Canadian Art, Winter 2000
White Out
What to do about white? What to do about order? The whole of art
history might be construed as a series of answers to just those two
questions, and the last cheeky riposte-in the form of nine works by
artist Pat McDermott-was on display at Toronto's Robert Birch
Gallery.
A quick glance about, upon entering that longish, narrow space,
might have persuaded the distracted visitor that she had wandered
by mistake into the temple of some obscure, austere (and very
contemporary) sect. The works, regularly spaced, all the same size
and at first glance mostly white, punctuate the gallery's plain
white walls like icons of the ineffable. What they really are, of
course, are icons to the rapture and radiance of the everyday.
In all but two of the works on display, Pat McDermott begins with a
child's jigsaw puzzle. He puts it together, pressure-mounts it to a
box he has constructed himself (each one takes many hours of
careful work) and then sets about painting it with some fifty
layers of gesso and five to ten layers of titanium white. The
puzzle shapes never quite vanish-you sense their regular, plodding
bustle deep below a surface that has the smarts to avoid serenity,
the smarts to get into trouble. In a piece called "they would like
to" (1998), he adds lightly pigmented wax to that surface and lets
it build into a gentle fractal commentary on the possibilities of
an order less rigid and less obvious than the one that lock-steps
below it.
In "is, not" (1999), it is absence that delights. You see the same
fifteen inch by twelve inch box, the same subtly mannered white,
the same anthropomorphic puzzle shapes. But this time the artist
has cut two holes into that surface-casually cloud-shaped, looking
simply through to the white wall behind and of course you realize
that there's really nothing simple about any of this. Seen through
those holes, that plain white wall is all frisky with shadows, with
grays that chase each other as you move, leading your eye beyond
that toiling little puzzle on the surface.
In the two most recent works, "will you please be quiet, please"
(2000) and "roughly" (2000), McDermott puts aside children's
puzzles. Pigmented wax covers the entire surface of the box. Into
its softness he has pressed, and then removed, a common bathroom
towel. You may never, stepping from the shower, dry yourself so
cavalierly again. McDermott finds an entire planet in the nap and
texture of cloth (he embeds a fragment of the towel into one of the
pieces, just to underscore the banality of his source), a planet
that responds to shifting light quite as wondrously as our own.
This is the first solo show in six years for this 38-year old
Toronto artist. He has clearly already come to terms with the
puzzle that is white, and the puzzle that is order. In fact, in the
world of Pat McDermott, the only puzzle still worth noting is why
we so often can't seem to see the radiance shimmering just beyond
and around our all-to-neatly interlocking lives.
By Gerald Hannon
Canadian Art, Winter 2000
Material Departures
"This Place of Departure", Pat McDermott's latest exhibition in the
project room at the Union Gallery, is best understood with a
material analysis. One that argues for the importance of
substantive presence and stresses the way in which 'stuff' itself -
matter, fiber, substance, material - embodies any directly
experienced encounter with reality. Although there is nothing
figural or representative about McDermott's most recent collection
of nine wax reliefs, they are clearly derived from a painting
tradition while at the same time recalling a set of ancient
Egyptian stone tablets, or even an assortment of hanging wall
textiles. In fact, if it weren't for their subtly sweet aroma and
dull smooth surfaces, one would be hard pressed to identify the
reliefs as having been constructed almost entirely of wax, at all.
McDermott's use of lightly undulating biomorphic forms - created
mainly by the effects caused by the molding of the wax - shifts the
emphasis from representation to the physical reality of the
materials themselves. Although there is a great attention to
surface construction in McDermott's reliefs, perhaps the abstract
painterliness found here is more in line with one of the ripped and
punctured canvases of Lucio Fontana's Spatial Concepts, than with
the conventions of Expressionism, Minimalism, or even
Modernism.
Like McDermott, Fontana stressed the 'total reality' of his
canvases as material objects which were, nevertheless, intended to
transcend their own materiality in favour of a more metaphysical
'real', yet still abstracted, concept (Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since
1940, 2000, 152). In other words, Fontana sought to shift the
emphasis in painting away from representation and towards physical
reality (Ibid). However, this is not to argue that form and
substance are totally absent of any contextual, or even narrative,
relevance in Departure. After all, there are traces of actual,
everyday objects in McDermott's works as well - a human hair curled
in the center of "gone from night", for instance, or the rounded
indentation of a coffee cup in "by weight of cloth and fact".
Perhaps there is also an element of the spiritual and the emotional
in the physicality of McDermott's materials. Set into the small,
shallow space of the project room, the translucent pieces of
Departure tend to reflect the surrounding light in a subtle manner
that blurs the edges of a rectangular composition in a sculptural
performance of opaquely bleeding surfaces. There is a ghostly
luminescence to the display, which evokes the kind of sacred hush
found in the inner sanctum of a chapel of the quiet, brightly lit
minimalism of a vacant hospital room - emphasized all the more by
the two small, blood-like red circles at the top of "in through the
front and out through the back", by the thin red vein of thread
hanging by a sewing needle in "this bright clarity", and by the
dark red stain leaking through the top left corner of "this place
of departure". In fact, where Fontana's canvases act like 'spatial
environments' aimed to launch the viewer into a metaphysical
journey, McDermott's reliefs act like 'material departures' that
throw the viewer into a suspension of reality, only to pull them
back into the tactile presence of their own corporeality.
2008
By Riva Symko, PHD
Head of Collections and Exhibitions
Winnipeg Art Gallery
Manitoba