The best stories I know come from late night car rides or kitchen tables

"The best stories I know come from late night car rides or kitchen tables" is the name of an exhibition of work by two artists, Brenda Draney and Tanya Lukin Linklater, both of whom were born in 1976 -- Draney in Treaty 8 territory (she is a member of the Sawridge First Nation and lives in Edmonton, Alberta), Linklater in Southern Alaska (she is of Alutiiq and Caucasian ancestry and lives in North Bay, Ontario).

The title of the exhibition is taken from an artist talk Draney gave at the University of Ottawa in 2016, a larger portion of which appears in the gallery handout intercut with a text by Linklater. Though Linklater's text is the more self-consciously poetic -- consisting of sentence fragments, conjunctionless run-ons, intermedial line breaks and enough blank space to build a snowoman -- it is Draney's straightforward statement (evocative of what is said while riding in a car or klatching at a kitchen table) that makes a poem of her thoughts on storytelling.

Draney's oil on canvas paintings are rich in "blank" spaces that are in fact an oatmeal colour. These spaces are earned in so far as the attention Draney pays to line requires them. The line and the lineless work together, and the result is the language these paintings "speak". I'm not even talking about these paintings as figurative, or being "about" something: they include tents, a line or lines (like the ribbon one cuts to "open" something), a couch, a wall of fake wood-paneling, men, men in RCMP uniforms, women, a fireworks explosion. As curated, the arrangement of these paintings resonates like a chapbook of lyric poems.

Lukin Linklater's contribution features a monitor'ed voice-over video of young dancers at work in the studio (... you are judged to be going against the flow because you are insistent, Parts 1 and 2, 2017), a sculptural installation of an unfurling poem on grommeted canvas squares occasionally redacted (enhanced? protected?) by kohkom scarves and a ziggurat of American Spirit cigarette packs (go//go, 2022) and a video projection of hands moving purposefully over a rough marine wood "screen" as its subtitles tell a story of America's most powerful earthquake (They fall the ground beneath you, 2018).

It is this last work of Lukin Linklater's that finds itself sharing CJG's smaller gallery with Draney's Vanity (2019). In Draney's sin-object conflation, a naked (undressing?) figure stands before what seems like the end of a multi-sinked counter, the kind one finds at an airport or a night club. The mirror above this counter makes it a vanity, but it is in fact the doubling of this (vain?) figure that makes its double the painting's mirror. Draney writes in the gallery handout:

"In the paintings there can be stand-ins and omissions. But then I have created something else again. Is it trustworthy? Decisions have to be made. Which parts are the most honest? Why is it important to be honest here and not there?"

Draney shows us what she does well enough to encourage us into her work, which can be a fine place to be for those of us looking to vacate our messy-bedroom/dumpster fire worlds without altogether abandoning them -- an experience from which we return to our daily lives refreshed, invigorated. In Lukin Linklater's work, I often feel like I am being lectured to, told, (t)roped-in. This is not to say that the work of these two artists makes for an unsuccessful pairing; on the contrary, we have much to learn through difference. Best to think of this exhibition as a teaching tool.