In his 1968 essay, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Robert Smithson writes about a “climate” of sight. He talks about the “mental weather” of an individual, and how a psyche makes one view art; a “wet” mind, for instance, appreciates the fluidity of organic, or painterly, images and forms, and looks upon surfaces that can seem gaseous or foggy. This “dank brain” is considered by some to be the ideal mental climate to navigate the fluidity of an artist’s thesis.
This climate of visual perception is also the ideal one with which to approach the sister exhibitions of Phantoms of a Utopian Will / Like Most Follies, More Than a Joke and More Than a Whim. Running concurrently at the SFU Gallery and the Burnaby Art Gallery, these exhibitions feature recent and older works by Canadian artist Alex Morrison, as well as works chosen by Morrison from the respective collections of the two institutions.
The content of Morrison’s work in these exhibitions is informed by the specific sites in which his work is exhibited, namely the brutalist architecture of the SFU campus designed by Arthur Erickson, and the Ceperley House location of the Burnaby Art Gallery in Deer Lake Park. These exhibitions are intended to address how the use of these spaces changes over time and to acknowledge artistic movements such as modernism.
This approach of using the space to inform the art is ripe with potential, especially in the context of SFU’s modern concrete architecture that is slowly decaying in the damp climate of Burnaby Mountain. This campus, in its short 50 years of existence, has been host to protests, celebrations, student-organized raves, and convocations.
Unfortunately, the result of Morrison’s attempt to address Vancouver’s changing spaces is muddied at best. Certain works stand out, such as paintings by Morrison, framed prints from the archives, as well as an array of ceramic works arranged on purpose-built MDF structures. But this variety clutters the exhibition, which in turn makes it feel empty.
To include work by other artists into one’s exhibition, as Morrison has done, is similar to citing references: they should support the thesis of the exhibition — that one’s state of mind can affect how we perceive art. It is great to see Curnoe’s work in this exhibition, but it distracts from its intention. It’s a great quote that doesn’t fit the context. More supportive of the artist’s intention is the visible connection between the hard-edged forms of the structures and the architecture of SFU, and “Palomar” by Michael Morris, a lithograph of curving, modernist forms.
Of all the work on display at SFU Gallery, the strongest ones are Morrison’s 2011 paintings on linen and the flags that hang at the gallery’s entrance, works that would have fit nicely into the Geometry of Knowing series that was part of the SFU Galleries’ programming earlier this year. As pure abstraction, these works do not contain the overall ambition of the current exhibition’s focus on state of mind, but the crystalline and triangular patterns call to mind both the clean, hard edges of modernist forms while also resembling patterns that could be used on more comforting works, such as stained glass or quilts.
These quiet and modest works build a discourse between these two opposing aesthetics that could be appreciated by Smithson’s “dank brain.”
