum tiles, colored crayons. McHarg is intrigued by the cheapness and uniformity of these “building blocks” of his work. His art is the most formal of the four. And though it may be tempting to view this work in the vein of Modernist traditions of the grid or with the specter of self-referentiality – a tradition McHarg readily admits to – one cannot overlook the materials that function as his medium. Some of the artist's recent works comprise geometric patterns laid out in linoleum tiles. Playing with the assumptions of uniformity in these industrial materials, McHarg subtly alters the tiles “unsquaring” them, so to speak, by slicing away the edges. The transformation, as it appears on the wall, is a subtle shift of the work's geometry, a systematic play away from the true (or truth?). The works echo the reductive geometries of Minimalism while retaining the contemporary sense of media play.
Recently McHarg’s work has taken a new tack, moving off the wall. Where his works once altered the functionality of usable consumer products, they now incorporate discarded household objects, objects that lost their usefulness before McHarg ever laid his eyes on them. Rusted pieces of hardware, spent of life and cast away by their owners, are given new context by McHarg who coats them with rust inhibiting paint and primer, and casually displays them on a pedestal.
So what does this work, or any of the work in the exhibition have to do with Hinterland? I would suggest about as much as I do. For this exhibition reflects the clues of our society: the materials we use, the places we live, the ways we think. And if our culture is still associated with the hallowed images of the Group of Seven, then so be it – we are the Hinterland. Mind you, an exhibition of four artists whose work happens to share some similarities (and many differences) is not an absolutist monograph on Canadian culture. Far from it. Each of the artists has talked about creating an imaginative space, one where the viewer must make his or her own sense of the objects and images presented. These are the objects and images of our collective culture, a culture on the peripheries of art, power, and history. A culture, in effect, of the wilderness.
