On Paintings
The Banality of Shrubs
The aestheticization of the everyday (pejoratively known as the banal) is a well trod path. From the mosaic table scraps of Sosus’s ‘Unswept Floor’ from 2nd century Pergamon, to Edward Ruscha’s book of photographs, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, from Giorgio Morandi’s still lives of vases and bottles, to Alex Katz’s portraits of his wife, to the monumental Balloon Dog sculptures of Jeff Koons, it moves through principally urban and domestic terrain. What is generally overlooked, however, are representations of the banal in the natural world. Landscape, especially in Canadian landscape painting, is usually represented as romantic, mysterious, majestic, picturesque, anything but banal. Think of Emily Carr, Toni Onley, and The Group of Seven.
In this exhibition I have concentrated my attention on an aspect of what I would call the banal natural landscape, the ordinary shrub. Even the word evokes a picture of an uncommon lack of distinction. Adapting a snapshot aesthetic, similar to street photography, to my painting practice, I have hunted the neighborhoods of Vancouver for those overlooked supporting characters of Canadian landscape, the “wild,” unmanicured shrubs growing in parks, vacant lots, and at the sides of homes. What makes the shrub an ideal vehicle for the banal is its freedom from the kinds of literary, cultural, and historical references and associations that encumber trees, flowers, and even vegetables. A solitary tree packs a very different punch than a lone Elderberry.
After growing up in British Columbia, I received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, and an MFA from Texas A&M University. I moved to New York City in 1990 and spent the next fourteen years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In 2003, I returned to Vancouver with my family.
The Banality of Shrubs
The aestheticization of the everyday (pejoratively known as the banal) is a well trod path. From the mosaic table scraps of Sosus’s ‘Unswept Floor’ from 2nd century Pergamon, to Edward Ruscha’s book of photographs, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, from Giorgio Morandi’s still lives of vases and bottles, to Alex Katz’s portraits of his wife, to the monumental Balloon Dog sculptures of Jeff Koons, it moves through principally urban and domestic terrain. What is generally overlooked, however, are representations of the banal in the natural world. Landscape, especially in Canadian landscape painting, is usually represented as romantic, mysterious, majestic, picturesque, anything but banal. Think of Emily Carr, Toni Onley, and The Group of Seven.
In this exhibition I have concentrated my attention on an aspect of what I would call the banal natural landscape, the ordinary shrub. Even the word evokes a picture of an uncommon lack of distinction. Adapting a snapshot aesthetic, similar to street photography, to my painting practice, I have hunted the neighborhoods of Vancouver for those overlooked supporting characters of Canadian landscape, the “wild,” unmanicured shrubs growing in parks, vacant lots, and at the sides of homes. What makes the shrub an ideal vehicle for the banal is its freedom from the kinds of literary, cultural, and historical references and associations that encumber trees, flowers, and even vegetables. A solitary tree packs a very different punch than a lone Elderberry.
After growing up in British Columbia, I received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, and an MFA from Texas A&M University. I moved to New York City in 1990 and spent the next fourteen years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In 2003, I returned to Vancouver with my family.
On Houseflies & Bees
The object is almost irrelevant, though not completely. Although flies come saturated with descriptive and cultural references, there's nothing spiritual, or emotional, or intellectual about my fly-as-subject. It was there when I found it. Yes, they are flies, there's no mistake. But in an odd way it only comes into focus secondarily, after it's understood as a series of marks. When it defies this route and the object of the work is seen first, it nevertheless very soon crumbles into intricacy and the sensitivity of just marks. The expectation of narrative that recognizable objects bring, is frustrated.
In Towards a Newer Laocoon, Clement Greenberg wrote that 'Literature's' corrupting influence is only felt when the senses are neglected. With the flies, the senses are not neglected and the literature that would fill these images otherwise is held out. Yet the drawings gain by this, the more so for their silence in the face of literature. Further on in Laocoon Greenberg has a passage that becomes applicable when "poem" is replaced by "drawing," "poet writes" with "artist draws," "reader's" with "viewer's," and "poetry" with "art." Adjusted, the passage reads:
The drawing still offers possibilities of meaning - but only possibilities. Should any of them be too precisely realized, the drawing would lose the greatest part of its efficacy, which is to agitate the consciousness with infinite possibilities by approaching the brink of meaning and yet never falling over it. The artist draws, not so much to express, as to create a thing which will operate upon the viewer's consciousness to produce the emotion of art.
Darcy Mann
