solo exhibitions

2009 Johnston's Falls
2009 Radiant
2008 This old thing?
2007 All That Glitters…
2006 Tag (with Erin MacMillan)
2006 Talk Back
2006 Shoes
2004 Friday, February 13th, 2004
2001 - 02 Wish You Were Here...
2000 Bonjour, Je m’appelle Shelley Ouellet
1999 Marilyn
1999 Aviary
1997 - 99 Entomology
1997 Quilt
1995 Entomology
1994 Entomology
1994 Bunnies

group exhibitions

2005 Stride 20th Anniversary
2002 Alberta Biennial
2002 Art Throb
2002 ACAD Faculty Exhibition
2000 Coffee Break@instant coffee.com
1999 Light a Match
1996 Alberta Biennial
1996 Numbered Company
1995 Mysteries of the Flesh
1995 Copy

other diversions

2006 - 2008 Carpet 'N Toast Gallery
1996 - 2010 vanitygallery.com

Wish You Were Here...
Amy Gogarty

Shelley Ouellet relies on the kindness of strangers to carry out her large-scale projects, and what is remarkable is the degree to which total strangers become enthusiastic agents in the process. Workers consult scale drawings, adhere to rational plans and systematically convert masses of raw materials in finished works of art. Participating in these projects kindles the sort of undistracted pleasure one associates with doing puzzles, playing Bingo or even (surreptitiously, well out of sight of judgmental friends!) polishing off a paint-by-number or two. Allowing someone else to solve the technical and procedural problems adapts the “leave the driving to us” motto to creative activity. One is freed to concentrate frenetically on the task at hand, ensuring diligence and accuracy. As one passes filaments around rubbery insects or silver wires through plastic beads, one anticipates redeeming one’s labour, transfiguring the commonplace into the miraculous. Somewhere in the middle, one begins to suspect something rather more complicated and philosophically ambitious is afoot.

Shelley Ouellet’s “sculptures” (as she calls both her Entomology and bead curtain series) locate themselves in a shifting terrain defined by historically contradictory positions. Performance, conceptual art and exhibitions such as do it, curated for Independent Curators Incorporated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist (1993-4, currently touring), emphasize process, art-as-information or by-instruction to move beyond Modernist obsession with formal integrity and aesthetics. Countering the ironic, masculine bias of much conceptual work, feminist art celebrates ethics and community as it similarly aims to surpass the limits of Modernism. Challenging both, contemporary craft acknowledges material, process and hands-on-making as components essential to its practice. If these positions appeared irreconcilable ten to fifteen years ago, a new generation of technologically savvy, confident and ambitious young artists such as Ouellet are moving beyond conflict to produce works that resonate on multiple levels. Her practice engages the wit and intellectual frisson of conceptual art, the ethics of feminism and the attention to material and process found in contemporary craft.

Ouellet’s earlier projects ranged across these positions. The three-dimensional creepy-crawlies of Entomology, produced from thousands of carefully ordered rubber insects and exhibited throughout the 90s, alluded to natural history museums, science fiction thrillers and childhood fears of things that go bump in the night. Ouellet used computers to develop her insect models, which were assembled with the help of enthusiastic volunteers. Filaments visibly fixed the creatures, suggesting an ironic attitude towards the imputed “transparency” of technology. Diagrams and modular construction characterized early conceptual art, which often toyed with inscrutable humour. For example, Lawrence Weiner’s Two minutes of spray paint directly upon the floor from a standard aerosol spray can (1968) consisted of a set of written instructions, the realization of which mattered little to Weiner himself (Altshuler 26). Written instructions – or computer diagrams – might similarly substitute for Ouellet’s projects, but her exhibitions are a gifts to the communities who help actualize them, affording the pleasure of seeing the projects, which often incorporate elements of community development and social purpose. The philosophical implications of an eight by eight by eight foot bug assembled according to plan from similar rubber bugs might be analyzed, but such analysis misses the point. While the prospect of viewing a spot of spray paints provokes little excitement, viewing the completed insect elicits a sense of shared purpose and awe.

For the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art in 1996, Ouellet created a movie-screen image of Rita Hayworth from black and silver sequins. Another project for Latitude 53 in 1999 reproduced Marilyn Monroe’s studied glamour on Lite Brite boxes. The pixilated patterns and reflective surfaces mimicked the ephemeral nature of celebrity in a consumer-oriented world. Critiquing the more spurious aspects of media hype, Ouellet simultaneously paid tribute to the powerful attraction such divas have for ordinary viewers. That the tessellation functions as recognizable image acknowledges the power and appeal of the original. Transferring star status to works of art shifts the dynamics to a certain degree, particularly when those works are seminal landscapes of national identity. In the works presented here, nationalism, tourism and natural wonder compete to implicate viewers in a host of projected desires.

The bead curtains in this exhibition represent three significant geographies of Canada: the Saguenay River in Québec, Niagara Falls on the border between Ontario and New York State and Lake Louise, in Banff National Park, Alberta. Moving east to west, the images derive respectively from paintings by Lucious O’Brien (Sunrise on the Saguenay, 1880), Frederic Edwin Church (Niagara, 1857) and Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith (Morning at Lake Louise, 1889). While demonstrating different formal and technical approaches to their subjects, all three paintings epitomize the nineteenth century’s obsession with technology, industry and spectacle. The earliest work, Niagara, is by an American, who saw in the falls an emblematic covenant with the Almighty in support of Manifest Destiny. Reflecting religious sentiments more prominent in the early part of the century, Frederic Church conceived of new scientific discoveries of deep time, cataclysmic natural forces and the sublime awe of nature in terms of Divine Revelation. Ignoring the many marks of industry already harnessing the torrential force, Church produced an idealized icon for an American nation on the eve of its civil war.

The images of the natural world created by both O’Brien and Bell-Smith reflect the more tempered secular influences. Both men extolled the abundance of Canadian natural resources, providing publicity fodder for both the Canadian Pacific Railway and the young Canadian government. As editor for Picturesque Canada, O’Brien was sensitive to the appeal of spectacular scenery, and, as founding president of the Royal Canadian Academy, he entertained royalty and fellow artists from Europe and America. By 1880, when Sunrise on the Saguenay was painted, fur trading, pulp mills, mining operations and dams had decimated the river’s pristine state, yet O’Brien created a tranquil image of reflection and harmony with the natural world. Today, the Saguenay is one of the most polluted regions in Canada and a stronghold of Québec independence, environmental and political realities generally overlooked in nostalgic reproductions of the luminous work. Bell-Smith’s watercolour of Lake Louise was painted within seven years of the first sighting of the lake by a white man, and within five years of it being strategically renamed in honour of Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria. Almost as soon as this region of the Rocky Mountains was discovered, the Canadian Pacific Railway commandeered its spectacular beauty for commercial purposes, facilitating a steady stream of tourists well before the end of the century. Lake Louise is now known primarily as a destination for holiday-makers, its compelling charm long domesticated by postcards and souvenirs.

Transforming familiar images into monumental bead curtains involves a process referred to by Peter Dormer as the “workmanship of certainty,” a concept formulated to describe the function of designers in serial production (138-39). Certainty is contrasted to risk, the province of artists, who entertain the possibility of failure with each new work. In our culture, we romanticize the risk-taker yet depend on the designer. The designer envisions a product, investigates materials, produces and tests prototypes and organizes production so the others can readily perform it. Successful production depends on a system of distributed knowledge by which designers accesses specific skills and tools developed across a wide network of unrelated systems. Previously tested tools, models and systems manage risk to ensure that uniformity, predictability and certainty characterize the resulting product. In the commercial handicraft industry, the reasonable expectation of success ensures the popularity of designer kits with those not sufficiently confident of their own abilities. Although this often provokes disdain, such disdain reflects a form of class prejudice, overlooking the degree to which all of our lives are improved by the intelligent deployment of distributed knowledge.

Shelley Ouellet selects images for their practical history, resonance and visual impact. In the case of these landscapes, she has thoughtfully chosen those that open well to dialogue on national identity, tourism and our relationship to the natural world. Perceptual psychologists note the mind’s willingness to assign meaning to extremely abstract figures rendered in two or three contrasting values (Gombrich 40-41). The expectation of meaning enables us to recognize images created by needlework patterns, mosaics, photographs in newspapers or even bead curtains, and recognition is itself a form of interpretation. Through abstraction and exaggeration, the source is both aerated and targeted as an object of discourse. Assumed meanings once directed by the painted image towards an audience comprising uniform gender, class and ideology now play across a field of contested meanings. Through the slow, inexorable process of transforming the continuous surface of the painted image into a schematic pattern of black, white or crystal beads, both original and subsequent messages are redirected towards a broader, more diverse constituency.

Ouellet’s curtains orchestrate on a grand scale much of what Colette Whiten’s embroideries of the 1980s achieved through the diminutive. Such comparisons invite questions of proportion, identification, intelligibility and media. As noted by Elke Town, meaning in Whiten’s work derived from her determined rendering of the most ubiquitous, degraded yet ideologically charged of images – newspaper photographs of politicians, conflicts and sporting events – into the least-regarded and most-gendered of media, needlepoint. Countering the pervasive and impersonal with the private and obsessive, Whiten’s subversions operate through distance, translation and process. Ouellet’s source images occupy the far extreme on the value scale. As historical paintings, their status, desirability and worthiness appear self-evident, yet, as with Whitens reworking of newspaper images, on re-presentation fully discloses the ideological nature of those values. The curtains ironically reproduce the grandiose aspirations of their models through a medium associated with women’s hobby-craft, and in the process, the nexus of power is shifted. If minute scale positioned Whiten’s embroideries on the threshold of visibility, exaggerated scale threatens the legibility of Ouellet’s images. In both cases, the struggle to register and interpret the schema disrupts its mindless consumption.

One notable attribute of distributed knowledge is that untrained individuals are inclined to use distributed tools in a limited, predictable manner, exactly as their designers envisioned. However, in the hands of an artist, who brings tacit knowledge of materials and vision to their use, tools or systems may be altered to perform in innovative, unanticipated ways. It is through this process of artists interacting with found tools and systems of knowledge that new and creative forms are realized. Exploiting the advantages of certainty, Ouellet uses widely available systems, technologies and materials but directs them to new forms. As an artist, she transforms expected outcomes through risk, which enters in the form of others contributing to the production and interpretation of the work. Power is shared and negotiated through codes based on respect, community and a desire to make something beautiful, monumental and significant. The mutual activity transforms mass-produced materials into shimmering spectacles that belie their origin in unprepossessing components. Shelley Ouellet’s productions move across conventional definitions of sculpture, performance, design and craft to suggest positive ways in which art can truly begin to transform the world.

Amy Gogarty, 2002

Works cited:

Altshuler, Bruce. “Art by Instruction and the Pre-History of do it” do it. New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1997. 20-32.

Dormer, Peter. “Craft and the Turing Test for practical thinking.” Ed. Peter Dormer. The Culture of Craft. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. 137-157.

Gombrich, E.H. Art and Illusion: A study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960. Seventh Printing, 1984.

Town, Elke. “Prince Charming and the Associated Press: The Needlepoint Work of Colette Whiten.” Eds. Jessica Bradley and Lesley Johnstone. Sightlines: Reading Contemporary Canadian Art. Montréal: Artexte, 1994. 342-353.

List:

3 sculptures
366 strands of beads per sculpture
180 beads per strand
197,640 beads
2,196 bead caps
16,470 feet of silver wire
68 plus volunteer beaders

Source Paintings:

Frederic Edwin Church
(American, 1826 – 1900)
Niagara, 1857

Lucius O’Brien
(Canadian, 1832 – 1899)
Sunrise on the Saguenay, 1880

Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith
(Canadian, 1846 – 1923)
Morning at Lake Louise, 1889

Amy Gogarty

Lived and worked in Calgary and now resides in Vancouver. Her work has been exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions, including Dreamy: Landscapes and Simulations (Art City 2001); the 2000 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art; Montréal/Calgary Exchange (Circa Gallery, Montréal, 1998) and ...Swan & Plenty (Truck Gallery, Calgary, 1997). Gogarty's exhibition l'arbre de Diderot was the inaugural Series exhibition in 1999. Amy Gogarty has written numerous reviews and essays published in Canada and abroad. She was Head of Liberal Studies at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary.

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Wish You Were Here...