Aug
21
Last week I was going through one of my scrap books for a bit of inspiration when I noticed towards the end of the book, a postcard, wedged between two pages where the book had remained blank. The postcard was a portrait of John Bentley Mays by Gertrude Kearns; an invitation to her solo show, United States of Being (the John Bentley Mays portraits) at Lehmann Leskiw Fine Art, Toronto. The show ran for about a three weeks in 2005. Unfortunately, I never made it. (I think I had picked up the card on one of my Queen West gallery walks, made a note to go, and then never got around to it.) In hindsight however, I think that was a good thing.
I’m not good with world news, or with world history. I speed through pages of the newspaper with graphic depictions of war casualties. I don’t follow world events online or on television. If the first section of every national paper was absent; the six-o’clock news, canceled; and the online news-breaking reports, omitted; I wouldn’t miss it.
I have a defeatist attitude when it comes to world politics, because it’s well, just that: politics. I do want change, but I stopped believing in the ability to make change a long time ago–whether advocating as an individual or a group, as a personality or organization.
Maybe it’s too simplistic to view things as such, but I believe the people (and the power of) keep the politics in check. But stop it? Not on your life, or mine, or the thousands of people who got caught in the crossfire as politics was driving its point home, in Hummers, oil rigs, and my personal favourite–besides an “organized,” “democratic” electorate–a stolen election.
Maybe that’s why Gertrude Kearns is such an anomaly to me. Amidst the chaos, she is creating art, intelligently. Her works are the reason why my attitude is changing.
Gertrude Kearns is a Canadian artist who, in her career as a painter, has been depicting aspects of war. Her methods include trips with the Department of National Defence. Her works are collected by the Canadian War Museum. Her subjects are of people who are the result of decisions being made, decisions being executed, and unbearably, decisions with grave consequences – in amounts insufficient to dig 6-feet deep.
Kearns’s style adopts something from Picasso and Russian Constructivism. The underpainting in one section of her art, becomes a point of focus and telling detail in another. And unlike a newspaper, the restricted use of colour forces the viewer to look longer, to look again, and look no further.
Portrait features are put together, assembled; like parts, trying to fit, and create a hole. In this way, Kearns reminds me of the ceramist Gertraud Möhwald. Lines which not only fragment the composition, but take on something more. They are wrinkles, scars; indications where things in life repeated, caused alarm. Contorted and embedded. Variated and permanent. A contradiction. A divide. But above all, an example.
If sittings are what will ultimately stand up to politics, then it’s not the making change that is an issue, but how that change must take shape in order for it to be effective (and take a seat). It’s rethinking the protests, the marches and letters to the editor. It’s about amassing a perspective; for Kearns, starting from a blank canvas, a new slate. It’s about finding a new way to contain politics within a manageable framework–one that may even put it in its place: in the corner.
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