douglas coupland’s atelier

19Jun09

A wall of flattened Andy Warhol wigs faces off against a wall of mutilated Marilyn screenprints. On a table in between, children’s blocks stacked atop Barrel Of Monkeys barrels form totems of words and phrases mom would have washed your mouth out for building. And Bill Gates is the referee, reproduced and multiplied in screenprints on the sidelines.

This is a glimpse into Douglas Coupland’s “Atelier”. There are aged checkerboards and bingo games from a bygone era scattered on the floor amidst fallout shelter signage, ripped posters advertising Rush and Ace Frehley shows and a battered photo of Mao Tse-tung. Standing in the exhibit space at Clark & Faria Gallery I was filled all at once with a melancholy sort of nostalgia, a cheerful amusement in the present and a cautious optimism about the future. Doug’s got a curious knack for creating the futuristic out of past and present objects. He examines our current version of “modern” by nodding to past versions and utilizing, as Warhol did, everyday objects to draw us in. Not only do we identify with googly-eyes, banana stickers, cigarette tinfoil and corporate branding logos; but seeing them used to deface iconic images in a colourful and whimsical artistic sort of vandalism…well, it almost tugs at the heartstrings.

In the front room, there’s a more sombre tone (though Doug’s version of sombre is technicolour), with highschool yearbook faces (a subject Doug revisits often in both his writing and his artwork) “melting” into colourful acrylic makeup mishaps; more children’s blocks mounted on the wall forming the phrase “time is the fire in which we burn”, and an abstract installation piece involving coloured pencils lined up and encased in acrylic boxes to form horizontal and vertical “barcodes”.

Douglas Coupland: Atelier is on at the Clark & Faria Gallery in Toronto’s Distillery Historic District until July 26th. Check it out. I may see you there, as I’ll be returning a few times. There’s a terrific energy in that space.

It seems to make Doug pretty happy.

(All photos © me. More images will be added to my Flickr set here.)

Filed under: art, canada, photography, toronto, ©kat   |  4 Comments
Tags: andy warhol, canada, clark & faria gallery, distillery historic district, douglas coupland, ontario, toronto, warholesque