2011ISSUE 5 $4

GutsLeft to right:

Helena Kvarnöstrom, Cheltenham Badlands (detail), 2006;

Mike Bayne, Coquitlam (detail), 2008;

Joanne Hui, Shanghai World Expo Passport Pages (detail), 2010

Cover image: Jennie Suddick, Sasquatch Father and Son, 2009

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333 SQUARE2 NOTES

335 THE CABINET OF WONDER the work of Jennie Suddick

by Trish Boon

343 MONOTYPE by Max Lupo

351 CMYK & THE MIDDLE OF IT poetry by Sara Pinder

363 MIKE BAYNE by Nicole Armour

375 EMILY FOSTER by Emily Foster

377 MAGNIFIED LANDSCAPE interview by Chrissy Poitras

387 BUFFY CARRUTHERS by Chrissy Poitras

391 THE GERTRUDES by Melinda Richka

399 JOANNE HUI by Joanne Hui

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2011 Issue 5885 County Rd. 5, Picton Ontario K0K 2T0

613.476.0337info@square2magazine.ca

DIRECTORS /Chrissy Poitras & Kyle Topping

EDITORS / Betsy MatthewsBecky Lane

Square2 is published quarterly by Spark Box Studio.

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For subscriptions visit square2magazine.com

Printed in Canada by Printcraft.

photograph by Kelly Taylorat Hand Works, Bloomfield, Ontario

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Welcome to issue five of Square2

Magazine. After an exciting first year we are eager to kick

off year two with a look at some of the ways contemporary Ontario artists address notions of place, identity, community and home through their artwork.

How do you see the world around you? What pieces of the landscape stick with you? How does your community affect your identity? Is it possible to create without being influenced by the spaces, places or people around you?

Some artists, like painter Mike Bayne or photographer Helen Kvarnöstrom, reinvent the way in which a place is understood and appreciated. Others, like sculptor Jennie Suddick, play with iconic figures and imagery to challenge a particular way of thinking. Whatever the method, the artists featured in issue five encourage us to question and revaluate our experience of the world around us.

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A CABINET OF WONDERSthe artwork of Jennie Suddick

by Trish Boon

The first time I came across Jennie Suddick’s work was at the Narwhal Art Project’s exhibition last fall, “The Dazzle: A Cabinet of Wonders.” I remember her charming miniature dioramas of burning trees and

awkward glimpses of the communal lives of hairy Sasquatch families. I think I was as attracted to the painstaking amount of work to flock entire families of naked railroad models into furry beasts and fold tiny squares of paper into miniature bursts of fire as I was confused by the oddness of the representations.

During my visit last spring with Suddick in the Parkdale (Toronto) home she shares with her partner chef Michael Synowicki, printmaker Marco Cheuk, and her delightful studio-companion Stevie Nicks, Suddick showed me her progress on a piece for the Open Studio Visiting Artist Residency series, which exhibited at the artist run centre this June. Bigfoot Trap Matchstick Model Kit is a complete kit which allows Bigfoot enthusiasts to reproduce, with matchsticks, a trap built in the mid 70s in Southern Oregon – a site which continues to be maintained in case the big man himself is careless enough to stumble into it after all these years. The sticks come in a hand-printed box which includes silk-screened instructions and elaborate diagrams to aid hobbyists in creating their own miniature traps. The project is the latest manifestation of the artist’s minor obsession with cryptozoology, the study of evidence which substantiates the existence of currently unproven creatures such as the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster.

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Suddick’s interest in cryptozoology stems from her own unsettled feelings about her relationship with nature. The idea that something out there remains unclassifiable, and therefore undominated, resonates with her insecurities over a lack of connection to the natural world and the arguably innate human desire to connect to the land.

It’s possible that the desire to connect to the land is not so much innate as it is expected for a young Canadian artist. During two

years of working, studying and showing in Florence, Suddick was reminded of her Canadian artistic heritage through the overwhelming international recognition still enjoyed by the Group of Seven. The legacy of these back-to-the-wilderness art-legends was particularly poignant for Suddick, who grew up in Unionville, the one time home of Frederick Varley.

Like many Canadians, however, her childhood relationship with nature was

Previous:Sasquatch Father and Son (detail), 2009mixed media sculpture, acrylic case,2" x 2" x 2"photograph by Jennifer Sciarrino

Left: Replica Victorian Ornament of the Patterned Tent Caterpillar’s Communal Tent – Species Variation 1., 2009 mixed media sculpture- makinaw cloth, thread, synthetic clay sculpture, found materials, bell jar,10.6" x 5.5" diameterphotograph by Thomas Blanchard

Right: Bigfoot Trap Matchstick Model Kit, 2011artist multiple- hand printed and constructed box, screenprinted blueprints, 300 matchsticks, wood glue, acetate sheet,variable dimensionsbox: 9.8" x 6.3" x 3"created under the auspices of the Open Studio Visiting Artist Residency, 2010-11

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punctuated with rest-stops and visits to Giant Tiger department stores. The artificiality of the experience was often as memorable as the so-called fresh air. Inspiration to bring her art closer to that of a Canadiana-inspired natural heritage struck after an idyllic encounter admiring a tent-caterpillar infestation. Seeing the nests as weirdly ornate and aesthetically pleasing, she was shocked at the reactions of horror by her city counterparts as she retold the story. When her research revealed that

the solution to tent caterpillars was often to kill the entire tree, Suddick began to muse on the irony of this drastic measure as well as on the idea of communities and their interdependence on each other – as a parasite relies on its host.

From these musings Suddick’s Communal Tent series was born. In it, Suddick mimics the ad hoc artistry of the tent caterpillar by using traditional Canadian materials such as unraveled mackinaws and threads from old

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Above:Commune , 2009

mixed media sculpture,4" x 2" x 5.1"

Right: Commune II, 2009

mixed media sculpture,4" x 2" x 5.1"

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Above:Fan Fiction Series #3(PBS: don’t take it for granite), 2010mixed media sculpture, 3" x 3" x 2.27"

Left: Nothing of harm to dread- agYU, Toronto Vitrine #3(Detail), 2011mixed media miniature sculpture, 7.6" x 5.9" x 3.9"

Hudson’s Bay blankets to construct webs of artificial Canadian cultural history.

During the Communal Tents exhibition for her York University Master’s thesis show, Suddick created intricate samples of the thread specimens accompanied by stunning pencil drawings, simulating the experience of a visit to a museum of natural history rather than an art gallery. Later, during a residency in Berlin focusing on the same series, Suddick continued her tradition of hand-made mythologies by desecrating sentimental family artifacts belonging to Canadian expat families and weaving the threads into the existing dents and nails of their Berlin residences to create her distinctive oddities.

The cryptozoologist’s search for the unknown creates a narrative for the existence of the unproven. This search seems to mirror Suddick’s reinvention of articles from the collective Canadian past into a new, artificially created natural icon. That her icon is modeled after a

pest that threatens our proud Canadian trees, or is made from cloth worn by hipsters and small-pox carrying settlers alike, is unlikely coincidental and aptly descriptive of a country of folks who are expected to be nature lovers but, in fact, contribute to the demise of their environment.

Suddick’s next project focuses on the aforementioned punctuations on the Canadian road-trip to the great outdoors – the recently closed and increasingly overgrown service centres she describes as nostalgic “non-monuments” that continue to resonate in her memories of family ventures out of the city. She may even pay homage to the Colborne, Ontario’s Big Apple.

Jennie Suddick has shown her work at various venues in Toronto and abroad. A selection of her smaller pieces is currently available at Magic Pony, in Toronto. Suddick will be showing at Toronto’s Le Gallery this fall.

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Above:Fan Fiction Series #1- Blair Witch, 2010mixed media sculpture, 2.9" x 3" x 3"

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MONOTYPE

To print, to be a printmaker, is to delight in the many nuances of the medium.

You may approach the medium in an architectural fashion, undertaking to manage every aspect of the process, ensuring that the finished work is a fit representation of your initial blueprints. Or, you may approach printmaking as a constant conversation with the process. Through this dialogue, you discover that the process not only speaks, but often acts of its own volition.

Whether I am making an intaglio print or a monotype, I find that I cannot resist the latter, more conversational, approach. I often start with a specific vision in mind, but I enter the process knowing that I am only responsible for making half of the artwork. As much as I am concerned with producing a print directly, I also imagine that I am merely establishing the necessary criteria for the print to make itself. I do

artwork and article by Max Lupo

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Previous:We’re on the Water, 2011 monotype,6" x 5"

Left:Aerial Bridge Car, 2011 monotype,3" x 4"

Right:Unloading a Lake Freighter, 2011 monotype,4" x 5"

Right:Unloading a Lake Freighter, 2011 monotype,4" x 5"

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Above:That’s Me in the Umbrella, 2010 monotype,22" x 30"

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not mean that I leave an overwhelming amount of the process up to chance. Rather, I enter the work intuitively and when the process begins to speak, I am ready to listen.

Here is an example of what I mean. The origin of the monotype, They Load Containers, was a photograph. I was drawn to certain qualities of the photograph, so I ventured to use it as the basis for an artwork. I began by using acetone to transfer the photographic image onto rice paper, which would later be used as a chine-collé (a chine-collé is a thin paper with an image that is glued to a heavier support at the time of printing). After transferring the image, the process had something to tell me: it said, “the reverse side of this paper looks more interesting than the front”. Rice paper is semi-transparent and the acetone transfer process can produce interesting effects when viewed from the back side. Before transferring the image, I had not really thought about which side to use and it was only through experiencing

the process that I made my decision. The transmutation of image into final monotype involved many similar action/reaction moments.

You can visualize the working process this way: decision--> process/action--> result(s)/reaction -->decision.

They Load Containers is part of a body of work which deals specifically with the distortion of information through reproduction and memory. As a result, I see printmaking as an ideal medium

to explore these issues. To print is to reproduce, and the effect of doing so varies

from one situation to another. In the case of my recent work, I acquire photographs and reproduce them in the form of monotypes. The process begins with a clear image, but through my technique of reproduction, the original information is diluted and the finished work may contain little of the descriptive information found in the initial photograph. This is similar to the process of memory, where any initial thought is diluted by time, and

I enter the work intuitively and when the process begins to speak, I am ready to listen.

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often all that we have of a particular memory is a vague recollection of some earlier idea. As well, our memories are altered or distorted by new information that relates to them – when the context changes, the information changes.

When creating my monotypes, I pull images from some portion of our public memory or shared history: the archive. Specifically, I use images from the Library of Congress’ Print and Photograph Collection. The archive allows me to use public domain images that are both historical and (through the power of the internet) immediately available. From the archive, my interest was initially captured by a certain set of photographs involving harbours, or heavy machinery, as seen in my monotype Unloading a Lake Freighter. I am not sure why I was drawn to these images in the first place, but now it is obvious that certain connections have developed. Particularly, there is a timelessness to these types of machines. For

example, look at Unloading a Lake Freighter and They Load Containers, then tell me, which one was created from an image photographed in 2010 and which one was created from an image photographed in 1943? Which one is from Pennsylvania? Which one from Halifax? Your uncertainty is my intent.

To put it plainly, I take information then distort and re-contextualize it in a way that is visually interesting and, I hope, thought provoking.

My process is: acquire--> reproduce/manipulate--> distribute--> repeat.

Right:Grain Elevators, 2010 monotype,22" x 30"

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LIKE USUAL, I FOUND HER. IT WAS THE RIGHT PLACE FOR SOMEONE WITH PIGTAILS DYED TO MATCH THEIR

LIPSTICK.

AND THAT DAMNED RED COAT THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR, A BANNER OF FUN FUR.

THE SLEEVE WAS HELD ON WITH SAFETY PINS, BUT NOT IN THE HARDCORE WAY, JUST LAZINESS.

SHE COULD SEW A PATCH ON WITH DENTAL FLOSS, DARN A HEEL, EVEN KNEW THINGS ABOUT THE GAUGE OF

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THE RAW SEAM SURPRISED.

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THE MIDDLE OF IT

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Poetry by Sara Pinder

THE MIDDLE OF ITI CAN TELL YOU WHICH MEN IN THE ROOM BEAT THEIR WIVES, GIVE OUT WAXED-PAPER TOFFEE

ON HALLOWEEN,OR PRINT FAKE STATUS CARDS, AND I CAN SAY

WHOSE LAWN I ENDED UP ONAT THREE A.M. LAST SUMMER, YELLING EPITHETS

RECEIVED BY THE WOODPILE, THE RATTY TARP-COVERED SKIDOO,

HEAVY WITH THE PRETENCE OF SLEEP.

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Dichotomy and delicacy are the essence of the encaustic works of Tanya Kirouac. The luminosity of the wax becomes rich with layering as it takes the form of a rose, cloud or field. A Montreal native, today Tanya is likeliest found working in the Distillery District Toronto studio and gallery, Studio Fuse, or looking out the kitchen window of the Cherry Valley farmhouse she shares with her partner, watching the way light falls on wild poppies and hay fields.

www.tanyakirouac.comwww.shopfad.com

Case Good Warehouse, Building #74, Suite 11055 Mill St., Distillery District, Toronto

Owl Farm Studios is a straw bale structure that is an ongoing work of art. “It was our aim to create a sustainable unique building using local reclaimed materials, which would feature our skills and personalities in the building.”

Janna’s functional ceramics are featured throughout the studio, from the sinks and tiles to the coffee mugs and dinette sets; she creates a multitude of pieces anyone can enjoy at home.

Jon paints large acrylic portraits of various personalities in a unique graphic style, and continues to offer archival custom framing services. 2603 Victoria RoadCarrying Place, OntarioK0K 1L0t. 613-919-1041e. owls@owlfarmstudios.comFacebook: Owl Farm Studios

The Agnes Etherington Art Centre’s mandate is to serve Queen’s University, the City of Kingston and the region as a cultural locus, through collecting, research, interpretation and exhibition of works of art, in the belief that contact with original works of art contributes to understanding our world, ourselves and others. The Art Centre features new exhibitions of contemporary and historical art year round, public programs including film screenings, public lectures and art classes, and free admission on Thursdays, as well as extended evening hours from September to April.

Located at the corner of University Avenue and Bader Lane, Kingston, ON. For information of programs and current exhibitions go toWWW.AEAC.CA

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MIKE BAYNE

Toronto-based artist Mike Bayne’s oil painting China Doll features a diminutive Chinese food restaurant on an unremarkable block of Kingston’s Princess Street. The

worn, brick building is resolutely boxy with few flourishes apart from its coloured signage, vaguely Asian awning, and pair of willfully circular windows. The amount of detail in the image is astonishing, especially given its limited colour palette. Bayne often works in tones of white and, in this case, an overcast sky hovers above a white edifice with a snow-filled sidewalk at its base. It’s because of this bleached-out background that distinct features emerge – the unassuming unit isn’t obliged to compete with full sun that would easily overpower it. What little light the day gives off is reflected in the wet, grey pavement. The building mostly blocks the only evidence of nature, a bare, grasping tree extending its tensile fingers skyward. There are no people present, but blinds hang in the upper-story windows indicating indoor activity for which privacy is sought. Bayne’s paintings present typically Canadian scenes and are densely populated

article by Nicole Armour

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Previous:Green and Red Truck, 2010oil on wood panel, 4" x 6"

Left:China Dolloil on wood panel, 4" x 6"

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with mid-century buildings of middling architectural ambition. They’re painted head-on in medium shot, their contexts apparent but only enough to elucidate the subject’s character. China Doll, for example, amounts to a portrait, its square windows the eyes through which you might discern its soul. There’s life within these walls.

China Doll is also notable for its tiny size. At four by six inches it’s comparable in scale to a greeting card or, more significantly, a snapshot. With few exceptions, this format dominates Bayne’s body of work. Further, the likeness is so remarkably realistic that it’s only upon close inspection that brushstrokes are discernable. Given that the artist works from his own photographs, and his execution is so seamless as to obscure technique, the images raise the question: Why paint what you could shoot more easily? Photography’s primacy in the modern era closely aligns it with Bayne’s twentieth century content in a manner that would

seem to unite his subject with this form. But the discrepancy between rendering banal, contemporary sites with such technical acuity, and in an older language like painting, is central to Bayne’s project. All of the residential and commercial shells he depicts, and their attendant signs, lots and vehicles, are aesthetically mediocre. By reproducing them with evident care and contemplation, Bayne

invites us to look as closely as he does at places we might otherwise disregard. Their small size forces scrutiny. He explores the fact that these spots, like his work, are also man-made and imprinted

with choices and effort. They constitute the ways we ornament our lives and act as mirrors of how we see ourselves and, for this reason, are deserving of monumental treatment. In Bayne’s estimation, it’s our tragic flaw to have defined the environment so thoroughly by our own meagre purpose.

This is not to suggest that Bayne’s work is either imperious or lacking in warmth and hope. Green and Red Truck, for example, is emblematic of the artist’s

Why paint what you

could shoot more easily?

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Above:Liquor, 2010oil on wood panel, 8" x 12"

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humanist vision. The painting depicts a vehicle irregularly parked in an asphalt lot. It’s built from the bed of one pickup that’s been fused to the cab of another, its distinct parts in two different colours that show where one truck begins and the other one ends. The humble vehicle sits in the foreground and all but obliterates a swath of inconsequential foliage and some low-slung buildings. Again, there’s no-one present. But the truck, an assemblage of industrial parts, bears the evidence of human intervention, as does its irreverent position between two, ruled parking spaces. It promises proof of life because it demonstrates adaptation and resourcefulness, a faceless person’s encounter with change. Its appearance denotes use. By documenting this scene, Bayne conflates himself with this inventive, absent character, his own skill a testament to the human potential for mastery. It also questions what our surroundings could be like if we saw beyond our own limitations

to expect more than sameness, economy and rigidity.

Bayne’s lineage can be traced back to the genre paintings of Dutch Realism due to the verisimilitude of his work, his use of oils, and his study of the effects of realistic light. Though he paints signs and buildings, he approaches them like portraits in the manner of Hals or Rembrandt. These same subjects also qualify as landscapes. His exteriors depict everyday life and, while devoid of people, suggest a preoccupation with the present comparable to the populated domestic scenes of Vermeer. All of Bayne’s paintings are executed on wood, a tradition that persisted in Holland far longer than in other parts of Europe. This choice of material also summons thoughts of religious altarpieces, a curious association given the apparently secular nature of the artist’s subjects. However, by making this reference Bayne underscores the virtual absence of religious symbology in public

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Above:Nibourg, 2009oil on wood panel, 16" x 24"

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Above:Coquitlam, 2008oil on wood panel, 8" x 12"

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modern life, as well as our apparent disavowal of grandiose tributes to beauty.

There’s a distinct lack of florid gesture in the homes and communities that Bayne displays. But the corollary of this observation is the possibility that reducing the sites of our lives to their barest, most expedient versions is what passes for devotion in the modern moment. We’ve made a religion of cheap development and consumption. By painting in miniature, Bayne redeems us, transforming our cultural artifacts into icons when we’d previously settled for none.

Liquor is a compelling example of Bayne’s conjoined exploration of humanism and religiousness. The painting is exceptional among the artist’s body of work for being a comparatively large eight by twelve inches. At its centre is a looming, unadorned sign advertising liquor, the word’s letters in simple, separate rectangular blocks on top of white, stilt-like legs. Though it probably appends a store, it’s not shown in the image. It’s Bayne’s habit to isolate signs from the

building or situation they describe. This one seems to emerge independently amidst stout buildings that line the roadside behind it and into the distance. The painting is bigger but the architecture doesn’t fill its horizon as usual. Instead, the text hovers over it like a divine symbol or a weak but persistent sun. The only other structures that mimic the sign’s scale are streetlights. This implied light and shared proportion suggest the forms towering over the roadway serve their surroundings like beacons. The sign stands alone at the forefront uniting and governing everything in its wake.

Since Bayne’s work is highly edited, it makes his content more pointed and potent. This is especially true when text is present. Wrested away from explicit meaning, words become more expansive as well as graphic. The extent to which the text is open to interpretation is magnified by the spaces between the letters as well as by the emptiness of the sky. Here, “liquor” radiates above nearby, indistinct sites like a promise or an affirmation. But it’s a bulletin disseminated from between two worlds. The sign is grounded by its legs but also

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appears to be floating. Further, the word inhabits a murky space between what the sign’s actually addressing and what it conjures – liquor as sedative, oppressor, ebullience, detachment. This abstraction is best exemplified by the electrical wire that emerges from its side and trails across the street and out of the frame. We can’t determine if there’s an anchor so the cord seems like a kite string keeping the sign earthbound or aloft depending on the current’s whim.

Completed in the artist’s standard small format, Untitled (Hospital Corner) is surprising because it depicts an interior. Still, true to form, it’s reduced to bare essentials painted entirely in whites and greys. It’s among his most minimal works. Bayne locates the image’s focal point where the wall meets the ceiling, providing only a partial view of institutional instruments that suggest rather than confirm you’re occupying a hospital room. Despite its simplicity, it’s suffused with tenderness for evoking the kind of human drama this room would support, one so hard to look at in a prolonged and direct way you’d find solace by searching out the ceiling. As in

all of Bayne’s paintings, the material of import lies just beneath what we’re shown. Due to its perspective, the image is intensely immersive. You don’t observe from the emotional safety of the doorway or, as in the case of his buildings, from a comfortable distance across the street. This painting, more than the others, highlights Bayne’s gift for portraying isolation and connection simultaneously, the way consciousness separates us despite being the essential quality that links us all together. To find absence in these pictures is to repudiate your own presence. And Bayne both validates and joins you in solidarity as a witness. This is the site of his compassion as an artist, the way his work includes and embraces your distinct point of view. He affirms that, in the midst of surfaces and starkness, the soul resides in the details.

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Right:Untitled (Hostipal Corner),

oil on board,4" x 6"