photo Toni Hafkenscheid

Landmark: Robert Houle & John Abrams:

 

 

The exhibition was co-produced by the University of Waterloo Art Gallery in association with the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen Sound. Curated by Carol Podedworny, Guest Essay by Stuart Reid.

 

 Tour Schedule

 UW Art Gallery : October 25 - November 22, 2001

 Tom Thomson: January 19 -March 3, 2002

 Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa: May 19 - June 30 , 2002

 

John Abrams and Robert Houle have built their artistic practices around painting aspects of the Canadian imagination. In 1992, Benedict Anderson identified the mostly 'imagined' character of the Nation in an age of globalization. Referencing Althusser's concept of the state as an Ideological Apparatus, Anderson's book  Imagined Communities identified a new agenda in the nationalizing of the Nation. For Anderson - as for many other cultural thinkers pondering Nations and Nationalisms in a post - modern condition, the concept of nationalism has shifted drastically in recent years. Anderson's concept of the subjectively perceived notion of the Nation, filters through the writings of others: Kristeva, Bhabha, Schama, Millar, and Lippard, among others. The imagining is subjective and fraught with concerns for territory and identity that do not find relevance in a state-sanctioned or traditional nationalist identity.

 

For Abrams and Houle, the landscape of Canada has been defined through political associations. Issues of identity are solidified through place and history, yet the concepts have been altered. Rather than positing an objectified and legitimizing history, Abrams and Houle propose remembrance as the source of historical associations. It is memory that enables claims of possession and passion to filter through an individual's and a community's linkages to the past of a place. Abrams will contribute two large paintings to the exhibition: a series of 44 small images, paired with a large 'Falls' canvas, collectively entitled Canadian Landscape Combine (2000-2001), and a triptych entitled Canadian History Trilogy, (2000). Houle's paintings in the exhibition include Kanehsatake X (2000), as well as Ipperwash (2001) and Ancestor (2001). The paintings by both artists conjure symbolic associations, each speaking of similar geo-political territories while referencing historical and cultural memories that reveal the contested workings of representation.

 

Andreas Huyssen's considerations in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995), paves the way for a critical analysis of why Abrams and Houle would mark their sense of location with paintings that suggest the lack of synchronicity in a post - modern temporality; the dissolution of territorial and spatial co-ordiantes in the present era; and the confusion in locating cultural memory when the traditional axes of nation, race, language and national history are multiple. For Huyssen, memory has become the axis upon which the individual and the group can anchor national identity and cultural history. Abrams and Houle understand that - as Huyssen notes, 'all representation is based on memory.' In their strugglr to locate memories with which to mark the cultural record, Abrams and Houle realize that this act is also a struggle for history. Conceived of with time and place as co-ordinates, Abrams and Houle draw the viewer 'to time' - or as Houle states 'me uhpe' - where to remember becomes the passage to the emotional recollection of 'events that resonate.'