What role does love play in art? What role does it play in the creative process? With Love, a modest exhibition of works by Mary Pratt and Alex Colville addresses precisely these questions. The pairing of two canonical figures in modern Atlantic Canadian art history should, alone, draw attention to it, but in really important ways this exhibition is not what one might think. It does not, for example, take a celebratory approach to either Pratt’s or Colville’s work. That alone sets it off from the general tenor of commentary that has surrounded the canonization of Colville at the forefront of Canadian – and Maritime – art history. What is more, Pratt’s and Colville’s artistic projects are dramatically different. Drawing them into conversation with each other provides an opportunity to consider the development and writing of Atlantic regional art history in new and informative ways.
With Love opened at the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University on 22 July 2023 and runs until May 15, 2024. It was curated by Owens Director, Dr. Emily Falvey. Its aim was to think through the ways in which love animates creative practice in art on more than one level. This is clear from the works on display. For Colville, love is manifest in two ways. His wife, Rhoda, appears frequently as a model and his art, in significant ways, represents his devotion to her. As the With Love exhibition notes remark “Colville gave a copy of each serigraph he made to his wife.” They end up in this exhibition because of a 2013 donation Colville made to the Owens in honour of Rhoda. Colville’s Stove from 1988 is an immediately recognizable example. It shows Rhoda foregrounded to the right along with their family pet dog in front of a blue and silver stove, which occupies most of the painting. Both are peering into the oven through an open door. It is an almost typical Colville kind of work that is already widely celebrated with its focus on a specific and particular scene.
The works by Pratt are from her Transitions series (1993 to 2002), that were part of a “creative collaboration with Japanese Master Printer, Masato Arikushi.” They work differently than Colville’s art. Like the best-known body of Pratt’s work, these works focus on domestic space and how it does not come into being accidentally. Romancing the Casserole, for instance, shows a well-designed casserole in a microwave oven. We could speculate on the intention behind this image, but its visuality captures a sedate, elegant moment that feels both warm and inviting. Other works are still lifes that show the artistic aspects of domestic space made by women.
Two things make this exhibition important to me. First, and not to be neglected, are the steps Falvey and the Owens have taken to make work accessible. With Love is on display but it is also available online with detailed visual descriptions. Said differently, exhibitions were always one way in which art and art history met audiences. Rather than simply commending the Owens – and perhaps serving to further stigmatize disability — what we are seeing is built-in thinking where nothing is done without wider accessibility considerations where they based, in this case, on visuality or location.
Second, this exhibition challenges both how I think about art, devotion, and creativity and how we tell the story of Atlantic Canadian art history. A range of different works have, in fact, contributed to a process of rethinking this narrative and that is good news. The established story is one of a series of transitions that led, as it were, to the celebrated artists of the last generation, foremost among these were Colville. This narrative carried with it an implicit politics that involved a transition from an earlier activist progressivism Kirk Niergarth effectively chronicled[1] to the image focused works of Chris Pratt, Colville, and Tom Forrestall, among others. This story was also the story of the domestication of artistic activism and the inscription of genius and a supposedly universalized aesthetics that stood at the root of recognized masterpieces. This narrative relocates the objective of art history (which becomes a recognition of greatness) and art itself, which prompts a sort of decorative form of elitist semi-existentialism.
How can we tell this story differently? There are a range of different ways. Jeff Webb, for instance, has looked at the ways in which the provincial state in Newfoundland built a professionalized arts infrastructure that was also connected to developing art markets and economic modernization programs.[2] John Leroux and Emma Hassencahl-Perley have examined the interface of state policy and Indigenous artistic practices to uncover a neglected and almost forgotten art form: “Wabanaki modern.”[3]
With Love approaches Atlantic Canadian art history from a different direction that is looking to problematize the very way in which we understand creative processes and the social relationship in which they are embedded. The goal here is relocate the idea of love as something other than representation and to reconsider the factors that feed into art as a form of creativity. It looks, in other words, for a different axes on which to interrogate regional art and art history.
For me, this narrative is unfinished. A final merit of With Love is that it does not close off an interpretive space but opens one up. The exhibition itself takes a minimalist approach. There is little interpretive text and a limited number of artworks whose approach to love seems to clash with each other. All of this allows the viewer to explore these works in their own way, think about how they show different sides to well-known artists, and connect them to other narratives. All this strikes me as really good reasons to take some time with With Love.
Andrew Nurse, Mount Allison University
Notes:
[1] Kirk Niergarth, “The Dignity of Every Human Being”. New Brunswick Artists and Canadian Culture between the Great Depression and the Cold War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).
[2] Jeff Webb, The Cause of Art: Professionalizing the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming 2024).
[3] Emma Hassencahl-Perley, and John Leroux. Wabanaki Modern: The Artistic Legacy of the 1960s “Micmac Indian Craftsmen” (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 2022).
Acadiensis 