There’s something innately nerve-wracking about a homecoming. You end up judging the who-you-were against the who-you-are-now, and hoping the disparities amount to a much-improved, but no-less-promising self. For these reasons, Emily Shanahan and Corina Kennedy’s live in the lost is an interesting experience.
The Warren G Flowers gallery exhibition brings the Dawson Fine Arts graduates back to their old haunting grounds for a chance to show their former faculty and present-day partners just what they’ve learned on their own since first having tentatively put brush to canvas almost a decade ago.
When Rover paid the artists a visit at their Belgo Building studio, time was very much the topic at hand, whether pertaining to the paintings, those good old student days or even the title of their show. “Broadly speaking, there’s this element of time that comes across,” Shanahan explains. “Living in the lost, you don’t really know what time you’re in.” Kennedy is quick to add that notions of “recasting characters” and “working with myths” also linked their two bodies of work together.
Shanahan’s largest painting, Cythera, plays with all these elements in an impressive, pistachio pudding-coloured party. The attendees? A pale group of statues, busts and horses, some standing on the grass, others drowning in the river. “I think statues are such a strange filter for us – they’re supposed to represent us, but they can’t move,” says Shanahan. “No one can help anybody, and no one can help themselves – it’s a staged limbo.”
Kennedy’s work is peppered with that same, sly sense of humour. 77 Yoko Ono Hair Pieces fills one wall of the gallery with tiny, window-like frames of black and white grouped in clusters. Yoko’s in there somewhere, but the expansive staging of the piece teases the viewer, forcing them to move back and forth and focus on one window at a time in order to really take in the presence of the titular icon. It’s like staring at a life-sized negative image of an apartment building façade – intriguing and disorienting.
Viewers’ eyes will then likely settle into two of Shanahan’s paintings on the opposite wall with their strong, central focal points and bold colours. “This series,” she explains of Green Cupid #4 and Purple Cupid #5, “was about not being lazy, and not letting something be undercooked. I had done one layer of swirl and thought: ‘I’m not going to touch it.’ Then I left it for an afternoon and thought: ‘It’s still bothering me. I know it’s going to look so much better if I do one more layer.’”
It’s that kind of blossoming artistic intuition that guides this fun and fascinating collection of paintings, watercolours and yes … confetti. When asked what goal they’d set for themselves after graduating from Concordia’s Studio Arts department with distinction and turning their gallery space, Room and Board, into a personal studio, Shanahan replies in earnest. “To try to shed some layers of bad student work, which I feel took me a year and half to get through … to make a lot of crappy paintings and try a lot of awkward styles and get somewhere that starts getting more interesting.” Nyx, perhaps more than any other piece, with its deceptively simple swirls of oil paint and sparkles evoking all the infinite mysteries of a star-filled sky, proves they’ve succeeded.
Meet Emily Shanahan and Corina Kennedy tonight during the vernissage for live in the lost, which runs at the Warren G Flowers Art Gallery in Dawson College until February 27th.
