COLLINS, FORSTER, HENDERSON, KLABUNDE: An Exhibition of Nova Scotia College of Art & Design Alumni
[First published as photocopied sheets for the 14-25 May, 1996 alumni exhibition at the Anna Leonowens Gallery at Halifax's Nova Scotia College of Art & Design.]
INTRODUCTION
It would be impossible to do a comprehensive Nova Scotia College of Art & Design alumni exhibition, but it is possible to initiate a series of shows which bring attention to problems of influence, education and professional art at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design.
There is no Nova Scotia College of Art & Design house style and no distinguishing school look; neither is there a secret code -- a kind of Masonic language or secret handshake -- that allows initiates to distinguish a Nova Scotia College of Art & Design sensibility in an art object. Several long term staff at the school have influenced the artists in this exhibition, but influences are always mutual in a good teacher/student relationship, and a compelling work of art is never simply a bundle of influences. Andrew Forster can't remember whether or not he had Garry Kennedy as a studio instructor; Sue Klabunde often quotes Walter Ostrum but did not study with him; Dorain Henderson studied with Jan Peacock, but her work better exhibits the sensibility of Nova Scotia College of Art & Design associates David Askevold and Robert Frank; Gerry Collins's "filling in" of Gerald Ferguson's drawings in the 1980s is stylistically all Collins and no Ferguson, but in the end all Ferguson's work.
Within the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design milieu, questions of influence are complicated.
Dorain Henderson is a very recent Nova Scotia College of Art & Design graduate; Collins, Forster and Klabunde graduated early and late in the 1980s. The work in this show was made between 1983 and 1996. Collins's Factory Paintings (1991) mark the beginnings of Collins's maturity as an artist. Excerpts from Andrew Forster's 1983 and 1986 exhibitions, which include publications, are supplemented in this show by his 1995 book Light In the Head. The Forster work in this show charts the career of an artist who has moved from neo-conceptualism to a kind of poetry. Sue Klabunde's Spots Pots work is commercial production that she characterizes as being made "outside" her art production. Henderson's Headache (1995) video tape is her first important work, and is evidence of a deeply serious and strangely -- given her age -- mature artist.
The artists in this exhibition set the standards for the emerging NSCAD-educated artist very high. Unlike most graduates of art schools, they have been blessed with a focus and a direction in their art from the beginning of their careers.
I have written about Collins and Forster for the magazines Vanguard and Arts Atlantic. As a curator at the TUNS School of Architecture, I hosted an exhibition of Sue Klabunde's work in 1986. Dorain Henderson's work is new to me -- a discovery made possible by Peter Kirby and Mount Saint Vincent University's Ingrid Jenkner.
GERARD COLLINS
For years Gerry Collins was best known for having been hired at an hourly rate in the early 1980s by one of his teachers, Gerald Ferguson, to "fill in" paintings for him. That work was Collins's apprenticeship in conceptual art. But Collins's painting was also the literal painted substance of Ferguson's work at a time when Ferguson was heading toward a radical transition in his practice. As an anti-painting mythology about N.S.C.A.D. was solidifying in the wider art world, we note, one of its leading lights was not only encouraging painting -- and traditional painting at that -- but was also unapologetically returning to painting himself, and, depending one one's point of view, either appropriating or collaborating with a student to make significant work.
Gerry Collins has always been a prolific painter, but he hit his stride in the early 1980s with 100 Portraits; and then with the Harlequin Romance paintings (based on pulp novel book covers); followed by the Wallpaper paintings (portraits and still life with wallpaper motives); and then by the Assembly-line or Factory-Made paintings, some of which are included in this exhibition.
Collins continues to use a system -- a set of rules -- to generate paintings almost as if he were making a set of Sol LeWitt cubes. But Collins so freely interprets his rules, which are in any case formulated in such a way that almost anything the artist wants to paint can satisfy them, that the idea has not become a machine that makes the art, but a good excuse to make a beautiful painting. The conceptual art tradition (let's call it a tradition) that Collins inherited from Ferguson positions his practice within a neo-conceptual corner of the art world. (Collins also studied, we note, with Gerhardt Richter, the German conceptualist painter.)
In the "process" art of late-1960s and early 1970s, the elegance of a verbal program most often produced rather simple-looking results (like LeWitt's white, minimalist open cubes) and never Collins's kind of painting. The complexity of paint handling in Collins's works is avoided by the older practitioners of the puritanical regimes of process art. One also notes that Collins's painting has a tastefulness about it which does not abandon completely a less-is-more austere, conceptualist aesthetic.
Collins's finished art cannot be anticipated from a reading of any of his programs. Four of Collins's Factory or Assembly-line paintings are included in this exhibition, works from 1990-91. The Factory Paintings are based on directly observed seascapes, local Saint John scenes, still life, and motifs from various reproductions and photographs which the artist has collected, and an old colouring book that Collins bought at a flea-market. The Factory Paintings bear assigned titles which have, as the artist puts it, a "numeric correspondence only" to an old hand list that he recovered from a shopping centre sale of real factory-made paintings. By coincidence, one or two of Collins' paintings almost match the titles from this found list.
The Factory Paintings raid the cheap kitsch world of velvet painting and shopping centre art. They start from a set of rules which allowed Collins more latitude than any of his previous series:
When I was a child growing up in Saint John, there were few opportunities to view works of art. Thus, the first paintings to which I was exposed were 'factory' or 'assembly-line' works. In my parents' living room hung a vast seascape in which the moon, a large blob of white paint, shone on a choppy sea of palette knife strokes. I saw more of these paintings whenever I visited my uncles. In fact, over a period of only five years, my two uncles amassed a collection of nearly eighty paintings. Each visit, I would pick a new favourite; Neapolitan Village one week, Plaza Del Toros the next. My uncles were quite pleased when I expressed my intention to become an artist. 'Someday,' they would say to me, gesturing toward Montmartre, The Real Paris by A. Lovati, 'you'll be able to paint like that.'
Collins's work could be representatively 1980s painting: the work borrows its imagery from the "right" low art sources, such as Harlequin Romance cover art, cheap wallpaper patterns, and factory-made paintings sold in shopping malls, and his arbitrary and deadpan titles bespeak the banal air of an artist raised in the era of mass media. However, the program of Collins's work quickly dissolves into beautiful paint handling, and the arbitrary titles, such as the titles of the Factory Paintings, often transport one into a delicious little reverie: for example, two of the titles of the Factory Paintings are Near the Coast of the Island of Ishia and Mixed Bouquet; Old Classic Style.
ANDREW FORSTER
In his first exhibition in 1983, Forster imitated, made-up, made-over and mythified himself. That exhibition was called Andrew Forster
(1942- ) Retrospective. In this "retrospective" Forster worked out a pastiche of real and imagined works dates and places. Forster's "real" work (a provisional term), his sculpture and written pieces of the previous few years, had a minimalist or conceptual nature, and it was easy to imagine them matching the spurious dates he made up for them in the catalogue.
In both the 1983 and later in a 1986 exhibition, Forster's exhibition catalogue was central. In the 1983 show, cards on the gallery wall referred to works that were not in the gallery. Instead, the catalogue contained photographs of the work and a brief, fictional chronology of Forster's life and work. It also contained an interview with Forster. The 1986 show included resumes of recognizable artists in which Forster inserts his name.
Forster's 1983 catalogue was dedicated to Elmyr de Hory, the art forger, and for those who know Forster personally, as many in Halifax's tightly-knit art community did and do, the catalogue's misinformation was transparent - an inside conceptual art joke. Forster's "retrospective" marked itself as being solidly aligned with the deconstructive sensibility of NSCAD's Garry Kennedy.
For example, Forster gave his birth date as 1942, when his actual birth date may be closer to 1952 or even 1962. Works that he listed as being first shown in 1966 (i.e. his Monument to Giacometti) Haligonians knew were made between 1980-83. In the catalogue photograph of the "Giacometti" piece only little clues like the contemporary lighting fixtures were evidence that the piece was not made in 1966, as stated in the catalogue.
Later, in his 1986 exhibition, Forster presented a more complicated set of variables. Forster appropriated a Rudi Fuch's catalogue about the artist Jannis Kounellis in which Forster switched his own illustrations with the originals: this made Forster's appropriated layers harder to distinguish from each other. Pictures of spoons, handles, mechanical looking things, landscapes of the pyramids, blurred photos of a painting and a spectator in a museum, the Statue of Liberty, and boxing gloves on truncated arms were substituted for pictures of Kounellis's work in the original book. The photos are puzzling, personal and evocative of the nineteenth Century, none more so than the photo of the Crystal Palace and Forster's elegant ink on canvas version of the original sketch for the nineteenth-century showplace. The 1986 catalogue marks a move by Forster away from Kennedy-style deconstruction and toward a much more melancholic and ethereal kind of art in which a kind of visual poetry is central. (Witness his most recent book.)
The inclusion of photos of national monuments of the last century and various mechanical parts in Forster's 1986 version of the Fuchs catalogue highlighted what is glossed over in the florid rhetoric of Fuchs's original words and photos. Forster addresses a version of the Romantic artist and the Satanic mills in the 1986 show, but unlike 1980s neo-Romantics and neo-expressionists, Forster was able to slip in and out of his own place in the art tradition by posing as other people and revelling in the discontinuity of it all in the true tradition of conceptual art. Like a ghost, or like his conceptual art forbears, he was out of the fray, his own invisible self, or so it would seem. Forster's 1980s work ventured into commentary as art the way a logician envelops one system within another -- as a temporary, pyramid-building way out of an insoluble problem. The insoluble problem for Forster, as it was for Duchamp and a thousand others between Forster and Duchamp, is how to at once be and not be an artist, how to deny an simultaneously glory in a privileged position. As a footnote it should be mentioned that in 1996 Forster has left his deconstructive "Museum Stories," and hence his first influences, far behind.
DORAIN HENDERSON
I create ambiguous situations using my immediate family members who live in rural New Brunswick....The familiar persons and things become elements of estrangement.
Henderson took a basic sound course from Andy Dowden, and studied video under Nova Scotia College of Art & Design video artist and teacher Jan Peacock: "I like the visuals in Jan's work," she says. Like other good teachers, Peacock facilitated work in Henderson, who graduated from Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in 1994, that has no direct relationship to Peacock's own. Within traditions of Nova Scotia College of Art & Design video art, Headache has more affinities with Robert Frank and David Askevold -- neither of whom Henderson studied with -- than with Peacock. Robert Frank's Cape Breton videotapes and Askevold's more recent work both use rural imagery to heighten a mood of melancholy and despair in which Henderson's work also abides.
Henderson is from rural New Brunswick, and so one is also tempted to align Headache with the mordant, working class Molly of the New Brunswick novelist David Adams Richards.
Ingrid Jenkner, in a catalogue essay to a recent Henderson solo show at the Art Gallery at Mount Saint Vincent University, succinctly describes how Henderson's Headache works:
The incantatory rhythms of her wordless 'phrasing' frame hand-held shots of 'family' activity in sequences that alternate between the absurd and the grotesque. Strung together like memory fragments, the repetitious sequences of Headache ensure that each new element or other sign of change will be scrutinized for its narrative significance, like a clue.
"Headache is a play on technical conventions of the frustrated narrative. The locus of the recalled memories is that of an alcoholic home." say the liner notes on Henderson's tape. In an artist's statement she sent to me, Henderson speaks of Headache as "a tapestry of alcohol-influenced events and memories," a description which leads a viewer to construct the video in terms of states of drunkenness and drug taking, perhaps the most fractured narratives that waking consciousness can produce.
Henderson is the youngest artist in this exhibition, but she makes the oldest work.
SUE KLABUNDE
The art of Sue Klabunde -- to distinguish it for a moment from her commercial Spots Pots work and her collaborations with the artist David Clark -- has been written about only once, in 1986, when Stephanie White savaged Klabunde's work in Vanguard magazine.
The exhibition was called Unnecessary: Recent Studio Work. White attacked what I read at the time as Klabunde's attack on the presumption of coherence in certain modes of architectural representation.
It is easy to make an incoherent exhibition of visual art. Klabunde, however, choose the gallery of an architecture school (at the Technical University of Nova Scotia where I was curator) to show work that mocked the conventions of architectural representation in several ways, most notably in her juxtapositions of immense drawings and tiny objects. Architectural modes of drawing and model-making were highlighted in Klabunde's manipulations of scale. White's review illustrated the professional gulf between artists and architects as she piously asserted that: "Architecture would force itself to exploit these potentials. Art, in this case, feels no such compunction and stops just as the powerful part should be starting." (Vanguard, Summer 1986, 63).
As it has turned out, Klabunde, after considering careers in both architecture and art, opted to hold her gallery art career in suspension for a time and adopt a career as a business person, creating a rather large production pottery company with a business partner, Sharon Davis. Spots Pots hires artists to paint ceramics with brightly coloured designs. These designs are modified according to Klabunde's assessment of the market. Her company has become very successful, but Klabunde reserves the right to return to "gallery art" at any time.
Although she says that "the decorations on the pots are misregistered to emphasize the hand-painted aspect in defiance of the mass produced," Klabunde is careful to distinguish Spots Pots from what she considers to be "art." She refers to a Nova Scotia College of Art & Design teacher, Walter Ostrom, whenever she talks about craft/art debates:
Let's start with the first piece of advice Walter Ostrom gave me upon graduation. In reference to my ceramic art and Spots Pots he said 'keep them separate'...I have actually tried to follow his advice in that in my mind I consider Spots Pots products -- just products -- and not art. They seem to follow a different set of guidelines than if they were art. I am also much less emotionally attached to each piece looking at them this way.
None of the other artists in this exhibition are engaged in such activity, that is, in something that is "not art." Gerry Collins's witty allusions to mass production in the Factory Paintings are, after all, just allusions. In the commercial world of Spots Pots, Klabunde does not usually "show" except to sell. Pots carry their context with them, like other manufactured goods. Artist and client assume that they both understand the work, and commercial flower pots do not usually come exhibition commentaries such as this one.
Klabunde's recent "Entrepreneur of the Year" award is an acknowledgement that is unthinkable in relation to the other artists in this exhibition, no matter how successful. (I do not want especially to overemphasize the differences between Klabunde and the other artists, by the way, because I have chosen to show only one body of her work.) The art world's system of recognition is mysterious and almost incomprehensible to outsiders, and even insiders. Artists who almost never show or sell can have very good reputations, and their work can be talked about regardless of its commercial success. Not so in Klabunde's world:
I consider the enterprise itself, the business, as an art piece. There are interesting intersections between Spots and things I'm interested in in art terms.
The administrative art of Garry Kennedy comes to mind, but not as a permission.
In 1986, when Klabunde showed her Unnecessary Studio Work, she had a choice about where her professional life would go. That decision remains open, and she may yet give up the pot business. For now, her identity as an artist is subsumed under her identity as a business person, an identity which she feels she may take or leave at her discretion.
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List of Works in the Exhibition:
Gerry Collins -- Factory Paintings, 1990, oil on canvas, 3 sets of 4 paintings (12 paintings total), each painting measures 32"x40", artist's collection.
Sue Klabunde -- Seven Spots Pots, (one from each Spots Pots year) 1988-1995, ceramic, various sizes, artist's collection.
Andrew Forster -- Excerpts from Andrew Forster's 1983 Eye Level Gallery exhibition (reconstructed 1996). Labels; artist books; artist's collection.
Dorain Henderson -- Headache colour video tape, 20 minutes, 1995
__________________________
Andrew Forster
Born: Halifax, 1959
Residence: Montreal
Education:
York University, Toronto, 1978-79
Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, B.F.A., 1979-82
Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, Holland, 1984-85
Solo Exhibitions
1990 Windsor, Artcite
1989 Halifax, The Centre for Art Tapes
1988 Toronto, The Power Plant; Montreal, Articule
1987 Ottawa, Saw Gallery
1986 Halifax, Eye Level Gallery
1985 Montreal, Optica Gallery
1984 Saskatoon, AKA Gallery
1983 Halifax, Eye Level Gallery; Halifax, Centre for Art Tapes
Selected Group Exhibitions
1988 Aylmer, L'Imagier, Le mot dans l'i'image
1985 Lanaken, Belgium, Beelden in Lanaken
1982 Halifax, Eye Level Gallery
Artist's Books
1989 Dominion
1985 Andrew Forster
1983 Andrew Forster/Retrospective
Bibliography
Borsa, Joan. "Andrew Forster; AKA Gallery, Saskatoon." Vanguard, vol.13, no.7 (Sept. 1984), p.28
Eyland, Cliff. "Andrew Forster: Eye Level Gallery, " Halifax, Vanguard, vol.15, no.3 (Summer 1986), pp.40-41
Forster, Andrew "(Dis)Appearance of the Artist." Vanguard, vol.14, no. 10 (Dec. 1985-Jan. 1986), pp.24-25
---. "Department for the West." Parachute, no.32 (Fall 1983), p.40
---. "Eva Brandl." Vanguard, vol. 16, no.4 (Sept. 1987), pp. 40-41
--. "Jannis Kounellis; Contradiction and Consolation." Vanguard, vol. 17, no.2 (May 1988), pp.10-14
---. "Toby McLennan." Parachute, no.34 (Spring 1984) pp.45-46
Lebredt, Gordon. "At Home with Repetition." C Magazine, no. 25 (Spring 1990), pp. 34-42
von Mirbach, Martin."Andrew Forster; The Power Plant, Toronto." Parachute, no 54 (Spring 1989), pp.64-65
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Gerard Collins
Residence: Saint John, New Brunswick
Education:
Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, B.F.A., 19--
St. Martin's School of Art, London
Dusseldorf Staatliche Kunstakademie, Germany
Dalhousie University, Halifax
Solo Exhibitions
1994 Fredericton, New Brunswick, Beaverbrook Art Gallery
1993 Sackville, New Brunswick, Owens Art Gallery
1992 Saint John, New Brunswick, Aitken Bicentennial Centre
1991 Fredericton, New Brunswick, University of New Brunswick; The Art Gallery, Mount Saint Vincent University
1985 Halifax, Anna Leonowens Gallery; Saint John, Windrush Gallery; Moncton, Galerie Sans Nom
1983 Halifax, Eye Level Gallery
1981 Halifax, Anna Leonowens Gallery
1980 Halifax, Anna Leonowens Gallery
1979 Halifax, Anna Leonowens Gallery
1977 Saint John, 49 Princess Street Gallery
Selected Group Exhibitions
1994 179 John Street, Toronto; Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, NB
1993 Wynick Tuck Gallery, Toronto
1992 Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax
1990 Toronto, Grunwald Gallery; Gallery Connexion, Fredericton, NB
1989 Toronto, Grunwald Gallery
1988 Fredericton, Gallery Connection; Saint John, University of New Brunswick; Fredericton, Aitken Bi-Centennial Exhibition Centre; Saint John, Windrush Gallery
1987 Saint John, Windrush Gallery
1984 Saint John, Inform Art Gallery
1981 Halifax, Anna Leonowens Gallery
1977 London, Observatory Gardens Jubilee Show
__________________________
Dorain Henderson
Born:1970
Residence: Halifax
Education:
Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, B.F.A., 1994
Diploma, Art Program, Saint John Vocational School, NB, 1989
Workshop: Intro to Beta SP Editing Suite, Centre for Art Tapes, Halifax, NS, March 1995
Selected Exhibitions/Film Festivals
1996 Mongrel Moods, The Art Gallery, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax
1995 London New Arts Festival, London, Ontario
1995 Headache, 00 Gallery, Halifax, NS
1995 50/50, The Khyber Gallery, Halifax, NS
1995 Love for Sale, Eye Level Gallery, Halifax, NS
1994 Securing Space, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, NS
1994 Eleven:Eleven, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, NS (solo)
1994 Why Are All The Songs On The Radio About Love? The Centre for Art Tapes and CKDU Radio, Halifax, NS
1993 Intermedia Artists of the Week, Video Screening, Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, NS
1992 Nova Scotia College of Art & Design Sound Radio Show, CKDU Radio, Halifax, NS
1992 Ear, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, NS
Grants and Awards
1995 Explorations Grant, Canada Council
1994 The Linda Joy Busby Media Arts Award
Videography
1995 Headache
1994 Landscape Suicide
1994 Narcissistic Endeavors
1994 Religious
1994 To Maya
1994 What Beer's All About
1993 Eleven:Eleven
Video Production
1994 Religion and Erotica, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, NS
1994 Red Sky at Night, Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, NS
1994 Cabaret Voltage, Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, NS
1994 Young Neptune Theatre Group, Halifax, NS
__________________________
Sue Klabunde
Born: 1964, London, Canada
Residence: Halifax
Education:
Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, B.F.A., 1989
Watershed Centre for Ceramics Arts, Maine, Professional exploration session, 1989
H.B. Beal S.S., Beal Art Program, London, Ontario, 1982-84
Parson's School of Design, New York, Summer program, 1982
Solo Exhibitions
1987 St. Thomas, St. Thomas-Elgin Art Gallery, The Big Pot Show
1986 Halifax, TUNS Architecture Gallery, The Unnecessary: Recent Studio Work
Selected Group Exhibitions
1991 Halifax, Anna Leonowens Gallery I, PT 109
1989 Halifax, Anna Leonowens Gallery I, Red Art & Dense Boards
Other
1988 (to present) Spots Pots Inc. (With partner Sharon Davis and 6 employees.) A commercial pottery that produces gift ware sold across Canada, the United States and Japan.
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