Bernice Afriyie | Arts Editor
Featured image: Pull/Away is an interactive exhibit that pushes the discussion on art’s subversive possibilities. | Vincent Chen
The Gales Gallery at York kicked off the new year with Pull/Away, an exhibit featuring fourth-year visual arts students testing the boundaries of various forms of print media. In one way or another, Helen Olcott, Kelly-Ann Hutchinson and Danny Cirne played with traditional representations of print media in their artwork.
Stepping into the white-walled gallery, a disinterested volunteer glued to a seat just left of the gallery’s entrance seems to be an unchanging fixture of the exhibit. Student projects come and go by the week, but the recycled disengaged bodies of supervisors never change. As such, questions of how any art form can be subversive within the walls of the Gales Gallery seem like valid ones. How can any art form or movement critically challenge its conventions when it must adhere to a greater frame?
From the moment visitors enter the gallery, Pull/Away engages them with these questions and more. “Pull, a term embedded in the tradition of various printmaking disciplines such as screen printing, relief and intaglio, encompasses the movements involved with the making and the final realization of a print. Away, a term indicating the distancing from a particular place, person or thing, illustrates how our collective body of work attempts to distance itself from traditional notions and of these printmaking processes by allowing the gesture and its results as the final realization,” reads the statement, in stark contrast to the white walls.
Each installation, viewed with the artists’ statements in mind, pulls away from the mundanity and regularity of the white gallery walls. The prints, whether vibrant or monotone, textured or smooth, force onlookers to critically engage with the work and the space. Not enough art, and subversive art in particular, extends complicitness to space and frames. The space of the Gales Gallery becomes a work of art as well, an artificially constructed installation that we are forced to question. Why is sterilized white the default backdrop of so many galleries? The colour and texture of the walls are worthy subjects because they are not routinely subjected to the same scrutiny as the pieces that hang from their walls.
These ambitious pieces subvert artistic practices and call out normative behaviours in society that stretch beyond the gallery’s walls. Pull/Away is a print exhibit that utilizes the Gales as an active subject, and by doing so, comments on connotations of
whiteness and passive assumptions of whiteness as the default setting in society. It’s evident in the neutrality attributed white faces and bodies in entertainment, media and advertisement. It’s there in the absurd moral association of whiteness with purity and goodness. It’s there in the exclusive characterization of nude tones. Like a white noise that our ears grow desensitized to overtime, we don’t stop to question the unnatural associations that we make between ideology and reality, colour and expression.
Colour, space, texture and light are the tools that artists are using to fight expression and exploitation and should not be tainted by the same systems of abuse that they are trying to fight.
