OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN, [excerpts]

J.J. Kegan McFadden

The exhibition 27 x Doug: Portraits by Larry Glawson pinpoints certain consistencies throughout the career of Winnipeg-based photographer and media artist Larry Glawson. Nearly thirty images produced over as many years are brought together for the first time so that formal, aesthetic, and conceptual links may be analyzed from one series to the next. This exhibition showcases selections from the artist’s various bodies of work, including Family Album (1983), Private Icons (1986), The Self Portrait Project (1988), Paired Portraits (1992), The Anonymous Gay & Lesbian Portrait Project (1992-2005), and his most recent series, home bodies (2002-ongoing). The truest constant in all of Glawson’s series, apart from his ongoing concern regarding the relationship between photographer and subject, is the image of his partner (and some may say ‘muse’), the artist Doug Melnyk. In order to provide a thorough overview of Glawson’s career output, I wanted to focus solely on this constant – the image of Doug – over time. This strategy is blatantly appropriated from an exhibition, which took place at The University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03, titled 27 X Sonia: Portraits by Walter Grammatté. Explicit in its queer re-visioning of history, this exhibition illustrates Glawson’s interest in the relationship between the mundane and the sublime, the quotidian and the detailed qualities of a life of work and love.

What is surprising is how the same subject, Doug, may be viewed in various ways from one series to the next. The first photograph Glawson ever took of Doug was in 1979, while the two young men were enrolled in the school of art at the University of Manitoba. In this 3.5” x 5” black and white snapshot, a confident and exuberant Doug pulls back the collar of his shirt to show off a hickey he’d recently received. This uncategorized and never before exhibited work acts as a precursor and foreshadows the numerous photo shoots Doug would sit through over the following thirty years, many underscored by sensuality and sexuality.

Most recently Doug appears in home bodies, a series Glawson begun while completing his MFA at Western University in London, Ontario. In home bodies (2002 – ongoing), we see more intimate stills and video of Doug, taken from vantage points only a lover might be afforded. With home bodies Glawson implicates himself, his own image, more so than with any other preceding series in an attempt to explore constructs of visual representations of his personal domestic world. 

Glawson’s latest portrait of Doug is a classically-posed digitally stitched image which is also one of the first results of a new interest in the abilities and limits of digital imaging post-production software and how it may be utilized to speak about failure in photographic representation. Its jagged lines and mashed up corner from several dozen images shot scan-style over the entire area where Doug posed adds up to a flattened image that veers in and out of focus.

When analyzing an artist’s career output certain notions about the work come to mind and constants over the span of that artist’s oeuvre begin to surface. Whether it is the choice of medium, subject matter, scale or concept – these are the elements that have always informed the artist’s practice. In Glawson’s case, his constants are equal parts the photographic medium and his lover/muse, Doug Melnyk. Also important to Glawson’s photo practice is his attitude towards portraiture. Since his first forays into genre in the early 1980s, Glawson has blurred the lines between photographer and subject by incorporating various personal ephemera of those posing for him, particularly Doug. More to the point, series such as Self Portraits Project, and Anonymous Gay and Lesbian Portraits skewer the subjectivity of a portrait and force questions around give and take, a levelling of the dynamic between subject and photographer.

- J.J. Kegan McFadden

Curator: 27 X Doug: Portraits by Larry Glawson

Artist Bio

Larry Glawson has worked out of Winnipeg as a photo-artist for the last twenty-six years. His work has been shown locally, nationally and internationally including exhibitions in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Edinburgh, New York, Helsinki and Belgrade. He first taught photography at the University of Manitoba School of Art in 1990 and yearly since 1995, except while obtaining his MFA at the University of Western Ontario from 2000 – 2002. Glawson’s work over the last fifteen years has been largely involved with queer identities, politics and aesthetics. In June 2008, a major exhibition of his home bodies series was presented in Winnipeg.

J. J. Kegan McFadden is a Winnipeg-based cultural worker whose curatorial interests lay in the realms of feminist and queer perspectives in culture-production and knowledge dissemination, artists’ books, and divergent photographic practices. He is currently the Director/Curator of PLATFORM: centre for photographic + digital arts.

Domaine la Fierté is a men’s-only gay campground north of Montréal. For three summers, I have photographed campsites, motor homes, and summer cabins of the men who spend time there. My photographs examine the site as both haven and ghetto built on fantasies that mix the wild with the domesticated. As homosexuality has found increased acceptance within the public sphere, gay households have spread to more suburban and rural locales. However, ongoing political debates centered on gay and lesbian partner rights attest to the fact that even the idea of a gay domestic space remains contested terrain. As a territory defined by homosexuality, the gay campground offers a counter—site of acceptance and free expression while simultaneously reflecting other forms of closed communities where exclusion and homogeneity are associated with security and comfort. By documenting the exteriors of these dwellings I am looking for clues into how the residents understand this terrain.

Jason Hendrickson presents the architectural fantasy space of Fierté, a largely gay summer community that flourishes every summer at Rawdon, Quebec. A private community in the woods, the domiciles of the photographic series Untitled (from the series Domaine la Fierté) have been lovingly crafted by their owners and residents with the hopes of developing a parallel, perhaps independent form of community - a community that harbors the discontents of heteronormative urban living. In one image, Hendrickson has discovered a rickety love-nest poised on the brink of a harrowing embankment. Its builders – who we might guess to also be its residents – have used discarded wood, scraps, portions of furniture, gauzy fabrics, ropes, tarps and plastic sheeting, to create a paradise on stilts in the seclusion of the forest. All to create their own private domicile. Details such as the industrial grade chains holding the mattress – and is that a swing? – suggest an ardent mixture of sexual and infantile play. It is a home built primarily by ingenuity, perhaps held together by just sealing wax but nonetheless realizing a particular person’s romantic and domestic fantasy of what a home for love – or love-making – could look like. - Mark Clintberg from the catalogue text.

Artist Bio

Jason Hendrickson is an American artist who lives and works in Montréal. In 2010, he received an MFA in Photography from Concordia University. He also holds a BA in Film Studies from Dartmouth College. He is the 2006 recipient of the Stanley Mills Estate Fellowship. Hendrickson’s work has been exhibited in Montréal at Les Territoires and Projex-Mtl Galerie as well as Or Gallery in Vancouver and The Andy Warhol Museum and 101 Gallery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Jim Verburg’s Untitled (where we’re at) presents two geometric circles formed by narrow bands of black vinyl: the first circle is adhered to the vitrine glass, and the second to the gallery wall behind. The result is a pair of shapes that change position relative to one another depending on the perspective of the viewer. While not a portrait in the conventional sense, Verburg’s piece gives a set of variable perspectives on the nature of relations between two persons – and is suggestive of romantic or erotic relations between humans, or at the very least, the physical intersection of two bodies. Like the navigational technique of parallax, where the trajectory or location of an object (or subject) seems to change according to the observer’s position, Verburg’s piece suggests the shifting arrangement of two people in a relationship. It also shows the shifting perspective of the viewer in evaluating that relationship. While the piece does not literally represent any architecture or activity of the domestic sphere, it does convincingly evoke the situation of sharing a domestic space with another person. It uses a small architectural space – the FOFA vitrine – to parallel the close space of a domestic environment. Untitled (where we’re at) uses modernist geometric aesthetics to offer a poetic view on the way that individuals do or do not relate, do or do not align. - Mark Clintberg from the catalogue text.

Artist Bio

Jim Verburg is a citizen of Canada and The Netherlands.  He currently divides his time between Montreal and Toronto. His photographic, film and video work has been exhibited, screened and published nationally and internationally. Primarily using photography, his artistic practice is mainly concerned with the complexities of relationships, intimacy, and sexuality.  He currently employs the media of film, text, installation, and print to explore his love of modernist aesthetics, emotional matters, and the interpersonal. His second film “For a Relationship” screened at the 2008 Oberhausen Short Film Festival in Germany, and won the 2008 Jury Prize for the “Best Canadian Short Film” at the Inside Out Film Festival in Toronto. The work was also nominated for the Iris Prize in the UK. He’s held residencies at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in Montreal, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto and the Banff Centre for the Arts.  In the spring of 2009 he had a solo exhibition/installation at Widmer and Theodoridis Contemporary Gallery in Zurich, and was featured by the gallery at the HOT ART Fair 2009 in Basel Switzerland. He recently premiered a video installation at the New Stage of the National Theatre in Prague, He is currently working towards a solo exhibition for Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal in the autumn of 2011.

http://www.jimverburg.com/

vi·gnette (vn-yt) 

[French, from Old French, diminutive of vigne, vine (from the use of vine tendrils in decorative borders); see vine.]

n.  ”something that may be written on a vine-leaf”.

1. A decorative design placed at the beginning or end of a book or chapter of a book or along the border of a page.

2. An unbordered picture, often a portrait, that shades off into the surrounding color at the edges.

3. a. A short, usually descriptive literary sketch.  b. A short scene or incident, as from a movie.

tr.v. vi·gnet·ted, vi·gnet·ting, vi·gnettes 

1. To soften the edges of (a picture) in vignette style.

2. To describe in a brief way.

Vignette (Apt. 15, Apt. 4b)

The drawing Vignette divides space into two distinct realms. Each of the three drawings is a short narrative scene, as one of the definitions of Vignette suggests. The largest of the triptych, the drawing in which both my husband Ned and I along with our 2 cats inhabit, is of an epic prairie vista. The prairie is pictured close-in with a sense of neo-classical space and detail (opposing the typical way in which prairie scenes are usually envisioned, as more or less a single mass and from a distance, disappearing onto a horizon line). The central drawing which reaches almost 18 feet exists as an entirely constructed space- a lush, mythic garden scene. As another definition of the word Vignette signifies, the scenery becomes a continuous border containing a dual portrait of us. 

This series marks a break with other recent work, in which I construct space surrounding my body shallowly, defined predominantly through the use of shadow, in the portrayal of glyphic gestures evolving a dialogue with art-historic tropes associated with masculinity. In Vignette, the highly detailed garden is not simply a tableau, although it does seem to orient space in a similar fashion. Rather than acting as a stage for dogmatic metaphor, as with historic Christian depictions of garden scenes containing human bodies, this drawing seeks to celebrate all the drawn elements in a neutral manner. The foliage and sentient creatures within the drawing enjoy the same symbolic elevation, the goal being that of a depicted pleasure. The setting of this drawing may also add an ironic element to the overall narrative, in that it speaks back to the homophobia which defines same-sex relationships as unnatural.

The two blue pencil drawings, Apt. 4b and Apt. 15 flanking either side of the larger central panel, reference the paintings of Dutch domestic interiors of the 17th century. These two images are drawn from photographs of the interiors of our old and new apartments. I have always loved the beautifully meticulous depiction of domestic spaces from this period, in part because they move beyond the simple depiction of painted interiors and household activity; revealing an interesting narrative about domesticity. They act as tells, informing the viewer to the status and possessions of the people who might have commissioned them. My smaller blue drawings are private but not solitary. They differ from the tradition of the Dutch paintings they reference because they are drawings of memory not ownership, as we are tenants having never possessed property in the almost 10 years we have been together. The small blue drawings offer an intimate gaze into the realm in which both Ned and I actually inhabit, our apartment. The smaller works juxtaposing the grand-scaled central panel which is meant to invoke a mindscape of appearance and beauty bordering on the celebratory and decorative. 

Zachari Logan’s piece Vignette (Apt 4b, Apt. 15) includes a monumentally scaled, precisely and painstakingly rendered double portrait that is also a sort of pastoral scene with no background. The central drawing of Vignette (Apt 4b, Apt. 15)’s backdrop is an expanse of inescapably void, white paper. In the foreground we see blades of grass, birds, budding flowers of many species, insects, a field mouse, and saplings, all drawn with incredible detail. Its parenthetical title refers to the two domiciles Ned and Logan have lived in. The entrances to these apartments, numbers 4b and 15, are shown in smaller drawings flanking the larger work. The figure on the left of the central drawing is a self-portrait of the artist, and on the right we see his lover Ned. The artist stands before us, scantily clothed, as if he just emerged from a post-coital nap. Ned, wearing considerably more clothing and an evidently displayed wedding band, looks lost in reverie. Look closely at Logan’s hand for a corresponding ring. This could be a wedding portrait. Their domestic arrangement collapses with the natural world in pre-lapsian bliss. Animal and human live in harmony here. Is this a garden of paradise for two men? Vignette (Apt 4b, Apt. 15) argues that the connection these men share is as natural as any other bond between humans, and as natural as the plants and animals that surround them. - Mark Clintberg from catalogue text

Artist Bio

Zachari Logan is a 30 year old Canadian artist who uses his own body as subject exclusively. Logan engages personal narratives that question historic masculine tropes. Logan’s  narratives,  situated  within  Neo-classical,  Renaissance and Baroque styles, utilize themes of male bravado, heroism and narcissism often found in historic genre paintings. With these various themes, Logan juxtaposes the mundane realities of contemporary life using common-place costuming and props. Logan is interested in creating self-anxious queer narratives which contextualize marginalized male identities within the canon of visual art.

http://www.zacharilogan.com/

Everything About You Son, Is Because of Me (chapter 1 of 8)

Super 8 film, color, 2:58, 2010.

Artist Statement

From the ruins of familial disavowal, this project is born from a desire to rearticulate male bonds across generations that aren’t contingent on blood ties or heterosexist familial bonds. From shared experiences of estranged or alienated relationships with our fathers, each of us are building new affective bonds and queer circuits of exchange that rearticulate what being a son, what being a father, what being a queer family, might mean. For men not even a generation older than the film’s subjects, disappearance is manifested through genocide, quarantine, disease and criminalization. Our experiences of disappearance originate at the family, through the subtle violence of indifference, invisibility and silence that create a uniquely experienced from of quarantine. Our very bodies represent a specter of familial contamination. 

At its core, this project is about the creation of new affective attachments and intimacies among queer men, inter-generationally. In the process, this project seeks to articulate new ways of conceiving of family; to build representational cultures that create new affective dimensions of queer life; and derive new meanings from the intimacies and violence that structure the conditions of our lives. This project – both the film itself and the process that has actualized it – takes its root in experiences and instances of violence faced by each of us as queer men. This violence, ranging from familial disavowal, to childhood sexual abuse, to structural violence that marks us as predatory, all constitute the landscape we seek on some level to challenge. 

In actively contending with and negotiating issues of boyhood sexuality, estranged relationships with each of our fathers, and the rituals of masculinity that weren’t transmitted via heterosexist father-son lineage, but rather which we were forced to learn and teach amongst ourselves, these negotiations were then actively playing out in each of our own lives. The project reimagines the possibilities for father-son bonds outside of heterosexist articulations; we reimagine queer family.

The short film work Everything About You Son, Is Because of Me by collaborative team Ryan Conrad, Liam Michaud and REB (Richard E. Bump) hovers at the edge. One man shaves off the stubble of another. Both men are shirtless. Both look to be in their twenties. Viewers are left to wonder what salacious details might be on the second reel of the film. We are invited as spectators to speculate about the nature of their encounter, but also the pleasure they receive from closeness involved in grooming another person. Grooming of this kind is a unique form of physical intimacy that is acceptable between heterosexual males – when practiced in the context of a barbershop. The artists add to our understanding of this work in their written statement when they express their frustration with their own distant or estranged father-son relationships and the negotiation of male rituals – including shaving – which they were left to teach to one another rather than learn from their fathers. The razor blade, dangling threateningly near the face and then tenderly tracing its outline, is a device that seems thirsty for blood. It can be both a potential weapon and an aesthetic tool of unhesitating certainty. It is also a tool for retrieving a piece of knowledge – something as simple as grooming – and for carving out a very intimate form of queer pedagogy. - Mark Clintberg, from the catalogue text

Artist Bios