If you look to the Internet to find the meaning of the phrase “strange bedfellows”, the first site that comes up is a flash page for an Australian TV show. It features two burly middle-aged guys standing together, one looking a little shocked or bemused (it’s hard to tell which), while the other, shorter more stylish one, is simply smiling. Next are articles about gay marriage. While I didn’t realize that this was really so strange, the phrase does imply an element of the unexpected or unusual and certainly of the incongruous.

Although they don’t contain many burly guys or seemingly abnormal marriages, the relationships created by the drawings of The Lions and the sculptures by Karina Kalvaitis could be considered a little out of the ordinary. Reminiscent of the fictional places, daydream wanderings, imaginary friends, and sometimes sinister acts of childhood, their artwork is a shared world where small stubby pastel pink beasts are half submerged in a block of wood and penguin-like clowns (or are they penguins in clown suits?) waddle in arctic icescapes. Karina associates her work with  circuses, the nursery and the domestic sphere.  If this is so, then the world of The Lions is more aligned  with teenage rebellion, notebook doodling, and fantasies of black Camaros. What brings them together is their “pregnant pause,” to borrow Karina’s words, their suspension of narrative, their unwillingness to let us in on the punch-line, or perhaps more accurately, their willingness to let us invent our own.

The Lions have been creating their own version of exquisite corpse drawings for the past two years. Straying from the Surrealist idea that collective creations are superior to the vision of a single artist,The Lions aren’t afraid of failure. It is because of the sometimes clumsy scribbles and deliberate awkwardness of their drawings that The Lions can create the often poignant compositions and surprising juxtapositions that gives their work resonance. And it is through the control relinquished when they pass a drawing over to a friend for additions that the two lanky, slightly skittish Extra-Terrestrials tentatively peering at you over the appendages of a big scribble and a guilty looking duck-man raking a pile of leaves can be spawned I have read before that play creates a space where subjectivity and objectivity overlap. It is in this in-between space that we encounter The Lions other-worldly creatures and Karina’s Cousin of the Hyrax, a small molded rabbit suspended by its ruffled collar. The latter’s cuteness is tempered with an undertone of menace.

I have read further that play is not reverting to a child-like state but is rather one of the first adult modes that a child acquires. 1

- Candice Hopkins is a curator and writer based in Banff, Alberta.

1- D.W. Winnicot, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971), 95-109.