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Home
> Exhibitions > Through the Looking
Glass
 Through the Looking
Glass 1995
Various locations
Exhibition text by Dr. Kim Sawchuk
Courtesy of Rosemont
Gallery, Regina.
Antoinette Antoinette Hérivel's portraits of life in
small prairie towns exude the warm excess of people and colours
and stories. Wide flat vistas are not part of her visual interpretation
of Saskatchewan. Geographically, prairie towns may be isolated,
separated from one another by miles. Internally towns are intensely
social. Within these cramped locations exists a hyperbolic overabundance
of emotion and situation, full of carnivalesque joy, humour,
tension and sadness.
The ten works in Hérivel's current exhibition, Through the Looking
Glass, depict daily aspects of rural life. In these canvases,
people engage with one another collectively-talking, eating,
working, playing, exercising, fighting, dancing, watching television.
The paintings are strongly narrative. Rather than simply representing
these stories in a "realistic" manner, Antoinette
Hérivel transforms them into allegories that combine elements
from classical mythology and art history with everyday settings,
such as laundromats, stores, restaurants, powder rooms, town
hall meetings, and county fairs.
Significantly, Hérivel doesn't paint from photographs or sketches,
but from memory. As a result she collides past and present in
her tableaux. Some of these juxtapositions are intentional.
A scene in a restaurant in "Table for Two" is a dramatization
of a visit to Italy in the distant past (indicated by the fish
with pasta) combined with the experience of eating in a local
diner (signalled by the pie display), and elements of fantasy.
The elegant looking waiter wears a revolver at his hip. Other
images that appear in her work are unconscious, their origin
unknown, or their significance only realized at a later date.
Memories from her childhood in England surface in details, such
as the shape of a patron's Jersey hat, in the "The Last
Day of Summer at the Prairie Palace Cafe."
While the details
are often specific, as in any allegory, they are transmogrified.
This results in a distinctively prairie version of "magic
realism." According to Frederic Jameson, magic realism
is not a realism "to be transfigured by the 'supplement'
of a magical perspective but a reality which is already in and
of itself magical and fantastical." (311) In "The
Last Day of Summer at the Prairie Palace Cafe," Hérivel
renders the quotidian fantastic through the combined presence
of arm wrestling farmers with implement caps, jugglers, women
in garish cocktail dresses, clowns, and waiters in tails. In
this genre, the sense of recognition for the viewer is often
uncanny, evoking the feeling of deja-vu. When I first saw the
work, I experienced this sense of having- been-there. In conversation
with the artist, I was told the name of the cafe. Indeed, I
had once been a customer in that very restaurant. Although it
wasn't "realistic", the raucously portrayed activities
activated my own recollection of the atmosphere of the place.
While local theatricality supplies Hérivel with the content
for her work, the most outstanding formal features of her painting
style are her use of colour; her broad, textured strokes; her
distortion of perspective; and her play with exaggeration and
comedic features.
Like the size of these very large canvases,
the colours in all of these works are excessive. Each distinct
colour seems to vibrate with sumptuous intensity, stimulating
the senses into life by the presence of a particular hue. The
predominate bubblegum pink in "Primavera Visits the Pink
Elephant Laundry" recalls both the look and smell of soap,
on the one hand, and the archetypically feminine to complement
the presence of the three muses doing their wash, on the other.
In "Pavane to a Cowboy's Child", the melancholic sadness
accompanying a child's death is given expression in the cobalt
blue of the night. The luminescence of the white horse intensifies
this melancholic ambience.
In conversations, Antoinette Hérivel
has expressed anxiety that she is working within an obsolete
genre. Some maintain that painting has been supplanted by photography,
video and computer generated images. If Hérivel's work is any
indication, there will always be a place for painting and a
need for artists to explore the medium's possibilities. Although
most photographs which appear in magazines that nostalgically
depict "slices of life" have been altered by computers,
their composite, mediated nature is hidden. Glossiness gives
them an air of untouched documentary realism, belying their
artificiality. Unlike the glossy surface of a photograph, the
memories in these painted places are filtered through the artist's
body and imagination to the paint brush to the canvas; the paint
layers and covers, recovering a depth of experience. In these
works, the texture of the paint creates a bumpy, thick surface,
a surface that obviously has been worked on by a human hand.
Changes of size, shape and perspective are crucial to all of
Hérivel's work. Distortion contributes to the paintings' chimerical
quality. The composition is not centred along a horizontal plane,
but instead seems circular, moving around the rigid square comers
of the canvas. In Hérivel's play on perspective, the checkerboard
floors, common in Renaissance paintings, are bent out of shape
reinforcing their dreamscape characteristics.
Finally, many
of the cartoon-like human figures and their actions are exaggerated.
In "Happy Campers", the eyes of the vacationers appear
to bug out of their heads as they look at the television screen.
In "Table for Two", the figures eat, their mouths
open, their hands large, their arms elongated. These bodies
are, in short, grotesque. As the Russian literary theorist,
Mikhail Bakhtin noted in his study of folk culture in the middle
ages, the grotesque exaggeration of the human figure is at the
basis of carnivalesque, a form that belongs to the borderline
between art and life. "In reality, it is life itself, but
shaped according to a certain pattern of play." (7) In
folk culture, images of food and drink are often interwoven
with images of the grotesque body.
Eating and drinking are common
scenarios in Antoinette Hérivel's work. Linked to the seasons
of agricultural life, these feasts remind us of the close proximity
of rural and urban settings in Saskatchewan. According to Bakhtin,
a banquet triumphantly celebrates the renewal that completes
the life cycle. Yet while they are festive images-for it is
impossible to be sad while feasting- they are ambivalent images:
"The end must contain the potentialities of the new beginning,
just as death leads to birth." (283)
Many of the characters
seem to be laughing or sharing a joke, and many of the situations
depicted by Antoinette Hérivel bring forth laughter, particularly
when you leam her titles: here I think of "Our Man from
Ottawa Meets the Party Faithful." However, these paintings
do not satirically mock prairie life. They are carnivalesque.
Satirical laughter is derisive-one stands outside the spectacle
and considers oneself above those at whom one laughs. In festive
laughter, one shares in the joke. As Bakhtin noted, "Carnival
is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and
everyone participates because its very idea embraces all people."
(7)
For this reason, perhaps the most exemplary painting in
Through the Looking Glass is the autobiographical "I Dreamt
I Dwelt in Marble Halls in the Land of the Sunday School Queen".
It is a scene fitting of Lewis Carrol. In the form of a triptych,
the painting is saturated with references drawn from Hérivel's
particular story and well- known icons and symbols. The title
of the painting recalls Grieg's "In the Halls of the Mountain
King". The middle panel shows an imaginary muse from the
artist's childhood, The Sunday School Queen (perhaps a child's
private rendition of the Sugar Plum Fairy), handing over paints
to the artist as a young girl. Women serving tea populate the
triptych-after all, many of these interior spaces are the traditional
domain of women in agricultural societies-as do musical instruments,
geese, and an assortment of trees. On the left side of the triptych,
a window, or looking glass, reveals a prototypically British
landscape; to the right, another window contains the recognizable
outline of a grain elevator, establishing a temporal sequence
between the artist's past, present and future.
Above the Sunday
School Queen are the words from Antoinette Hérivel's school
motto, "Beyond the best, there is better." Words of
hope, images of transformation, people sharing activities: there
is an element of resistance to the individuating tendencies
of middle-class life in this humorous look at Saskatchewan.
Antoinette Hérivel has recreated wonderfully familiar situations
to make us aware of the serious import of the pleasures of that
which we mistakenly call the commonplace.
Dr Kim Sawchuk
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