Dainty Flotsam - Karina Kalvaitis 
Laundry Room - James Whitman, Barry Doupe, Tasha Brotherton
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Karina Kalvaitis & The Lions (James Whitman, Matthew Brown, Barry Doupe, Tasha Brotherton, Lief Hall)
July 8 - August 6 , 2005
Opening Reception : Friday, July 8th @ 8pm
All are Welcome. Admission is FREE.Halo Head Mask - James Whitman, Matthew Brown
Strange Bedfellows
If you look to the Internet to find the meaning of the phrase “strange bedfellows”, the first site that comes up is a flash page for an Australian TV show. It features two burly middle-aged guys standing together, one looking a little shocked or bemused (it’s hard to tell which), while the other, shorter more stylish one, is simply smiling. Next are articles about gay marriage. While I didn’t realize that this was really so strange, the phrase does imply an element of the unexpected or unusual and certainly of the incongruous.
Although they don’t contain many burly guys or seemingly abnormal marriages, the relationships created by the drawings of The Lions and the sculptures by Karina Kalvaitis could be considered a little out of the ordinary. Reminiscent of the fictional places, daydream wanderings, imaginary friends, and sometimes sinister acts of childhood, their artwork is a shared world where small stubby pastel pink beasts are half submerged in a block of wood and penguin-like clowns (or are they penguins in clown suits?) waddle in arctic icescapes. Karina associates her work with circuses, the nursery and the domestic sphere. If this is so, then the world of The Lions is more aligned with teenage rebellion, notebook doodling, and fantasies of black Camaros. What brings them together is their “pregnant pause,” to borrow Karina’s words, their suspension of narrative, their unwillingness to let us in on the punch-line, or perhaps more accurately, their willingness to let us invent our own.
The Lions have been creating their own version of exquisite corpse drawings for the past two years. Straying from the Surrealist idea that collective creations are superior to the vision of a single artist,The Lions aren’t afraid of failure. It is because of the sometimes clumsy scribbles and deliberate awkwardness of their drawings that The Lions can create the often poignant compositions and surprising juxtapositions that gives their work resonance. And it is through the control relinquished when they pass a drawing over to a friend for additions that the two lanky, slightly skittish Extra-Terrestrials tentatively peering at you over the appendages of a big scribble and a guilty looking duck-man raking a pile of leaves can be spawned
I have read before that play creates a space where subjectivity and objectivity overlap. It is in this in-between space that we encounter The Lions other-worldly creatures and Karina’s Cousin of the Hyrax, a small molded rabbit suspended by its ruffled collar. The latter’s cuteness is tempered with an undertone of menace. I have read further that play is not reverting to a child-like state but is rather one of the first adult modes that a child acquires. 1
-Candice Hopkins is a curator and writer based in Banff, Alberta.
1- D.W. Winnicot, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971), 95-109.
The Lions
Statement
We are a group of Vancouver artists who have been meeting weekly since 2003 to work collaboratively on drawings. Through these weekly meetings we have amassed hundreds of drawings made on standard 8.5 X 11 paper. We take an experimental approach to making images and the sessions are open to the unexpected results of improvisation and spontaneity. The resulting pictures are odd mish-mashes of genre, style, narrative experiment, fantasy and spectacle. Forms, characters, and pictorial conventions are retrofitted becoming disfigured, violently decorated, comic and incongruous.
Some of our drawings are aesthetic or non-representational but others frame an event as a film still or storyboard would. These depict figures in the manner of a portrait or within a social relationship. Both, the portraits and the scenes, are temporal and imply narrative, often depicting the 'middle period' of an event or an in-between state. We draw things that are 'happening', but we don't invent larger histories or stories to explain them, instead, we use implied narrative to produce atmosphere and generate a charged social space.
In the portraits we build faces out of little bits of graphic junk and material elaboration. The portraits are deadpan, distant, outrageous, and confrontational. They are attempts to build and allow expression or 'face' to emerge from material that retains its own identity and isn't necessarily of the disposition to depict something. Often we disfigure characters or faces. This serves to distance the character, to make them alien or 'other', less an object of subjective identification and emotional indulgence for the viewer. Sometimes this acts as a type of violence that has been done to the character by the artist. A figure can be so ornamented it seems their body is betraying them, despite their best attempts to control themselves. Their predicament is ridiculous and we can't help but laugh at their misfortune.
While our images are 'fantastic' and hinge on incongruities, they draw on and work through familiar archetypes. We use colloquial pictorial forms, genre material, jokes and gags. The pictures are often of everyday domestic settings or filled with abundant quotidian detail and 'real life' material that permits the viewer to relate through common understanding. Collaborating together, we never leave this material as it is, but inevitably subvert and mutate it into something unlikely. The pictures refer to common genres and styles of drawing and caricature, but are not of them. Instead they are the sum of uneasy tensions between familiar pictorial and genre conventions and our aggressive play with those conventions.
Karina Kalvaitis
Artist Statement
The major visual references in my sculptures are the circus, nursery and the domestic sphere. Within these realms I explore issues of comfort and discomfort, connection or disconnection and the fine line between homes and cages. Lurking inside these worlds of ruffles, ribbons and pastel colors are the complex needs, desires, sorrows, and joys that ruled us as children and still affect us as adults.
Aesthetic references to the circus – tents, banners, and flags – indicate a return to familiar yet fantastical ground. At the circus we expect the unexpected; the unbelievable, the disturbing and the frightening, but also the beautiful and the magical. Elements from toys and board games have associations with playtime, but are also a reminder of the malicious glee of childhood. The nursery, though warm and fuzzy, can also be site of struggle, pitting the immense needs of the newly born against the limitations of their caregivers.
Small and mysterious animals sometimes populate this charged atmosphere. They are often delicate, limbless, and are sometimes only a hollow skin. On occasion there are merely indentations which indicate where a creature might have been. The circumstances of these animals’s existence seem fraught with a sense of vulnerability. Are they being cared for or contained? Their habitats have elements of both homes and cages.
These sculptures capture the pregnant pause – a stillness before some small and strange emotional drama is played out. Taken together they create a world that is familiar, yet more intricate and intense than our own. They are another biological sphere parallel to this one. Like the fabled monster in the lake, they are of this world, yet tantalizingly out of reach.
+ 15 Window Project Space:
some assembly required by ryan statz
