Golnaz Taherian | Arts Editor
Featured Image: Soule encapsulates a sense of nostalgia for lost youth. | Golnaz Taherian
Ellen Soule’s art exhibition, ‘Lucky Charm’, reminisces on childhood experiences through the fully developed consciousness of an adult. Located at the Special Project Gallery of Joan and Martin Goldfarb Centre for Fine Art, the exhibition focuses on screen printing, which involves hand drawing on tracing paper and exposing the art with a chemical process.
Through the use of bright and saturated colours, Lucky Charms cereal and candy motifs, and hand-drawn style, the artist encapsulates a sense of nostalgia for lost youth.
Soule, a fourth-year visual arts student, has been drawing for as long as she can remember. She branched out into screen printing after taking a course on it on her second year. She notes that screen printing facilitates the process of hand drawing.
York has had a deep impact on her art. “York has the best facilities; the print studios are one of the best in Ontario. The professors are awesome, and they are really good at pushing you and being there for you,” says Soule.
Much of Soule’s art begins with aesthetic ideas. Rather than proceeding from an artistic preconception, she lets her creative intuition guide her to new and interesting places. She goes with the flow, and develops her themes therefrom.
“Sucker,” for example, portrays a woman holding a red lollipop. The woman is looking directly at the viewer, inviting open interpretation. Soule mentions that when she finished the piece, it invoked within her childhood memories of receiving Lucky Charms from her grandfather. This memory became the kernel of the theme of her present exhibition: the recollection of childhood from the perspective of adulthood.
In “Lifesaver,” a topless woman shields half her face with her arm, while the aforementioned candies float beside her. Her body leans next to the green, yellow and pink ring-shaped sweets. This seems to represent that her character is done with childhood and yearns to grow. She seems to be experiencing a sexual awakening. The candy represents the childhood which she has grown beyond and given up. But the fact she is covering her breasts is indicative of her feelings of discomfort and hesitancy.
“Pleasantries” encompasses four graphics of an adult in a “No Thank You” T-shirt of different colours. It represents a woman who is obliged to say what is expected; she is just standing there looking bored with her social role. The different colours of the shirts may represent different days and different roles that she must play. For instance, yellow can represent being bright and happy and pink being soft and feminine.
“It’s essentially about coming a little bit away from the childhood and more into the experience of female. Saying ‘No Thank You’ but being pleasant about it,” says Soule.
“I pair all this candy imagery with the figures who are clearly not children. These ambiguously older girls present an interesting dynamic between the idea of youth versus the idea of maturing; I can’t look at childhood in the same way that I did when I was living it, I can only access it though vague memories and perhaps an act of fantasy,” she adds.
