John Armstrong: –distinguished artist in Vancouver where
she lives and she has shown across Canada,
and internationally.
Allyson received her BFA from the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design and her
MFA from the University of British
Columbia. Her work resides in several
collections, including the Art Gallery of
Ontario, Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of
Nova Scotia, The Banff Centre, and the Art
Gallery of Windsor.
She has numerous awards including senior
artist grants from the Canada Council,
the Mexico-Canada-US artist exchange
residency, and the Rockefeller Foundation
Bellagio Residency Program. She is a
professor in the School for Contemporary
Arts at Simon Fraser University in
Vancouver and is represented in Toronto
by Katzman Contemporary Art, where she
had an opening this past winter [laughs]
had some really wonderful text and design
paintings that reflect in various ways
on the position of abstract painting in
Canada, and at that opening–in order to
get there you had to go through a
blizzard, so it was a very interesting
experience moving from the white world
into more chromatic world that Allyson presented.
So please join me in welcoming
Allyson Clay. [Applause] Allyson: Thank you very much, John
for a nicely pronounced introduction–
and thank you for hosting me here, and
nice to see an audience. So, I thought I
would talk about, as John said–we have
a friend in common called Lucy Hogg who–
she used to live in Vancouver and now
lives in New York and she said she was
wishing she was here because 'I have some
explaining to do' she says, and the
explanation is why I'm currently making
paintings with text when I spent quite a
few years before that using photography
in my work, making video and
installations, and moving slowly back
towards painting through a collage–
collaging steelworks together. Maybe that's
enough of an explanation for Lucy but I
will go into detail here. I'm not sure if
I can explain why, but–partly I think
that for me my practice in photography
became to be too distracted from my
manual experience making work and I
really felt like I'd like to have that
time in the studio again–instead
of just doing all my art by phone and
email, and–
also because I began to enjoy the idea
of text in art more and I wanted to find
a medium that I could use that would be
interesting–an interesting–have an
interesting relationship to actual words
and letters, and I think painting because
it's kind of contrary to text, works well
for me. Anyway, so this talk I'm calling
'Liquid Spatial Evocations' and it's
actually a quote from Roald Nasgaard's
book on Canadian abstract painting and
he–and this phrase is from his
description of one of Milly Ristvedt's
paintings called 'After Rameau's Nephew' from
1978 and I'll come back to why I'm
interested in Roald Nasgaard and that kind
of phrase–and I thought I would start
with just a recent text work which is a
digital print that I did in honour of
Jeannie Thib who is an artist who passed
away this year–actually last year, and it
was based–we were asked to make a work
based on one of her drawings–patterns–she
works with patterns, so this is the
pattern here. And I like to work within
a frame–tight frame because of–I'm still
suffering from conceptual training
hangover from NSCAD years.
So, this is "leaf, leafing, cut, cutting, fret,
fretting, trace, tracing, fold, overfall,
sunfalls, lacefurls, blossombarrier,
litornament, shift, shifting,
leaves, leaving" so that was for Jeannie
and it's a very small print–8 by 8 inches.
And then I'm going back to very
early work from 1988, when I first
began–began to be interested in text.
This was a show that I did at Artspeak
Gallery in Vancouver, which was formed by
a bunch of artists that came down from a
university in the interior which was
closed down by the right-wing government
because there are too many lefties in
that town and a lot of artists and
writers came down and started Artspeak
Gallery in Vancouver. So what these are–
on the left hand side are four paintings
that are 1 foot square each, you'll
recognize the tight form of the square
and on each of these I made a painting
by mixing my own paint and using what I
thought were kind of abstraction tropes
and–and then across the room from these
paintings were for descriptions also
closed in as close as possible to
rectangles or squares, which describe the
art making process, and at that time I
was reading–actually it explained to you
how to make one of these. So the idea was
that this is for you to make, this is
an example of what you can make and
these are the instructions, so this is a
recipe. However, the recipe was
interrupted by subjective musings so you
couldn't just do the straight recipe
without hearing my voice in your ear–and
it was accompanied by a little art book
and the show was called "LURE" so–and so
the book actually presented the text
against–each text–
so the instructions were the same more
or less except there are different
images and–but I still varied the kinds of
instructions, like what kind of wood to
use and how to mix your paint et cetera, and
then each–each subjective text had a
different kind of interference with
another narrative and this one, because
it was–it had something to do with the
image so this–I got that little thing
here–so because it was a strip across I
just did a–I did this strip of
text which kind of described a political
Irish event–someone whose son was
murdered in the strife–'the troubles' as
they called it. Anyways, um, there's too much to
describe for these works. The next series
I did were paintings of labyrinth so I
kind of expanded into–exploring
abstraction more–these are 2 feet by 2
feet square and it's oil on linen and
there's also an accompanying text for
this. And I also was still strongly
rooted to my conceptual foundations and
I didn't choose the colours in a
subjective way I actually took a design
book and picked two colours that were put
together in this design book and then
went to the art supply store and bought
the paint that was closest to those
colours and just made–made the
painting. And I made the painting with–
without tape so I had to turn it
around because it's easier to paint
straight lines by painting up into them
so I did a line and then a line and a
line–it was wet into wet, so it has a nice
kind of tremor to it while still being
very formal and I also saw the labyrinth
image as being narrative image because
your eye can take you around the painting
to the center and back if you want to
spend that time doing that.
And the book that accompanied this–it
was called "The Stories" and each abstract
pattern–so I made ten of these–had a
story accompanying it–and the story
was about walking in the city so I took
the idea of labyrinth as a kind of icon
or trope of the city's map and–and I
wrote stories about–small stories, very
very short stories about wandering in
the city and I'm actually in the process
of putting these to music. I'm going to
be working with a person who plays
accordion and we're going to make songs
out of them. >>Audience: Are you going to sing? >>Allyson Clay: Ah– [laughs] I think that would be a
little problematic. [Laughs] I don't know what's–
maybe she'll sing, that'll take the
burden off. Um, then I went on to further
paintings where in fact instead of just
using the guideline for colour and
actually painting it myself, I hired
people to make my paintings–to paint
them and–but I did choose–and I wrote
the text myself, so I wrote–and again
they're very small stories and this
left-hand panel here, I–all the–I sent
20 panels to a company that does false
surfaces for wealthy people's houses.
So this is a copper sur–surface–where
did my thing go–yeah, and–and that person
I hired to paint this was recently
graduated from Emily Carr and needed a
job and I thought he was a pretty good
painter so I said okay I'd like a night sky,
and I'd like a storm, and I'd like this
and I'd like that, so he just went along
and I accepted them. I did paint a few of
them myself
so just because I thought I should.
This is not one I painted myself–and these
are all stories about women in the city
so I was beginning to be more interested
in gender and the city and how the–the
subject in the city who was the
peripatetic(?) [laughs] perambulator person–
was always a man and so I thought okay I'm
gonna see what–I'm going to write
stories that suggest a woman in the city
or a woman taking action making things
and–and just turn it around a little bit–
the female 'flâneur' I was interested in.
The flâneur being this romantic idea
of a guy who–slightly separate from
society but walks around among and
observes and writes about what society
is–the outsider. So I'm also out-siding–
out-siding by being the female flâneur
and I made two series of paintings–this is–
this is one, and then I made this next
series of ten works and these were done
with photographs on canvas and then the
right-hand panel I did–I painted myself–
of skies, and the process for the text is
screen print so these were
screen-printed on also and
so I would work with the screen printer
situating the text on the–on the
painting and I wrote the text et cetera, so
this is 'The dreams I'm having affect my
speech' and then a kind of separate–
"The novels she was reading began to affect
her daily routines. She walked with
determination and took unfamiliar
routes. Her appearance and her voice
changed. She was promoted at work."
I was going through tenure at this time–tenure review.
And then around this time also I was
experimenting with other media
printmaking and so this again was a
screen print that I did on the dollar
bills that were going out of service at
the time so I bought a bunch of dollar
bills and I made a series of works on
them so on one side it says 'blemish' and
on the other side it says... >>Audience: Abrasion. >>Allyson Clay: Abrasion,
thank you. [Laughs]
So just down–a little side story, my
interest in text was also an interest in
theory and literature and books. I was
interested in how books in fact are
physical objects, not just theory and
books are beautiful to hold and you know
paper is good to feel and–and when
you're an academic sometimes you get too
many books and you feel the heaviness of
theory and you want to let it go so I
wanted a kind of an urban event where I–
this was a building I was living in but I
doubled the photograph so that the
building, which is a very urban modernist
building, goes on forever and there's me
there a couple of times so I have some
kind of companionship in this activity–
and I threw out books and so obviously
this is photoshopped because you
wouldn't be able to–I had to do a lot of
photos to catch different books in
different forms so they are photographed
but not all on the same photograph so I
added a few books–and this was from a
commission that I did for Presentation
House Gallery in–in North Vancouver
and it was a long painting like this
because it was meant to be the same size
as you put on the side of a bus as an
advertisement and it was also the same
size as the ads in the bus station so–it
was an ad. Now, unfortunately this went up
in September 11th and–what year was that? 2001?
what year was that? 2001?–Yeah, and there was a
person that was really upset by it–but
just one person because this reminded
them of bailing from the two tow–the
Twin Towers so that was an unfortunate
coincidence and a sort of silly anecdote.
And then I went on to make large
photographic works about flying books–
again, just enjoying the beauty of them.
So I had my husband who was really good
at baseball when he was a kid–he chucked
books and I photographed them and these
are not–they're only photograph–they're
only photoshopped because I had to take
out some shadowing from capturing a
slight movement in the air but otherwise
they are against the sky they were in
and I wanted them to look more stationary
and frozen. So these I showed at Leo
Kamen gallery about 2005 or 2006.
Okay, air to water–I thought okay I want to
look at books that are being destroyed
underwater and I liked looking at them–
they're beautiful shapes so I actually
took books that had some significance for me–
my own catalogues–a book by an Italian
critic who's called Achille Bonito Oliva
and he wrote about this art
movement called Transavanguardia–
Transavantgarde–and–
just books that had some kind of significance
and I destroyed them. This particular
book is called 'The Pornographer's Poem'
and it's by Michael Turner–I don't know,
he's a writer in Vancouver–and I won
this actually at a–at a fundraising
event and the Artspeak Gallery and he
signed it for me–but he did spell my
name wrong. [Scattered laughter] Oh–anyway, so after that was drowned I
thought what am I going to do with this
book–I dried all the books and I
still have many of them just kind of
bundled up and curled up and dried so you
can still read them–I think one of these
books was also an October magazine–
different theory and art writing–so I
thought I would just do–re-stage them as
a kind of an event–post event flurry
in a space which is also in that
building that I was throwing books out of–
So this is 'The Pornographer's Poem'–a
critique perhaps.
Unfortunately, for this artwork I cannot
find the original film so–to date–so I
have a photocopy scanned image of the–of
the centerfold of a catalogue of my work
and so it's a little hard to see because
the line down the middle is distracting
but this is going back to my interest in
the city and activities in the city and
expanding my interest in being a female
flâneur and flâneurs–and being a voyeur,
I guess, if there is such a term.
And so, I make these videos from my
rooftop in Vancouver looking into other
people's windows but I made them into
little tiny projections–again thinking
about book size and storytelling size
and made these stands and–where's my
little, there it is–okay, so there's a small
projector and glass and then a stand and
then there's these–you probably maybe
don't even remember these things but
these are VCRs.
So there are five of these and each one
with running a loop of an image that I
had taped from looking in windows
from my rooftop and–so this is an
example of one of the loops or one of
the images–it's still. Every so often in
the audio–the audio i remixed to mix
more street sounds–and every so often
you would hear a gasp [imitates gasp]
and then–then maybe later you might hear
nothing ever happens–so that was the
audio for these works. I can tell you
about things that I was reading at the
time but maybe you know it–I was reading
Michel de Certeau's 'The Practice of
Everyday Life' was a big influence on me
and probably still continues to this day.
These hang around in my brain for many
years–and yeah, so this was actually an
empty apartment
and–and I was looking–I had my
camera trained on it and nothing was
happening and suddenly this guy popped
up and he was a painter I guess, he was wearing
painting overalls and he went and took a
swig of a drink and then he went back
and disappeared again, so I did get one person.
This is actually another building
where interestingly there's a person
here and there's a person here, and
they're both cooking in the kitchen so
what these also reminded me of–in
particular this image here, are paintings
like Vermeer paintings or Dutch
paintings of interiors, they're about
light–of course they don't have the
detail but the kind of light and the
kind of mundane activity was interesting
to me–so that's the video. Okay, photography
and photography in painting–way back in
1995 I was in the US and on this
Mexico-Canada exchange, and I was
at Irvine University and if you ever
lived down there for a little while
you'll know that people drive around a
lot, so everybody who taught at UC
California, Irvine lived in Los
Angeles and they might also teach if
you're a sessional–you might also teach
somewhere like at Cal Arts which is like
way north and you drive way south so you
do a lot of freeway driving and I did
too because I always wanted–I was
staying in Irvine
but I always wanted to go to LA to see
shows and things. Anyway, so I–you know I
was kind of for many years I was
thinking about how can I do work
that's about driving that might interest
me and–in the meantime while I was there,
I rented a little airplane and we went
and flew around over Los Angeles and
the environment around Irvine–and I took
photographs. So, somehow it just came to
me like in 2008, [laughs] this is what I'm going
to do and these were based on this one
photograph I took of a mall near Irvine
which is actually a circular mall and–so
you can enter from anywhere and there's
all the–you know the shops, big-box
stores, and stuff and there are movie theatres
and stuff–but when photographed from the
air, of course, you get perspective and
the circle is not a circle it's an
ellipse–and another thing I did with
this image that I really liked was I
didn't get the whole mall in in one shot
so I thought I don't care, I'm going to
finish the mall off by using the end of one–
of one end and reversing it upside
down and sticking it on to the other end
so the photograph is actually
altered also, and I kind of altered it
some more–there was one building that
had a swimming pool on the top on the roof
and so I kind of multiplied that a few
times and so–if you do end up looking at
the photo while you're looking at the
piece you will see these quirky things.
So these are steel ellipses and so the
photographs are
mounted on these and then these other
ellipses I painted by spray-painting car
paint on them.
I made an edition–two editions actually–
this one is the black and white edition
so it's kind of a Silver City edition so
it has colours that are you know car
colours–silver colour, black, kind of maybe
brownish gray, things like that–so, this
was the Silver City one. After that I
thought I want to paint more but I don't
want to paint with car paint because I
nearly killed my assistant and I didn't
want his mother to find out what kind of
work he was doing for me even though he
doesn't–didn't care–so I thought
well I'm gonna paint but where do I
paint like what do I do and I thought I'm
going to go back to those labyrinths and
test them out–make them 3d, so I did that and I
made a bunch of paintings that nobody's
really ever going to see except when I
do talks. [Laughs] They're oil on linen, they're about
3 feet and I kind of use this
axonometric perspective to bump up the–
the labyrinth so there was another
spatial element there–and also the–they
were dysfunctional labyrinths so this is
probably maybe one of the more
functional ones but sometimes I chopped
off the edges and made them really
ambiguous in terms of the suggested real
space.
Then, I made these works which were shown
Leo Kamen, and they're tiny works,
they're collages and again you can see the
relationship between these works and the–
the ellipse–the exploded ellipse.
These were photographs that I took in 1997 and
I was playing–I had a stereo camera and
my brother gave it to me to use while I
was in Paris at the artist residency
there and so I went around with this
camera not exactly knowing what I wanted
to do and found myself at the new
library–it's the national library there,
and it had a really interesting–has
really interesting modernist
architecture–it has these towers that
are meant to look–remind you of books at
each end and then in the middle there's
a large wooden Plaza–so I looked at
these I thought aha books. So I use these
as the basis to make these–again,
thinking about the 3D-ness of the–of
the labyrinth I kind of use the stereo
image to make a puzzling photographic
image. So this is–again, these are metal
and they actually hang on the wall with
magnets. [Whispers] I'll go fast. [Laughs]
I should hand out free coffees for my
talks. [Clears throat] So, here's another one and–
yeah, so they're collaged, so there's one
form that's this shape and then there's
aluminium form glued on and then these
forms are glued on each separately and
painted separately so it's a–it's a
physical collage and steel. And I don't
know–you know, I really don't know how
readable these images are if you don't
know what they are but the one thing is
there's two book images happening here–
this looks like the centerfold of two
pages being open and then these are
repeating kind of book images here that
are a modernist version of the book and
this suggests another kind of
architecture. The subjectivity that I was
interested in earlier where I was
interested in inserting my voice or
talking about the female flâneur or flâneurs–
is I thought replaced or put back in
with the brushstroke of the painting so
I was happy with that being the physical
presence. Now, that's quite ambiguous
because if you are interested in gender
in painting, it's really a masculine
gesture historically but I realized that
it's not going to become feminine
gesture of empowerment and less women
keep painting, so there you go.
Then I thought well to hell with imagery
at all and I'm going to make these
shaped steel paintings that are
monochromes and that still have some
relationship to the idea of the city, so
boundaries was interesting to me and
these are probably–this one's about
3 feet–roughly 3 feet around and
again they hung on the wall with magnets.
This is a smaller one and I did some in
wood–I made wood–small studies too so
this one–actually I named them after
suburban kinds of things so this is
called "Crazy about the new spring fashions"
–this is called "Shade parking", this is
called "Golf on Rodeo Drive."
Okay, jumping back to a new moment–or forward
to a new moment–I was also–I read a lot
and I like to think about feminine
subjectivity in many different ways
other than just painting and photography
and I was interested in trying to do a
video about this notion of talking to
oneself in one's head, so I don't know
how many of you have these conversations
with yourself–on different levels, some
are quite overt. For instance, if you like–
my friend Michelle Gay, who's working on
the computer at home while I'm staying
with her as her host–she's my host–she
talks to herself all the time on the
computer and I think she's talking to me
but she's not–she has big problems that
she has to voice them out loud but
that's kind of like inner thinking, but
then there's inner-inner thinking where
it's not so articulate, you're kind of in
conversation with yourself almost
unconsciously. It so happened that a
friend of mine, Lisa Robertson–poet–who
now lives in France was also thinking
about the same thing
and we decided we would collaborate on a
work and we invited–Natalie Stevens, also
known as Nathaniel to join us and be the
poet and the listener–and we made this
video. So Lisa wrote a script for this
and I retreated–I was going to write
something actually for a couple of years,
I was trying to write this and I was too
bored with my own writing and I thought
maybe I'll ask somebody who's a good
writer to do it and that was Lisa.
So, maybe I'll just read from my notes here–
I've been interested in urbanism,
feminist subjectivity, the everyday
rupture, abstract form, poetry, and inner
thought, so
it is inner thought which produces the
exterior voices in my earlier work so
when I inserted subjective text, those
are inner thoughts–they're not kind of
asking you for a response. Inner thought
needs a critical look as Carol Becker
says in her essay on micro utopias. Now
many artists fear that the world has
become too interior focused and that
private space and identity are all there
is, even in the public arena. Most
significantly those personal issues are
rarely linked to the greater social
context that could help frame them,
isolate their origins, and catalyze their
resolutions.
So I wanted to re-look at thought, the
activity of the thinking that goes on
while thinking or doing something else
in a critical way. So I worked in
collaboration with two poets–Lisa
Robertson, which is here–she's there, and
Nathaniel Stevens–here. I played the
shadow character, I kind of turn up in
the mirror–this mirror every now and
then, and we did it as part of the media
residency at the Western Front in
Vancouver. So here's another still–
I hired a photographer too and the
photographer just traipsed around the
whole time during the video and you
could hear the click of the camera and
the feet going and then he'd pop in
every now and then to get a closer shot
so he was kind of another, you know–a
Brechtian kind of moment or part of the
video. And in the back I projected
this film which Lisa introduced me to–
this French filmmaker called
Jean-Claude Rousseau–I don't know if you've
ever heard of him, John. He's a wonderful
filmmaker, he makes beautiful, beautiful,
beautiful–achingly beautiful films–so this
is from a film "Jeune femme à sa fenêtre
lisant une lettre" which–excuse my pronunciation–
so it's based on the idea of a Vermeer
painting but the camera is just so
gorgeously–the camera more listens than
watches and it moves around and listens
to the interiors and the exterior, the
window et cetera–it was made in–in the
early–mid '80s.
In my mind this video was about painting
and how inner thought is like a cog that
moves the paint. Carol Becker also says
"art is often a kind of dreaming the
world into being, a transmutation of
thought into material reality, and an
affirmation that the physical world
begins in the incorporeal in ideas"
–incorporeal. So this is–this is the text–
another text that Lisa wrote
in relation to this and it's called "The
Setting." I'm just showing you a scan of
the–where it was printed in the catalog, and
it's written interestingly where she's
looking at different paintings in the
national–in–what would be called, the
National Gallery in London?–and–and she
was looking at how the descriptions of
the paintings–the title cards–and she
was copying them, and so basically her
poem is almost a direct copying out of
those description cards, and it becomes
like an assemblage of beautiful images
that are all about 17th century
paintings about society so I was very
influenced by that. I won't read it out,
you can maybe just glance at it for a
bit, it's just too much reading–but this
painting–this painting explores
different degrees of fear and those
things are you know very evocative–
and–yeah, so because I teach painting and
I don't teach painting a lot in my SFU
program, we have a very condensed program
and we have one painting class that
somebody can take twice so basically you
come out of our undergraduate program
with the ability to do everything and
almost nothing–but really smart people–
and we have people going to or just
graduating from NYU and people
graduating from Oslo Art School and
Piet Zwart–so it's not like we don't
educate them, it's just they don't get
like a good technology education, they
get grounded and everything. Anyway, so
for this painting class I thought okay
I'm just going to hand out–I'm going to
write descriptions of paintings and just
hand them out. This was my abstract
painting section and so I wrote
descriptions of very abstract paintings
and I got a lot of the images I was
writing about from Roald Nasgaard's book
on abstract painting in Canada so I
chose those paintings that seem like
they'd be easy to write about so that
you could imagine what I was–you know,
the work from me writing about it and
you can make a work. I forgot that-
you know–why could I forget this, how?–
that students are so smart that they can
actually find some of these things
online even though it seems anonymous
so–checking for updates–
Um, [laughs] workin' in the background–but anyway
not too many people did that but some
did
unfortunately. So I kind of–I kind of
thought of it as a kind of Coles Notes
version of how to learn abstract painting.
I wrote 20 descriptions, handed them out
and got a bunch of paintings made, and
unfortunately I don't have images of
them–I didn't get permission from my
students so I won't be able to show
you them yet–but this particular
description is of Elizabeth McIntosh
painting so–I got a very strange
interpretation of this, and it was–made
an interesting painting so you get
interesting renditions of other people's
paintings. And so, while I was reading
about these paintings I couldn't–you
know, I couldn't help looking–reading, as
well looking at them in this book, I–I
realize that I was very attracted to how
abstraction was written and–
Roald Nasgaard has written a very useful
book going over historically
and also regionally in terms of abstract
painting and–and he–he loves painting so
he's really into making these sensuous
descriptions of trying to evoke what it
feels like to stand in front of one of
these paintings and look at it. So here's
an example of his writing, "Deep eruptive
textures were created by dragging
saw blades
across the surface, paint was pulled into
ridges and smudged into crevices"–anybody,
who is that
'Ewen,' does anybody know?
He's like an Ontario guy. [Laughs]
Paterson Ewen–okay, here's another
page and my underlining–so you can see
I've been influenced a lot by thinking
along with Lisa Robertson about you know
what–how painting is written about and
she was interested in society–
high society paintings from the 17th
century and I was, you know, suddenly
interested in abstract painting.
The painting we see part of on the left is
by Douglas Haynes and called "Bonzo's
Last Stand" 1978. The text that I've
scribbled on is actually by Harold
Feist–so shapes flutter and dance–I
don't know, I think it's great writing,
it's very poetic. I also wanted to kind
of get you–to let you know that all
throughout my adult–even young adult
life–I've been interested in poetry and
was very influenced early on by this
poet called Carmina Archilochi(key) or
Archilochi(kai)–I'm not exactly sure how you
pronounce that–"The Fragments of Archilochos"
and they're fragments of survive–
surviving fragments of
Greek poetry and–so you get these texts
and shape things that–you get text–you
kind of get an idea boiled down to just
fragments that were there before.
He's the earliest known Greek author to
compose almost entirely on the theme of
his own emotions and experiences so
again, I didn't know this when I was, you
know, 16 years old but it makes sense now
reading that–that it's influenced me all
my life. He lived around 480 BC.
One author calls his remaining poems "table
scraps" which actually was the name I
wanted to give
to my cat but I wasn't allowed to buy my
husband. So here's a–you know, scan of
one of the–of two pages of the book and you
can see these very evocative things
happening, "In copulating one discovers that."
And somehow they become really meaningful.
"I knocked him out the door with the
vine-stump-cudgel." And to put them in
perspective I also–being a student at
NSCAD, I was very influenced by the work
of Lawrence Weiner who is–who's an
artist–have you guys learned about him in any
of your classes? He's an artist that
paints mostly on the wall–he doesn't paint–
it's actually stencilled or now it's
actually a linotype, et cetera–but his artworks
are statements and words–and I have a
deeper understanding of modernist
sculpture because of him amazingly–
He came and did a talk at Emily Carr many
years ago and I was pretty young then
also–not a–I was a graduate student at the time–
and he said that modernist sculpture is
about moving one thing from one place to
another place and I thought about that
for many years and the more I've seen a
modernist sculpture, the thing–more I
understand about art
in the 20th century and the language
that the kind of paradigm that I'm still
living in within. So, this is an
interesting example of his work written
on a brick wall–"One quart exterior green
industrial enamel thrown on a brick wall"
–so that's an example of one of his
statements and they're almost like
instructions for works so you can do it
yourself
and that I guess had influenced me in
terms of making those square paintings
with instructions that went along with
them.
So, I–it just–I'm also–over time I've been
interested in the tone of language of
the everyday, the cryptic bits of text
that one picks up walking past people in
conversation, shortcuts in saying things,
and the drawl, prosaic being ordinary or
unimaginative, the dull, the mundane.
This photograph is by Richard Landry and it's
a text from an artist book Lawrence
Weiner that I happen to have in my
collection. Another influence was this
book–and actually it wasn't the book, it
was–I went to a reading by Auden–
the poet W.H. Auden in 1971 in Manchester,
England where I started University at
University of Manchester.
He came and did a reading and I was
extremely influenced by this–these short
poems and it's–it's from a–they were from a
book that was recently published or
about to be published called "Academic
Graffiti" and
I memorized this poem–and that's about
the only thing I've memorized in my life
that stayed with me–even though we
had to memorize a sonnet by Shakespeare
every week in high school, I only know
this poem–so "John Milton never stayed in
a Hilton Hotel"–oops–
"which was just as well" and–there's
another subtext to why I like this–just a
quick subtext–when I was in high school
I went to Rome–I lived in Rome and one
of the classes I took was on City
Planning–the history of City Planning
in Rome and we would have to walk around
Rome and look at a 17th century map and
do some explorations and write some
papers on some buildings or avenues and
there was always like 6th, 5th tore up part
of Rome to make pilgrimage routes and–in
the 17th century–late 17th century, and
always at the end of every street where
it landed at the church you were supposed
to go to, there was an obelisk so that
you knew–it was kind of like a compass
handle–this is–you're going in the right
direction. So, there was one street in Rome
though that–it was actually built
before that in the Renaissance and if
you stood at one end and looked at the
other end you could see up on the hill–
on the other side of Rome–you could see
the Hilton Hotel and–I liked that.
There was no obelisk.
Here's another one, "Good Queen Victoria
in a fit of euphoria commanded Disraeli
to blow up the Old Bailey."
My other influence is Christopher Wool–this
work I have a poster of that hangs up at
home, I read it every day–it still takes
me a while to figure out what the next
word is going to be. I like that it slows
down reading and I think it is a sad
piece in a way. It reads, "The show is
over the audience gets up to leave–to
leave–their seats time–
time to collect their coats and go home
they turn around no more coats and no
more home." I think it's just a beautiful
beautiful piece–so it's enamel paint on
aluminium and you can–this one exhibition
I was in–in Europe and I picked it up and I'm
glad I have this–it was–they were take away–
really big poster. Also things that I
find are interesting to me–this is a
little list that I picked up off the
street near me–floral dress, Hunter boots,
chartreuse scarf, aqua cardigan, grey heart
cardigan–this is colour–this is
somebody–I don't know if this is what
somebody wants to wear one day or what
but it's short, poetic, and every day.
So then I–this kind of influence–this
painting called "Slap Chartreuse" and it
reads "tinged with crimson crazy
eye-popping viscous orange flux" so some
words that I find lying around
chartreuse turn up again in other works.
I also want to say that some of my
influences come from students and these
are two works by a graduate student that
I had called Anna-Marie Repstock and
she had an undergraduate degree in
English and was doing this graduate work–
English and then an undergraduate–she had
two undergraduate degrees, one in–a BFA
in painting and then she came to study
with me because somebody told her I worked
with text and these are two paintings
that she made and she was–she's a very
very bright person and we have amazing
discussions about poetry, text and
painting. So she has a very strange style, it's
very eccentric and–but I choose to
support it even though I don't know
where it fits in painting land but this
is–these are kind of channels that she
makes
and then the paint kind of builds up on
the sides of the channels and it's kind
of like–it's like a picture of what
paint does when you just make a stroke
and you don't care about the edges so
she was working with that idea and
enhancing it. So this says "OH" and the
other one says "Sundown."
And these are some images to kind of
give you a sense of the show that I did
at Katzman Kamen gallery in February
and I think people who came to the
opening should all be given medals
because the weather– [laughs] I've never been in
such weather–yes, so it was snowing heavily
all day and then it switched to rain and
then there was thunder and lightning–
delightful weather in Toronto. So these
paintings–again, so what they're doing is–
I'm taking these sections out of the
Roald Nasgaard work and I've um–
reshaped–I've remade–I've made them into
my–I've made my own word compositions
and stuffed them into difficult shapes as
part of a canvas space so you can see I
have all sorts, we'll look at those and
probably this one was the first one, "What
a furore"–I don't know how to pronounce
that word–"What a furore what passion in
these irregular lines" and this one is
"Ice slick green slapped over and over
hot magenta so flat." I wanted to use really
heightened colour because I'm not so good
with being subtle with colour but as you
can see I'm trying to teach myself that
later on–recently I've been trying to do that.
And I really thought the
brushstroke was really important so I
kind of heightened that and I had a big
conundrum about text whether I should do
vinyl design–vinyl text so it looked
kind of corporate or whether I should
use hand done text and is hand done text
too hokey–anyway, I went with the handwritten
text–its hokey–but it has passion. [Laughs]
Then I–yeah so I started switching up
whether it should be straight up and
down or not
this is "Ochre chrome ochre ultramarine
all patchy." This one we already read–
I wanted to you know–you know, when you
write text you kind of want to maybe
make it readable on the canvas so I
wanted to play around with the fact that
it's going to make it hard to read
because this is painting I can do–you
know, I can make painting make the text
so it's kind of interested in that.
"Black black indigo dot dot dot dot–dot"
maybe–so you can see that my interest in
these kind of shapes, the containment
–senses of containment that I get from
thinking about city, thinking about city
blocks and routes, and place I'm using as
abstract forms inside an abstract
painting so they reference abstract painting.
So, "Blue there and ox blood sweep and flow."
Another installation view–there was two–
four small paintings and I have to
say, Maryanne, I'm sorry to say this but I
didn't really like this installation of
these two works together but it was
something that she liked and we kind of
left it like that.
So, "As lead white cut here and there
fast with azure"–or how we pronounce that, I don't know.
"Slam down squill blue mustard mustard
violet." "–Drip ripped ground splat pink and
broad wide lavender" and "Not chaos just
daub daub void daub void daub
lumpy and true"–this is kind of a
comment on me painting. These paintings
are about four by five feet and this one
kind of abbreviated cut off before it
finishes "And space a line of colour a
slip slipping of dragged over–dragged O."
Anyway, so I kept–these are
recent works–just a couple of them to
show you what's happening in my recent
work that I'm trying to do a couple of
different things with painting and
really thinking about following the
paint and seeing what the paint does
with the text as more letting that take
precedence and discovering that way and
I'm working now–as a kind of a
painter-painter–it's not–I'm not sure
what's going to come out of each
painting. This is what came out of this
painting–oh yeah, I should also say that
I wanted to make a series of paintings
about Sigmar Polke and I liked the idea
of making paintings about him because
he's kind of the ultimate painter, the
magician–people refer to him as the
magician–and what's it called when you
make gold out of base metals–alchemy–
he's an alchemist! And so he's kind of a
iconic painter because all painters are
alchemists, scientists–
but scientists of magic. So I did a lot
of reading and–and then I did a lot of
writing and–but not much writing came
out of it and I didn't–there was just
too much writing to make an interesting
painting so I kind of cut back and
somehow this word came out of that–first
painting was this and you can see that
I have some overpainted text like–and
these were–this is a list of items in
his work so "Gun bullet flower ghost
cloud" and "irritable"–I don't know who's
irritable, me or him–but, he's no longer
alive but recent–recent contemporary painter–
recently contemporary. This is another
one and I've been experimenting with
layers of text so–sorry, layers of
paint–so you can see through it a little bit.
This emerged out of a whole bunch of
other text and down here there was
spittle and I didn't like that so–but
it sort of is there still and "bile" is
another word that comes–somehow emerged–
came out of reading Sigmar Polke, so
it came from one of the texts–it's a
quote–it's a word that came out of the
actual text that somebody was writing
about him. And another one, "dub"–so again
there's a whole other phrase–a
whole other sentence underneath that got
broken up and exists as a kind of ghost
underneath so these are the three most
recent works that I have.
That's it.
Oh, and that's a painting by Peter Doig–I know
now. [Laughs] Is that the whole painting or is that cropped? >>Audience: It's detail. >>Allyson Clay: Detail, yeah I thought so.
So, does anybody have any questions?
>>Audience: You introduced yourself as a recovering conceptualist, from Nova Scotia School of Art and Design but your work is also
concerned with beauty, it looks like–is that a conflict within you or is that something you've always kind of embraced?
Or do you think you would have been an abstract expressionist had you not got into NSCAD?
>>Allyson Clay: Possibly–latter. I–I found no trouble
understanding beauty in conceptual art–
it just wasn't particularly about
paint. So, for instance, the–wall
works by Lawrence Weiner were beautiful
to me and–so I never found any trouble
with that–but it was a split between
making paintings and figuring out how to
tie that back into my interest
in conceptual–my respect for it, I guess–
my love of it–really I would have loved
to have had a conceptual painter teach
me but in–when I was at NSCAD the
painting department was practically
empty of people–empty of students and
there were only a couple of faculty–John
Clark was one of the faculty members–he
passed away a few years after that–and
–but I don't know, I had trouble
articulating what my needs were as a
painter
so I didn't really know what I wanted
when I was a young student, um–yeah, so I
coasted along–but that's a good question. [Scattered laughing]
>>Audience: Would you now consider showing your
labyrinth paintings that were sort of–
approached the subjectivity of
your more recent work? >>Allyson Clay: Do you mean the 3D ones? The
axonometric– >>Audience: Yeah. >>Allyson Clay: –perspective? Well, if
somebody was interested in showing them,
sure. Nobody's seen them, so–
>>Audience: You–you didn't show them because you
were uncertain? >>Allyson Clay: No no no no– >>Audience: Okay. >>Allyson Clay: There's
kind of dead space around them, that's all.
>>Audience: This has been a question I've had for a
number of years–in Vancouver there's a
great interest in monochromes, and I wondered if you
could illuminate me on that–
>>Allyson Clay: Conceptual art–I guess people are
afraid to paint over there and are you
thinking about anybody in particular or
any works? >>Audience: You know, a number of people
make reference to their interest in monochromes– >>Allyson Clay: Uh-huh, huh–
David Maclean used to talk a lot about–
the monochrome–he has these words for my
paintings, like he–the new paintings he
calls them–what does he call them–hostage–you know
when you send a note that–a hostage
text– >>Audience: Ransom. >>Allyson Clay: –A ransom note! He calls it ransom
note printing–anyway, yeah I learned
about the monochrome I think from David.
The monochrome is like the ultimate
conceptual painting, so that's where the
two things reconcile I guess–but the
monochrome in Vancouver–it's funny
because there's a show about the
monochrome at the Helen Pitt Gallery and
these guys are talking about it in
relation to neo-liberal culture and
money and grey–the greyness of the business
world, money et cetera–so I didn't get to see
that show yet but I was kind of interested
in that–but yeah, I don't know–right
now we have so many painters that
somehow–I don't know how they emerged–
but there's no monochromes
that I can remember. There's a very
interesting set of paintings by Neil
Wedman–I don't know if anybody knows Neil Wedman's
work but he made these–he paints in
black and white a lot–mostly–monochrome
we would call them and–but he's always
figurative and also always kind of
thinking about the graphic art–like
graphic novels and stuff–he did a
series of paintings that are about UFOs
and they're–they're grey paintings–
vertical grey paintings and they make
you think of her Gerhard Richter but you can–
if you look hard you can see a little
UFO floating–they all basically
become atmospheric so then you realize
that the grey is an atmosphere and
somewhere in that atmosphere there's a
hovering UFO–so they're very interesting
comments on monochromes and I thought
they're pretty funny but–maybe also in
Wallace's work–yeah.
>>Audience: Yeah, he's kind of the father– >>Allyson Clay: –yeah yeah yeah yeah–
>>Audience: –there's no further– >>Allyson Clay: No–he's afraid to–yeah, I think
that's the only way he introduces–yeah
the monochrome as–or painting in his
work is the monochrome [clears throat] yeah maybe that's–
because he has such a fatherly presence
in our city.
>>Host: Okay, well thank you very much Allyson. >>Allyson Clay: Thank you all. [Applause]
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