Exhibition catalogue essay, ACCESS Artist Run Centre, Vancouver, September 2003

birthdaycake island
By John Keillor

[Reproduced for internet viewing]

(Please note that the scanned works by Jo Cook and James Whitman are not the ones described below. They are from the exhibition's catalogue and similar to the items under discussion. The Matthew Brown image is exactly the drawing I originally reviewed. jk)

Birthdaycake island writhes with infectious festivity. The viewer is engulfed, searching, active, finding surprises that include little etchings hidden at the bottom of a wall, in a corner, or under a light switch. It is a celebratory exhibition, a separate world, a bustling collaboration.

At first glance, the viewer is struck by birthdaycake island's deceptive and dangerous whimsicality, insofar as whimsicality makes things trivial: lots of unframed paper stuck to the walls alongside larger works. No one wants to be caught gorging on triviality.

There are literally hundreds of pieces here, assembled like a playful, careless jumble. The eye travels, attempting to give each work a cursory, once-over glance. It soon becomes clear that there is even more to see here than the viewer originally estimated.

So the harried eye rests on something, probably something big, such as one of Jo Cook's two larger drawings. Her figurations are reminiscent of the illustrations found in Scandinavian children's books, with spare, thick lines and hardy characters.

Cook's narratives suggest the burbling social chaos found in Hieronymus Bosch's paintings. On a ship we see gambling, primping, pimping, and child rearing. A knight climbs an on-board tree to tackle a daemon with a stolen goose. A man in a cow costume chows down on a hamburger. Each character seems part of a cautionary tale. The actions among these tightly packed passengers do not overlap much. No one is helping anyone else, or noticing anyone else's plight. Human organization crumbles under the pressure of human vitality.

Not bad. Let's try another. Off we go. The eye careens among different bunches of drawings and paintings, searching for another striking presence, such as James Whitman's depiction of a poor country boy, captured with light pencil crayon. Again, the style is simple, more child-like in execution than Cook's beleaguered throngs, quieter and more intimate.

The poor country boy surveys his surroundings with the imperturbable air of a young prince. His trailer behind him is his castle. His body is straight and healthy. The living boughs around him are rendered with tight, minute attention to each pine needle, while the surrounding, chopped down forest is a hazardous smudge. Douglas Coupland's political sentimentality meets David Hockney's challenge to enjoy life, to shake off that crippling resentment that people naturally feel in light of the terrible injustice that seems to pervade everything. The boy will not cower before his poverty or the land's devastation. He awards himself his own nobility. Wow.

Looking further, birthdaycake island's title begins to make sense as the viewer begins to get a handle on the presentation's M.O. Festive engagement makes the eye and body move. There is also something gleefully diabolic operating here. One senses it in Cook's lilies by the gallery's entrance. Lillies: that flower of death and sensuality. Cook has placed them in a vase made from ridiculous, pink plastic water pitchers, divesting its contents of their darker symbolism.

So we've figured out that artifice is a central theme here. But what is a comic surface intended to conceal? What is it hiding?

Then the roving eye lands upon something by Matthew Brown. His work tells no stories. It is formalist, sullen, and static, finding fuel in Japanimation, futuristic toys and heavy metal illustrations. His works are churning, seething almost-abstracts. No Brown piece represents an existing thing, but they all have very thing-like qualities. One wonders what sort of material is being depicted. (muscle? bone? steel? glass?) Brown's chops are cloaked in a deftly controlled, offhand delivery that appears accidental. The floating stasis of his objects seems deceptive, as if gears or ligaments curl and strain within them.

The creepy upward motion of the spinal protuberance seen here could also be waving in the air-like the tail of a kite, spiraling downward-as the connected mess below could be a falling pelvic bone being crushed on impact. Why such a terrible image? Is Brown even inviting that interpretation? The educated viewer is not proud to arrive at such a vulgar, irrepressible reading of the piece. There are other, equally speculative ways to describe this sketch, but none of them ennoble the describer's academic powers. Brown is clearly not in the business of enforcing the critic's pedigree.

The drawing's sinister lilt provides a thematic and stylistic jolt in comparison to Brown's colleagues. Cook and Whitman also include representational aspects to their comparatively few abstracts, adding eyes to an invented shape so that it becomes faintly mammalian. For them, this is viewer antagonism, a teasing, winking detail taking place within the composition. A stunt. But this stunt-as-detail trope is elevated to the centre of Brown's style. Most of us are savvy enough not to read representational meanings into abstractions, even when tempted. Brown forces this reaction from us, debasing our categorical imperative.

And in this exhibition, Brown's sharper edge jumpstarts the viewer's reappraisal of birthdaycake island's fey exterior. Back at Cook's ship of fools painting, the cow-costumed man who is eating beef seems like a natural way to illustrate hypocrisy. Brown, in his own style, uses cow-like facial features to create a large, brutally arresting Rorschach painting. The viewer is confused as to whether the work is abstract or not, and struggles to find an appropriate way to regard the piece. While Cook uses fables to illustrate mankind's propensity to abandon what noble values we would prefer to represent, Brown demonstrates that we cannot fully apprehend these values.

The dark, twee humour in this exhibition adds up to a code of ethics defining the refinement of the urban peasant, who's mandate is to address life's challenges with modesty and self-control, rather than genuflecting before television's shrill, beefy platitudes.

But anti-commercial art can also be mere propaganda: mere prosaics that are easily said by the Sayers of Things that are Said. Birthdaycake island celebrates life with some lyrically rude but nourishing attacks. This is art about remaining alert and optimistically critical.

Vancouver Access Artist Run Gallery purchased this article for their catalogue in the fall of 2003.