Rain in the Forecast, Suzo Hickey
Somewhere Beyond Nowhere, Tara Nicholson
Alan Brandoli
Although diverse in media and emphasis, the work of both Suzo Hickey and Tara Nicholson question the histories and changing perceptions of place and self as becoming increasingly alienated from lived and natural environments. The complex, layered relationship between location, community and individuality is a longstanding and currently resurgent theme in art, enlivened by Tara Nicholson’s interrogation of habitation, and is implied by Suzo Hickey as an encumbered search for orientation and community.
The temperamental surfaces and saturated contrasts of Hickey’s collection of suburban street scenes entitled, Rain in the Forecast form subjective responses to specific B.C. locales - Kaslo, Prince Rupert and East Vancouver - places the artist lived, walked and interpreted as moments laden with unease, wonder and heightened sensations. Hickey confirms her affinity to painting and walking as a premise for the work by concentrating painting as a necessary extension of her “need to get out of her car and walk.”1
The street scene as a trope that merges external reality with the artist’s inner consciousness flows through 17th C Flemish genre painting to early modernists such as Munch and van Gogh to current rejuvenation in works by Rauch, Doig and Dorland. Internal reflection is negotiated through reworking and layering paint, echoing direct experience, remembrance and response. In works such as Tall Trees in Kaslo the systematic patterns or grids that begin some of Hickey’s paintings are left visible and index an ordered, rational origin as counterpoint to the otherwise agitated, searching brushwork. “I just painted stripes, stripes, stripes, or geometric patterns... And then when you paint over, a little bit of that comes through.”2
Anyone having walked the drenched streets of Vancouver can identify with the restless isolation and unsettling atmosphere of these paintings, but Hickey has amplified and distorted the lighting and colouration to serve a more personal purpose. Walking and encountering becomes an internal negotiation for congruence, accommodation and identity. Body memory and repeated movement actualize Hickey’s experience as played out through the durational processes of orienteering and making her work.3
In the uphill views of Tall Trees in Kaslo, Looking North and Pasquale’s House the emptiness of the street forms a continuity with the viewers space and underscores a strong sense of individual isolation in the midst of a populated suburbia. As in many Canadian renditions of community what lies beyond the ordered façades and city borders are implied questions, while through the exertion of the search we sense our own internal balance engage.
1 Suzo Hickey, A Portrait Of An Artist: Suzo Hickey, Stephen Thompson, The Georgia Straight, May 24, 2011, p. 4. Vancouver Free Press Publishing Corp.
2 Ibid.
3 Fuchs, Thomas, The Phenomenology of Body Memory, p. 9, in Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement, edited by Sabine C. Koch, Thomas Fuchs, et al. John Benjamins, Publisher, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2012.
In contrast to Hickey’s proximity to her subject, Tara Nicholson’s exhibition entitled Somewhere Beyond Nowhere presents images accessed through local drives, hikes and distant travels to locations in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia and Holland as she seeks the telling peculiarities of human presence within communities and individual forms of habitation. In this sense Nicholson’s subjects underscore difference and individuality while Hickey’s work transcribes familiar scenes into emotively charged scenarios.
Imbedded in Nicholson’ images is the idea that humans create the idiosyncratic character of a place and community by actualizing inner desires based on escapist narratives. Be it through the public display of intimate and profane graffiti written on a huge boulder by a busy highway; an empty and unfinished ocean side shelter; an idyllic view of a lake with a barren development site, or a simulated version of a campsite, these works regard these specific indexes of human intervention in the landscape as a fetishization of narratives of retreat, escape or individualization. As Nicholson explains, The title comes from the idea of retreat, a notion of going beyond modernity.4
Ironically, many of the images consider myths regarding nostalgia, idealism and sublime experience that give rise to oddly distorted artificial reconstructions and fantasy “get aways” that subvert their intended utopian premise.
Nicholson’s Kuierpadtien, an image taken in Holland abruptly foregrounds an ambiguous, blue half pipe in the bottom third of
the composition that can be read as either a waterslide or as a reference to a twisted aqueduct. In the background is a blissful beach scene with boating children, beaches and tents. This seems idyllic until we realize that it is a manufactured reality and reflects a plethora of problematic assumptions including the notion that we can be transported into an imaginary adventure by altering nature. The unreal becomes real.5 The pipe structure overlooks an artificial campground and waterway that Nicholson informs us, is outfitted by a constructed ski hill, fake rock walls and an artificial lake.
Conversion of the natural characteristics of place to serve the desires of the imagination is a form of compensation for the perceived lack in the original landscape. In the case of Kuierpadtien, Holland’s flatness and lower than sea level geography is re-fabricated as an invented, nostalgic habitat.
The visual rhetoric that Nicholson seeks out in these found tableaus is how these largely modernist narratives endure and can serve her creative enterprise as inquiries into the dynamics of the peculiar ecologies that arise in each place.6 Although, these photographs are charismatic and visually arresting we also sense that the image of the three cowboys in Riders on Comber’s Beach, represents a fading and increasingly anachronistic subculture that continues as a fascination with a Western archetype rather than as necessity. In this way, Nicholson deliberately employs documentary and romantic visual tropes to reconsider how display and composition provide an opportunity to raise issues about the mythic representation implied in the image.
4 Tara Nicholson, video presentation, Deluge Contemporary Gallery, Victoria, B.C. 2012.
5 For an early discussion regarding the transposition of the real by variant forms of simulations and the concept of the “hyperreal”, see Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacrum and Simulation, University of Michigan Press,
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. 1981.
6 Goggin, Peter, et al. Rhetoric, Literacies and Narratives of Sustainability in Evironmental Rhetoric of Place, Peter Goggin, editor Routledge, New York, NY, USA, 2012.
There is a detectable romanticism in both of these artists’ works where the fascination with the notion of human connection to
place is presented as a personal encounter - a transformative and transitory experience for Hickey and one of excursion and encounter for Nicholson. However, on examination some of the differences are stark. For Suzo Hickey this experience is about seeking solace in the strangeness of familiar neighbourhoods. In Nicholson’s images we see the romantic enactment of travel akin to an archaeological and epic search for the different and exotic narratives that accommodate retreat and remoteness. She locates the peculiarities that reveal faltering modernist ideas about utopian dwellings, structures and interventions. The works in both exhibitions dwell on the oddities of how humans imprint place with practices of seclusion, personal narratives and the enactments of the imaginary.
Suzo Hickey is a painter and multidisciplinary artist living in Vancouver, BC. Born in 1959, she migrated from coast (Prince Rupert) to desert (Kamloops) before settling in Vancouver in 1990. She graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1994, and has exhibited around BC and internationally on themes of queer mothering, urban landscapes, namecalling, narrative and death in the family.
suzohickey.ca
Tara Nicholson completed her Master of Fine Arts at Concordia University in 2010. Using photography and video to investigate remote and disputed territories, the notion of modern-day pilgrimage has been repeated throughout her large-scale projects for the past four years to invite reflection on the desire to escape modernity. Nicholson has exhibited and attended residencies internationally and since 2010 has taught part -time at the University of Victoria.
taranicholson.com
Alan Brandoli is an artist, writer and Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops B.C.
Somewhere Beyond Nowhere, Tara Nicholson
Alan Brandoli
Although diverse in media and emphasis, the work of both Suzo Hickey and Tara Nicholson question the histories and changing perceptions of place and self as becoming increasingly alienated from lived and natural environments. The complex, layered relationship between location, community and individuality is a longstanding and currently resurgent theme in art, enlivened by Tara Nicholson’s interrogation of habitation, and is implied by Suzo Hickey as an encumbered search for orientation and community.
The temperamental surfaces and saturated contrasts of Hickey’s collection of suburban street scenes entitled, Rain in the Forecast form subjective responses to specific B.C. locales - Kaslo, Prince Rupert and East Vancouver - places the artist lived, walked and interpreted as moments laden with unease, wonder and heightened sensations. Hickey confirms her affinity to painting and walking as a premise for the work by concentrating painting as a necessary extension of her “need to get out of her car and walk.”1
The street scene as a trope that merges external reality with the artist’s inner consciousness flows through 17th C Flemish genre painting to early modernists such as Munch and van Gogh to current rejuvenation in works by Rauch, Doig and Dorland. Internal reflection is negotiated through reworking and layering paint, echoing direct experience, remembrance and response. In works such as Tall Trees in Kaslo the systematic patterns or grids that begin some of Hickey’s paintings are left visible and index an ordered, rational origin as counterpoint to the otherwise agitated, searching brushwork. “I just painted stripes, stripes, stripes, or geometric patterns... And then when you paint over, a little bit of that comes through.”2
Anyone having walked the drenched streets of Vancouver can identify with the restless isolation and unsettling atmosphere of these paintings, but Hickey has amplified and distorted the lighting and colouration to serve a more personal purpose. Walking and encountering becomes an internal negotiation for congruence, accommodation and identity. Body memory and repeated movement actualize Hickey’s experience as played out through the durational processes of orienteering and making her work.3
In the uphill views of Tall Trees in Kaslo, Looking North and Pasquale’s House the emptiness of the street forms a continuity with the viewers space and underscores a strong sense of individual isolation in the midst of a populated suburbia. As in many Canadian renditions of community what lies beyond the ordered façades and city borders are implied questions, while through the exertion of the search we sense our own internal balance engage.
1 Suzo Hickey, A Portrait Of An Artist: Suzo Hickey, Stephen Thompson, The Georgia Straight, May 24, 2011, p. 4. Vancouver Free Press Publishing Corp.
2 Ibid.
3 Fuchs, Thomas, The Phenomenology of Body Memory, p. 9, in Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement, edited by Sabine C. Koch, Thomas Fuchs, et al. John Benjamins, Publisher, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2012.
In contrast to Hickey’s proximity to her subject, Tara Nicholson’s exhibition entitled Somewhere Beyond Nowhere presents images accessed through local drives, hikes and distant travels to locations in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia and Holland as she seeks the telling peculiarities of human presence within communities and individual forms of habitation. In this sense Nicholson’s subjects underscore difference and individuality while Hickey’s work transcribes familiar scenes into emotively charged scenarios.
Imbedded in Nicholson’ images is the idea that humans create the idiosyncratic character of a place and community by actualizing inner desires based on escapist narratives. Be it through the public display of intimate and profane graffiti written on a huge boulder by a busy highway; an empty and unfinished ocean side shelter; an idyllic view of a lake with a barren development site, or a simulated version of a campsite, these works regard these specific indexes of human intervention in the landscape as a fetishization of narratives of retreat, escape or individualization. As Nicholson explains, The title comes from the idea of retreat, a notion of going beyond modernity.4
Ironically, many of the images consider myths regarding nostalgia, idealism and sublime experience that give rise to oddly distorted artificial reconstructions and fantasy “get aways” that subvert their intended utopian premise.
Nicholson’s Kuierpadtien, an image taken in Holland abruptly foregrounds an ambiguous, blue half pipe in the bottom third of
the composition that can be read as either a waterslide or as a reference to a twisted aqueduct. In the background is a blissful beach scene with boating children, beaches and tents. This seems idyllic until we realize that it is a manufactured reality and reflects a plethora of problematic assumptions including the notion that we can be transported into an imaginary adventure by altering nature. The unreal becomes real.5 The pipe structure overlooks an artificial campground and waterway that Nicholson informs us, is outfitted by a constructed ski hill, fake rock walls and an artificial lake.
Conversion of the natural characteristics of place to serve the desires of the imagination is a form of compensation for the perceived lack in the original landscape. In the case of Kuierpadtien, Holland’s flatness and lower than sea level geography is re-fabricated as an invented, nostalgic habitat.
The visual rhetoric that Nicholson seeks out in these found tableaus is how these largely modernist narratives endure and can serve her creative enterprise as inquiries into the dynamics of the peculiar ecologies that arise in each place.6 Although, these photographs are charismatic and visually arresting we also sense that the image of the three cowboys in Riders on Comber’s Beach, represents a fading and increasingly anachronistic subculture that continues as a fascination with a Western archetype rather than as necessity. In this way, Nicholson deliberately employs documentary and romantic visual tropes to reconsider how display and composition provide an opportunity to raise issues about the mythic representation implied in the image.
4 Tara Nicholson, video presentation, Deluge Contemporary Gallery, Victoria, B.C. 2012.
5 For an early discussion regarding the transposition of the real by variant forms of simulations and the concept of the “hyperreal”, see Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacrum and Simulation, University of Michigan Press,
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. 1981.
6 Goggin, Peter, et al. Rhetoric, Literacies and Narratives of Sustainability in Evironmental Rhetoric of Place, Peter Goggin, editor Routledge, New York, NY, USA, 2012.
There is a detectable romanticism in both of these artists’ works where the fascination with the notion of human connection to
place is presented as a personal encounter - a transformative and transitory experience for Hickey and one of excursion and encounter for Nicholson. However, on examination some of the differences are stark. For Suzo Hickey this experience is about seeking solace in the strangeness of familiar neighbourhoods. In Nicholson’s images we see the romantic enactment of travel akin to an archaeological and epic search for the different and exotic narratives that accommodate retreat and remoteness. She locates the peculiarities that reveal faltering modernist ideas about utopian dwellings, structures and interventions. The works in both exhibitions dwell on the oddities of how humans imprint place with practices of seclusion, personal narratives and the enactments of the imaginary.
Suzo Hickey is a painter and multidisciplinary artist living in Vancouver, BC. Born in 1959, she migrated from coast (Prince Rupert) to desert (Kamloops) before settling in Vancouver in 1990. She graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1994, and has exhibited around BC and internationally on themes of queer mothering, urban landscapes, namecalling, narrative and death in the family.
suzohickey.ca
Tara Nicholson completed her Master of Fine Arts at Concordia University in 2010. Using photography and video to investigate remote and disputed territories, the notion of modern-day pilgrimage has been repeated throughout her large-scale projects for the past four years to invite reflection on the desire to escape modernity. Nicholson has exhibited and attended residencies internationally and since 2010 has taught part -time at the University of Victoria.
taranicholson.com
Alan Brandoli is an artist, writer and Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops B.C.