Constructed Realities

Art/ by Jack Ruttan

Gigi Perron and Joan Rzadkiewicz

at Galerie Clark until November 24 (1991)

In their own different ways, the two artists now displaying at Galerie Clark have produced constructions of everyday life.

With her paintings Gigi Perron is trying the difficult trick of communicating a sense of boredom without becoming boring herself. The figures in her pictures all have the same bald heads and large-featured faces whether they are male or female. This makes them not portraits of individuals, but of everybody. In fact, we see Perron's stoop-shouldered people wherever we look: on the streets, in the metro, sometimes even in the mirror. Who hasn't sat at a kitchen table during a party like the people in Party de Cuisine? Looking at this and the other pictures we get a feeling we are intruding on stranger's lives. Some of the figures even turn around to glare at us sullenly. However they don't seem to have enough will or energy to tell us to get out. All of Perron's people look like they want to express something, but never quite make it.

If there is a pitfall with painting like this, it's in relying too much on one device. For all her skill and sophisticated "old master" technique, Perron is a self-taught artist. It will be interesting to see what she will be painting in twenty years.

Joan Rzadkeiwicz's two installations, (which appropriately enough were under construction by the artist when viewed for this article) are a good deal more optimistic. She has built what amounts to a do-it-yourself universe, or rather an assembly kit for building it. The materials the artist sets out to be used are deliberately humble, reflecting in a way the limited capacity humans have for imagining and coping with infinite things. There is a paint brush tied to a stick to daub stars on the sky, and a tarpaulin underneath which is partly meant to be drippings, and partly a map that shows where to put the stars. At the same time the tarpaulin implies that we put the stars there ourselves, simply by the act of mapping them. If this is not enough, on the plastic overing the pan are written "instructions." It's a text from the work of the ancient scientist Ptolomey, one of the first written descriptions of a scientific universe.

The second installation uses similar strategies. There is a candy bowl full of rhinestones which can also become stars. Underneath the drawing board on which the fictional universe-maker works is a map on plastic sheeting which describes a different kind of creation. This is the creation, or rather re-creation that comes when you remember something. Another text, this time taken from a manual on how to improve your memory, invites you to treat like a temple the memory of something complicated. By walking around the temple you bring parts of this memory back. Rzadkeiwicz has done this, creating a painted memory map of her old neighbourhood in Winnipeg.

She really doesn't say whether tools and strategies as simple as these create a half decent universe, or just build something that will fall apart. She does imply that this is the best that we can do, and at least that is better than nothing.

Links to Galleries in Montreal