HORSE & CROW is a two-person show featuring new installations by veteran painters John Abrams and Patrick DeCoste, curated by Carla Garnet.
Horses and crows are very different animals, but they are present as the artists' symbols, in the landscape, and recent and deeper histories mined. Their title, already literary, suggests relationships, a call and response, companionship, and antagonisms.
The term "Fin de Siècle" first appeared in French writing in 1886, reflecting a growing interest in the final years of the nineteenth century as a distinct historical period. It was used to describe either the modernity of that time or its identity as a declining phase. "La Belle Époque" (French for 'The Beautiful Era') was a period of European history beginning after the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and continuing until World War I. It is generally characterized as a time of regional peace, colonial expansion, and technological innovation.
Neither of these terms is directly applicable to HORSE & CROW artists, John Abrams and Patrick DeCoste installations. Still, they are helpful as a shortcut to discussing the literary conventions both artists use to explore their themes (before & after) frame by frame, using painting techniques to take apart and put together narrative trajectories, which cajole and interrupt their literary/historical reference structures.
Patrick DeCoste's multimedia installation explores the "Belle Epoque" colonial period of Maritime Canada before the forced expulsion and genocide of the French settlers and the local Mi’kmaw people by the invading British Empire.
An “end of an era” theme is present in John Abrams' painting/video installation based on, "The Misfits," a 1960s “anti-western/western” film penned by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift.
With their artwork, both artists ask how stories might persist in time employing their particular narrative as a space to look at our disconnection from the past and the future by investigating counter-imaginary in the present.
Touching on the aforementioned themes, each explores particular narratives, politics, mortality, and art using storytelling as a bridge between text and painting because stories have the power to preserve memory.
So, while each refers to a different time, place, set of characters, and actions, they use imagery such as portraits and scenes to order/reorder the sequence of events illustrating that narratives occur in space and unfold in time.
DeCoste is of mixed 17th-century French and Mi’kmaq, and later Irish bloodlines. He descends from one of the early Metis peoples in Nova Scotia, Francoise Petitpas. His work is inspired by her life and by her older brother Bartholemy who was captured by the British and died in a Boston prison.For HORSE & CROW, DeCoste has created scenes and characters (including Francoise and her pet crow) leading up to 1722 and the Battle of Winnepang, near Halifax. This conflict between the colonizing British forces and the French Mi’kmaw people reached a head ending a century of peace in the region and resulting in forced expulsion and genocide of local French and First Nations peoples. The artist’s narrative installation shares elements of the Winnepang account featuring 15 small round acrylic paintings on cross sections cut from a white pine tree trunk. These small painted wooden medallions depict many of these historical figures, motifs, and events and are accompanied by wool blankets, furs, and animal skulls.
John Abrams is interested in how cinema translates words from the page to the screen and how he can then translate the film still into a painting that can be re-inserted into the film. “The Misfits”, Abrams’ source material, in HORSE & CROW, explores fading archetypes, loneliness, displacement, loss, bravery, and exploitation. The film is about a recently divorced woman and some cowboys, and their desperate plan is to round up mustangs to be slaughtered for dog food, but in the end, they set the wild horses free. Characters in the movie, like artists, more generally, live outside the conventions of society. And despite not being young and beautiful anymore, they all strive to remain desired and stay alive. The film and its production can be seen as a story within a story, exploring the complex relationships between the creatives involved, gendered spaces, the working poor, and the American dream that Hollywood often depicts.
Both artists are avid readers interested in storytelling, imagery, and experimentation. While they rely on realism, they persistently interrupt traditional linear structures, asking viewers to read their paintings as text. Utilizing their assemblage of paintings as method to change and shift perspective and to point out that pictures/stories can hold us together or tear us apart. But, also, together they point to how 'narratives' help us remember and imagine.
CG/09/24