Jessica Bell at Central Art Garage featured in Ottawa Report, Canadian Art
Jessica Bell, “Fits and Starts” (installation view), 2017. Courtesy Central Art Garage. Photo: Julia Martin.
Canadian Art
Ottawa Report: New Romantics, Old Punks
REVIEWS / MAY 24, 2017
From a survey of early intersectional videos to a series of new fabric sculptures meant to be touched, Ottawa is showing both its tough and tender sides.
Excerpt of article:
Around the corner, you’ll find the Central Art Garage, a converted mechanic’s shop just off Lebreton Street North. When I stopped in to see Jessica Bell’s new solo exhibition, “Fits and Starts,” which runs until May 26, the gallery director, Danny Hussey, was clearing a shipment of wood off the gallery floor. (He runs a frame shop in the back.) A parade of unstretched muslin graced the wall behind him, bearing crisp, flat rectangles of colour on both sides—blue-black, peppermint grey, orange-ochre, vermilion.
Since receiving her MFA from the University of Ottawa a couple years ago, the Vancouver-based Bell has been steadily unravelling the pretense that surrounds the art of painting. She’s worked on both sides of the canvas, has done away with stretchers and has laundered, folded, quilted, stitched, inflated—even made rugs from—her paintings. In “Fits and Starts,” colour is the revelation. Violets, blues, roses and greens now burst from Bell’s surfaces. A massive quilt suspended from the ceiling bears successive layers of sunshine yellow, calling to mind a giant, washy Josef Albers.
Jessica Bell, “Fits and Starts” (installation view), 2017. Courtesy Central Art Garage. Photo: Julia Martin.
The other revelation is Bell’s Effort series, which consists of dozens of multi-coloured, snake-like soft sculptures. They’re measured in arm’s lengths and are meant to be handled. On the opening night of “Fits and Starts,” the performance artist Laura Taler, incognito in a black hoodie, walked into the packed garage and wove her way through the crowd. She approached the pile of “snakes” on the floor, and conducted a sort of soft-sculpture ritual, arranging the works and wrapping them around her body. At one point, she stood on a chair and whipped one around like a lasso above her head. As for the safety of the audience, Hussey told me, “If there’s carnage, there’s carnage.”
Rupert Nuttle is a painter and journalist living in Ottawa.