Arrows and Bullets Comb my Hair

On right now at Gallery @ 501 in Sherwood Park is Arrows and Bullets Comb my Hair, an exhibition of drawings, collages, and prints done by three artists whose works I really enjoy: Blair Brennan, Patrick J. Reed and Richard Boulet.

Almost all of the works are presented as a series and read as equal parts obsession and catharsis, making visible the lived experiences of each artist. Intensely personal, the works reflect both private mythologies and symbolic cosmologies not entirely accessible to the viewer. Recurring images and themes become touchstones that serve to bind each series together and point cryptically to the stories that appear to lie beneath the surface.

There is an honesty to these works that comes as a result of the spontaneous and seemingly unpolished nature of them. Drawings done with ink or paint, collages made from the detritus of everyday life, a re-purposed Styrofoam tray transformed into a print matrix: the materials and processes used by Brennan, Reed and Boulet are deliberately low-tech, heightening the immediacy and visceral quality of their projects. Many of the illustrations have an abject or disturbing quality to them which may come in small part from the contents, but more so from the uneasy feeling of being unwittingly exposed to someone else’s diary.

Boulet interprets Mahfouz

The analogy of these works being like diary entries is not so far from the reality of their fabrication. On one entire wall are drawings done by Boulet in which he describes the dreams of the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, a man with whom Boulet feels kinship, as filtered through his own process of dreaming and remembering. The fleeting memories of one man, recorded in words, interpreted by another, in images. A very real slippage exists in this “collaboration” between Boulet and Mahfouz - it is impossible to separate where one man ends and the other begins.

Kozgna Upsuth

On one side of the free-standing partition in centre of the gallery is Reed’s Kozgna Upsuth. Layered over 24 air rifle targets are drawn and collaged elements, subversive and rife with overt sexuality, disorder and masculinity. Like automatic drawings, the works are unrestrianed and were completed, in Reed’s own words, “during the seemingly endless and Godforsaken winter of 2010-11.” Though displayed on a wall, the individual works are usually collected and stored together in a cigar box, like private vices or fetishes hidden away under a mattress. Similarily, Curly Q, The Erik Menendez Suite chronicles aspects of Reed’s ten year long obsession with Menendez, one of the two brothers convicted in the shotgun killings of their parents in 1989.

Scara Privata

Perhaps the most personal and diary-like of all the works in Arrows and Bullets Comb my Hair are those drawings that make up Brennan’s Scara Privata. Ongoing since 1990, the images are culled from his habitual practice of drawing almost every day. Some are infused with humour, others are more sinister. Like Boulet and Reed, rather than belaboured, the drawings and collages that constitute Brennan’s practice are spontaneous responses to his lived experiences. Yet the works transcend the personal place from which they originate with their capacity to activate meaningful connections with viewers. This comes in part as a result of the collectively shared references embedded within many of the works.

One of the most arresting works in this exhibition is Brennan’s Necessity and Chance. Two first aid kits, both painted white and lined with red velvet, occupy two different display cases. In one, a pair of horns (possibly the devil’s?); in the other, a utility knife that bears the word “DEFIANCE.” Displayed as they are, as viewers we are called to ask which is necessity and which is chance…

Necessity and Chance

What makes the works in this exhibition resonate most strongly with my own sensibilities is the way they make visible those sides to ourselves so often kept hidden. The quiet darkness that often tugs at the edges of our dreams, obsessions and anxieties of daily life. It is as though the ritualistic practice of drawing, collaging and printing serves to keep at bay and defying that intangible force which threatens to unravel our carefully constructed lives.

Boulet, Reed and Brennan are not alone in their serial practice. Google “a drawing a day” and you’ll find thousands of other artists, each engaged with this kind of habitual practice. There really is something cathartic about the daily practice of doing something that is just for oneself.

These artists and their works do not endeavour to offer any answers - in fact, the works may seem challenging because their symbols or references are not our own. Embrace the challenge. Meaning exists in the relationships between the parts and the whole, whether its the individual elements in any one illustration to the overall work, or whether its the individual drawings to the series on display.

If you have yet to make the trip out to Sherwood Park to see the exhibition or the new gallery, it is well worth it. Arrows and Bullets Comb my Hair is on until February 27th.

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