We are all familiar with the concept of tearing someone, something, down in order to build it back up again.
It applies to the military's psychological programming of soldiers and it applies to home renovations. You get what you want by removing the tainted stuff and rebuilding with fresh material.
Rob Dyson, being an artist with both a mechanical aptitude and an intuitive mind, has reverse-engineered this concept. He has built things that put fresh, constructive things in place by reframing the materials already in use. Forces, redirected, can be used against themselves. He calls this pushing and pulling of internal forces ContraStructural.
Dyson's paradoxes are best described by his most common art material, canvas. That's a painter's medium but Dyson is not a painter. He sculpts with it. Furthermore, canvas is typically used as a solid, flat surface, but Dyson uses it to appear crumpled, wind-blown, even liquified. It's almost magical what Dyson has on display at the Two Rivers Gallery.
"His exhibition has a lot more going on than what meets the eye, at first glance," said the gallery's chief curator George Harris. "It plays around a lot with structures. There's an emphasis put on tension and the idea of barely holding things together, opposing forces being pressed together or pulled apart. It's a metaphor for the world we're living in and what's on the precipice of what's about to give way or about to let go, or the strain of things. That's what I think, anyway. He might disagree and say they're just paintings that are having their fun."
Dyson certainly had his own fun with the titles. One is called Sailing On The Sea If I Care. Another is The Red & Blue One. But just when you think it's all irreverent and comical, you get set back on your heels by The Skin Of An Artist which depicts a flap of canvas hung inside a frame wooden frame by a handful of industrial hooks.
The canvas bears an odd, unmistakable resemblance to human skin. The hook at the bottom cradles a clutch of the canvas like a loving hand but at the top, the canvas is pierced by hooks and hangs grotesquely from those harsh metal fingers.
"It's a collision of circumstances similar in my mind to The Pieta (Michelangelo's masterpiece sculpture in St. Peter's Basilica)," Dyson said.
"There you have this truly lovely Christ figure in the beautiful, loving embrace of his mother, but then knowing it's all because he's suffered this horrible torture."
About those harsh metal fingers: actually, they aren't metal at all. There is a lot of iron and steel implied in this exhibition, but close examination reveals it is almost all wood, cardboard or PVC pipe. The artful deception is part of the structure of the point.
"There's a fakery here," he said, with a mischievous grin. "The pencils aren't real pencils, I made them all. The knives aren't real knives, I made those, too. The pulleys, the clamps... It's what I do, as an artist. You could farm out all the constituent components, but for me the whole point is that it's made to look like something but it's not that thing at all. My hand is in all of it, even though it can get really tedious - 'I wish I didn't have to make 120 bolts today when I could just go buy 120 bolts' - but the finished work more than makes up for it."
The gallery room is circumnavigated by these large-scale art structures that each tell a story of appearances being more than what you first perceive, the materials being different stuff than how it looks, and everything being a to-and-fro of natural and fabricated all colliding to form something perhaps strange to the eye but also something interesting and even beautiful.
Each is puzzling, like the one entitled Maintainers & Manipulators that depicts a set of wide-jaw clamps holding a sheet of canvas within a picture frame. Where the clamps are in place, the canvas is gripped flat and tight as a drum skin, but where there are no clamps the canvas us askew and rumpled over a chunk of raw, jagged wood.
"The clamps are holding the canvas and also the frame itself in it's rigid composition. They are the lynchpin, the ContraStructural centre of the piece. The clamps look like they are mass-manufactured. They have a familiarity like you could walk into any hardware store and buy them off the shelf, but then you also can't shake the knowing that they aren't quite right, not quite real," Dyson explained.
"That is the heart of the ContraStructural meaning," he added.
"A hand and a foot are similar in nature, aren't they? But not the same at all. A hand and a pair of pliers look similar in nature, but yet when you look at it in detail they are not the same thing at all. There's that metaphor exercise in this, where things appear to be one thing but they are not, but they are unmistakably similar."
If all you do is walk into the gallery and walk quickly around the exhibition ring, you take away the sense of the surreal and the sense of mechanical inspiration that comes from freezing cloth in time or conjoining unrelated components into a new thing. That's enough to appreciate Dyson's skills.
If you take the extra time to close in and stare awhile, assessing the pieces that compose each work of art, the appreciation erupts. Harris felt this when Dyson called him to visit his Prince George art studio. He invited the curator over as a consultant, to pick Harris's trained brain about what he might do with the small handful of pieces he had already created in this series. Harris told him to carry on with it and the Two Rivers Gallery would host them all (plus three pieces by Dyson already held in their permanent collection) in a full exhibition. That's how ContraStructural went from weak flicker to fully engulfed in Dyson's daily endeavours.
The exhibition officially opens tonight with a reception and artist's talk at the Two Rivers Gallery at 7:30 p.m. It will be on display until Oct. 7.
ContraStructural opens in the facility's Canfor South gallery space at the same time as Quebec artist Dan Brault opens his show Atomic Love in the Canfor North gallery.
Both artists will be there in person at this free public event.
