Made/Unmade

A couple weeks ago Monte Clark Gallery opened an eight picture exhibition by the lens-based artist Stephen Waddell, entitled Made/Unmade.

Given the design of the gallery's main display room, viewers are encouraged to move counter-clockwise, and so it is that we experience on the east and north walls a pair of delaminated circular tables, the hollow insides of figurative statuary (front and back?) and a forgotten graveyard featuring a more solid form of (granite) statuary -- in this instance, a kneeling, grieving figure, head bowed. 

Moving to the west wall, a picture of an art school hallway, where against its high walls lean paintings, presumably made over the course of an academic year. On the same west wall, a young worker untangling a piece of rope at what looks like Vancouver's Jericho Sailing Club. On the south wall is a single picture, this one of a dead-faced figure, mid-40s, alone on a chain carousel as it swings clockwise towards us.

Both the exhibition title and its counter-clockwise orientation suggest an undoing. The tables were made, and functioned as such (socially circular) until something (a flood?) brought about their decay. As for the two hollow statues, are they halves of a single statue (halved for what reason?), or were they designed to stand "proud" from a wall, their hollowness or incompletion hidden? As for the monumental grave marker, it is categorically less the subject of its picture than its signifier: a graveyard, yes, but a landscape first and foremost.  

That the first two walls carry the petit genre troika of still-life (tables), portraiture (hollow statues) and landscape (graveyard) has bearing on how I process Waddell's art school hallway. If not of the petit genres, does this art school scene, then, belong to something grand -- like a history painting? And if so, the history of what? The past school year? The past year of COVID? Or because the work is double dated (2012-2021), the past nine years, a decade that has seen a shift not only in political economy, but in technology, ethics and aesthetics? Is this decade the knot our young worker is trying disentangle, unmake, make sense of, or is it something this worker has unconsciously succumbed to? Is this decade what haunts the eyes of the figure on the chain carousel, someone insanely conscious of what has transpired, to the point where this figure can no longer go on in any direction, but in circles?

Made/Unmade closes November 13th. Please see it.