One Response to Bright Nights
An Exhibition of Paintings by Petra Halkes
I came to the opening of Bright Nights, having spent the day
reading about the Japanese artists, Hiroshige and Hokusai, and looking at their
woodblock prints of nature images, particularly their waterfalls and mountains.
For a long time I have been drawn to Ukiyo-e, attracted by its emphasis on the pleasures
and transience of life, and the visual tradition called “the floating world”
that came into being in 18th century Japan at a time when the
merchant class was on the rise and its members wanted images that echoed what they
found familiar or desirable.
When I walked into Bright Nights at the Ottawa School of
Art, that cold February night, it seemed the spirit and lineage of Ukiyo-e had
been extended and given form in the blurred, enticing night images of streets
and buildings. The harshness of electricity’s bright utilitarian function seemed
muted, and, in its place, was a soft sense of wonder. Light, when coupled with speed
and darkness, had transformed highways, landscapes and commercial architecture,
had turned them into a floating world, a dream.
In looking at the paintings, it became apparent that a
double vision was at play. There was the interior view of the invisible
passenger in the car, conscious of the passage of time and distance, witnessing
buildings changed by light, released from their ordinary appearance. And there
was the actual exhibition viewer, one step removed, but sharing the passenger’s
perception of such attractions as a beckoning house, shorn of any hint of its role
in the occupants’ domestic life, or a road that seemed to promise no fixed
destination, only an invitation to travel. Stores, in the series, Drive By
Shopping, were devoid of goods, their opaque windows a swath of white. In all
the paintings there was a sense of shifting ground, of becoming gently de-stabilized.
The lure of entering this new territory suggested a
consideration of the genesis of the source of light. I thought of Hokusai’s “The
Waterfall of Amida”, when I looked at the large vertical painting on the south
wall of the gallery. It was the least subdued painting in the exhibition- the bright
red cover of a gas station’s highway- strength lights protected a flow of white
light which fell like a pristine flood in the centre of a canvas bounded by deep
blues. The illumination appeared to cascade in the form of Hokusai’s Amida waterfall.
The more I looked at it, the more I thought of it as ancestral - the light, another
form of water, an offspring of human inventiveness, born from the act of harnessing
the power of nature.
My mind went back to the exhibition Primal Spirit, shown at
the National Gallery of Canada, 20 years ago, and forward to the Wanda Koop
exhibition currently on at the National Gallery. I began to see Bright Nights
as having an affinity with both. While Primal Spirit was a powerful exhibition by
ten Japanese artists who used natural materials to make sculptures that Howard
N. Fox, curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
described as a “response to nature and the attempt to engage the forces and
great cycles in nature.” He also noted that underpinning the works was the
Buddhist concept that the function of art is essentially meditative.
Bright Nights seemed to treat electrical light as a subject
for meditation on “hybrid nature” by illuminating aspects that were akin to
solar rhythms- the implied change from bright daylight to dusk. Wanda Koop’s show,
just a few blocks away, had the same sense of shifting ground, of seeing nature
as hybrid. Her perspective was often from inside domestic space that became
both public and private, seeing the landscapes of the Iraq war as inseparable
from the light of the television screen through which they were transmitted,
giving eerie form to images of reconnoiter and surveillance.
The epic and
monumental aspects, evident in Primal Spirit and Wanda Koop’s work, were
missing from Bright Nights. The more I looked at the paintings, the more they
seemed to reinforce my first impression of echoing Ukiyo-e’s tradition. With
the exception of two paintings, the works were small in scale and rooted in the
familiar landscape of daily life. Released by light and speed from the mundane,
they had been granted a mysterious and alluring dimension in an altered
material world.
-Nancy
Baele
