CURRENT EXHIBITIONS |
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Liminal Spaces in Borderlands – Imagining the ImmaterialCarolyn MacHardy, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia Okanagan Liminal Spaces Shawn Serfas was born in 1976 in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. As a young man he hiked and canoed in the Churchill River system, developing a passionate interest in the land and its forms. This in turn led to a year of environmental studies at the University of Saskatchewan. But it was the memory of seeing a reproduction of J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 The Slave Ship, an emotionally charged, highly romantic painting now called Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhoon Coming On, in his high school art class which led him to dabble in painting during his first year at university; the following year he switched to a BFA program and eventually became a painter. Over the past eight years, Serfas has developed a body of work that circles around issues of our relationship with the land and how we mark it and map it. It’s an interest with a strong autobiographical slant: Serfas grew up in the small city of Prince Albert, his family having come to Saskatchewan from Germany and Ukraine in the early 1900s as homesteaders. The idea of a raw and gritty land transformed first by surveying and then by the addition of buildings and crops is embedded in Serfas’s family narrative and provides a founding matrix for both his paintings and his interest in environmental sciences. In the same way, being from northern Saskatchewan has been extremely important to the genesis of Serfas’s interests: Prince Albert, poised on the boreal plains between the arboreal forests to the north and agricultural lands to the south, is a gateway to Prince Albert National Park (famous in part as the place where Grey Owl invented himself) and then north of that to the Churchill River system, while fifty miles to the east of the city, the two Saskatchewan Rivers, the North and the South, meet in an area called The Forks. Until he moved to Edmonton to pursue an MFA at the University of Alberta, this is the terrain that provided Serfas’s spatial markers, a provisional answer to the question “Where am I”? Serfas’s paintings are exuberant and richly textured. He refers to himself as a landscape painter, but his paintings do not offer mimetic descriptions of the view in front of his eye; instead they probe the idea that science, rather than revealing the processes at work both within the earth and on its surface, only makes us more aware that things are happening that are not obvious to the human eye: the processes behind plate tectonics, global warming and melting ice caps, for example, are invisible to all but the most sophisticated technology. And our understanding of nature has been radically challenged over the past century: as writer Johanne Sloane notes, “…nature really is different than it was one hundred years ago… now we know that nature is likely to be altered, toxified or mutated, whether the ecosystem in question is a genetic sequence in the human body or an isolated mountain lake.”1 The four photographs, three of them taken by Serfas, that are included with this text give an idea of the type of source material that he works with. (Serfas doesn’t paint from photographs and doesn’t consider himself a practising photographer so his photographs are not included in this exhibition). Each photograph speaks, in its own way, about the superimposition of human will on the land or about how radically different our views of the land become with every new technological development (including sophisticated cameras and surveillance equipment). The photograph of the Rockies references the importance of aerial photography and satellite information to Serfas’s painting practice; that of the window with its grid of bars suggests the ordered and structured lens which we often adopt, sometimes unwittingly, to look at the land, and the photo of the homestead near Edmonton shows the transience of the marks we make, even large ones, and how nature attempts to reclaim what is no longer occupied by humans. Of the four, it is the photo of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan which I find particularly striking: it is, in many ways, the prairie photograph we have all come to expect, with the lower third, possibly less, given over to the land and the buildings and the rest taken up by the vast sky. But this is a prairie which has been heavily mediated by the will of human beings: it is the result of the surveying of the prairies in the late 19th century, a system that divided the land into rectangular parcels governed by rangelines and township lines, familiar to anyone who has flown over the prairies. There is nothing haphazard or capricious here: fences and sophisticated farm machinery are required to maintain the view seen in this photo.
Although Serfas abandoned environmental science in a formal, educational sense when he switched into a Fine Arts program after one year, certain fields within the earth sciences such as geomorphology and hydrology continue to fascinate him and very much influence his work. Such interests on Serfas’s part would seem to align him with artists such as Mel Chin in the USA, Hermann Prigann in Germany, or Reinhard Reitzenstein in Canada, all of whom work with the land. I also see a parallel with the late Robert Smithson who wrote that “In order to read the rocks we must become conscious of geologic time, and of the layers of prehistoric material that is [sic] entombed in the Earth’s crust.”2 However, much of the so-called “land art’ challenges notions to do with art being about making a physical object or image in the studio, proposing instead what has been called a “post studio” practice. 3 Though he cites land artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Nils-Udo as influences, Serfas is very much a painter: he works in a studio with canvas and paint (however, as is often noted, paint is composed of earth, rock and minerals, ground up and then mixed with some sort of fluid medium), and he willingly embraces certain traditions within the history of painting: he likes the fact that his paintings are on stretchers which impose physical limits on the size of the paintings and he likes the fact that his paintings have defined edges. Serfas describes his painting process as being very earthy and physical. He begins each painting by deciding on the underlying structure and composition and thinking about the painterly problems he is tackling; then once the ground paint is laid down, he abandons himself to the process of painting. As he talks about laying the canvas on the floor and then starting to paint, I imagine an elaborate aerial choreography that recalls Jackson Pollock’s working method as seen in the famous Hans Namuth film: Serfas pours paint on the canvas, swishes it around with his hand, sluices water over it and exposes it to vibrations. He frequently uses words such as ‘sedimentation’, ‘gravity’ and ‘fluvial’ to describe this process. At least 12 to15 layers of paint, metal, aluminum, polystyrene, plastic and water, and often more, are applied this way. At some point, he takes the paintings outside and exposes them to the elements: the nastier the better, it seems. When he decides that they are finally finished, each multi-layered painting is densely populated with things that matter to Serfas: references to things such as geology and geomorphology criss-cross more personal references to biography and spirituality. For the viewer of these works, the metaphor of an archaeological dig is very apt: each square centimeter, each strata of material needs to be sifted through and thought about before the next layer is tackled.
Until very recently, one of the key structures in Serfas’s paintings has been the monolith, a tall vertical form. It is visible in most of the works in this show and is more apparent in some works than in others. In Dark Black Cloud #2, it appears along with a circular form, a shape which has crept into Serfas’s paintings over the past two years. The two shapes are signs of presence, both physical, as in the question of “Where am I” posed earlier, and metaphysical. It implies an alignment between our own verticality as erect human beings and the structure of our field of vision. A similar signifier of presence is the “zips” in American painter Barnett Newman’s work. In the context of Canadian art history, it is possible to read Serfas’s use of the monolith both as an homage to Barnett Newman’s visit to the Emma Lake artists workshop, north of Prince Albert, in 1959 and as a reminder that the development of modernist abstract painting in Saskatchewan from the 1950s on was very much tied up with the New York-based Abstract Expressionists, painters whom Serfas considers to be seminal influences on his work. The monolithic form disappears in Borderland Eclipse, the most recent painting in this exhibition, but vestiges of it remain in the clearly visible vertical join between the two canvases in this diptych. A thin, loosely painted sphere sweeps across both halves, visually knotting them together; sometimes this form is almost submerged in the surrounding paint, and at other times it pulls free of it, crackling with life. For Serfas, a man of faith, the circular forms carry a celestial, heavenly quality and he hopes to nudge people towards appreciating the spiritual qualities in his paintings: he hopes, he says, that viewers will reflect on the cusp or, as the painting’s title suggests, this borderland between the material and immaterial. Borderlands are liminal spaces- thresholds- and I understand Serfas’s title to mean that he is contemplating taking his work in new directions, that he has enlisted the imagination in this quest because, as philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote, it is the imagination which “by the the swiftness of its actions [..] separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future.”4 Paradoxically, Serfas is also talking about imagining the immaterial with paint - earthy, heavy, physical matter.
Will Serfas remain a painter? I think he will. I see him as still mulling over the many lessons to be learned from Turner’s great painting of Slavers throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhoon Coming On. Serfas is pondering the interface between the self and the environment and between humankind and the immensity of the world that surrounds us and of which we are part. He is in awe, in the sense of fear and wonder, of all that science is unable to explain. Shawn Serfas is dancing with the sublime.
Endnotes Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed.Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 880. |
