For the exhibition Material.After.Life. curator Michelle Jacques gathered work by a group of nine artists who give a second life to materials with long histories and complex stories, from scrap metal to daily newspapers to doilies.
It all started with a visit to the studio of Doug Bentham, a veteran Saskatoon sculptor best known for monumental works like Unfurled, which sits at the base of the University Bridge, and Skater’s Arch, which was selected from a national call in 2016 to be featured outside the new downtown Edmonton arena.
But during her visit Jacques was charmed by Bentham’s smaller works.
“In hearing Doug speak about those small works, I learned that they’re not studies, they’re not ‘lesser than’ in his opinion on his practice. They’re very significant pieces that do two things that really are the inspiration at the root of this exhibition. They are made entirely from scrap materials,” said Jacques. “And they are put together in ways so that the works are not just about reuse or recycling. There’s a real essence to the materials these works are made from. Works that almost contain a memory that is embedded in the material from which they are made. So those were the ideas, found objects, and a kind of almost spirituality that were at the back of my mind as I started to put the exhibition together.”
From there, Jacques gathered additional artists whose works feature cast-off, discarded or seemingly disposable materials. During a tour of the exhibition she offered insight into their individual practices and the works on view.
Joanne Lyons
Material.After.Life. features several works by Saskatoon artist Joanne Lyons, who uses doilies to create otherworldly drawings and installations.
“Anybody who thrifts knows that second-hand stores are full of doilies, because they don’t have a lot of use in this day and age. So Joanne finds hundreds and hundreds and possibly thousands of them,” said Jacques.
The exhibition features not only Lyon’s use of the physical doilies, with which she creates soft, whimsical installations, but also her drawings that extract the imagery of the doily to create new forms resembling plant-life or sea creatures.
Jan Wade
Jacques first worked with artist Jan Wade at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1996. Thirty years later, she invited Wade to be part of Material.After.Life. with her Memory Jug works, which are comprised of found objects.
“Jan collects objects for many, many years, and has described how, once she starts the making process, they tell her what she needs to do with them. During her comments about the works at the exhibition opening, Jan talked about the long history of memory jugs in African and African American culture, and their importance as celebrations of the connections between the physical and spiritual worlds.”
Gwen McGregor
Toronto artist Gwen MacGregor has worked with a range of found materials over the course of her career. She described a time when this choice was born of financial necessity, but she is also very adept at making compelling works of art from things that have been cast aside. In the works selected for this exhibition, she has used plastic bags, yarn, art magazines and newspapers.
“Wherever she was, Gwen filmed herself making granny knots out of the front section of the daily newspaper. 2000 brings together the knots and the documentation of their making. In the video, we see a year’s worth of front-page headlines. While her material is ephemeral, something that is usually thrown away, in this work, it becomes a record of world events, and a document of the artist’s labour, and her movement – some of the newspapers are from the United Kingdom, and at one point we see headlines in Spanish. Installing this work 26 years after its making and first presentation, one realizes that socio-political time is cyclical. On some of those newspapers there are headlines that read as though they could have been written today.”
Sonny Assu (Ligwiłda’xw of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations)
Jacques came to know the work of artist Sonny Assu during her tenure at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. During her time there, the museum acquired three works that capture the true essence of found object art.
“Sonny, who is an Indigenous artist, found these off cuts in a pile at a site where they were collecting logs to build luxury log cabins. So these are just simply the ends of those logs. But he presents them as though they are West Coast Indigenous masks. He’s done nothing to them to make them look more like masks – this is how he found them. But it’s almost as though we are looking at the essence of the threes. With these works, Assu raises questions about environmental sustainability, by asking us to think about these beautiful natural elements as throwaways to the process of building luxury homes.
Leanne Read
Jacques first met Saskatoon artist Leanne Read when she was completing her Masters of Fine Art at the University of Saskatchewan.
“I was fascinated by Read’s commitment to working with used pianos as a primary material. They’re nearly as difficult as doilies to find new homes for. And like Joanne Lyons, Read has found a range of ways to work with the various parts of the piano, and has made sculptural, performance, and animations using them as her material. The work included in Material.After.Life. is made from the strings of many, many pianos, and is a beautiful, suspended piece that is enlivened with the energy of the instruments that they were sourced from. The work also embodies the considerable energy that the artist put into shaping the rigid and unforgiving into their final shape.”
Additional artists
Material.After.Life. also features work by Wally Dion, John Latham and Kara Uzelman, who each have their own unique ways of creating new life for old materials, whether it’s circuit boards, old books, or metal objects including cutlery.
