Artist explores very fabric of our lives

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/02/2016 (3848 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Shopping at Value Village is a peculiar experience. Finding that perfect vintage sweater means enduring the scent of unwashed clothes, old sweat and millions upon millions of dead skin cells heavily dosed in Febreeze.

If you’re like me, the experience yields a mixture of revulsion and wonder. Those racks of cast-off clothes may be teeming with humanity, literally, but in artist vernacular, articles of clothing are “loaded objects” weighted with all kinds of metaphoric and associative properties.

First Fridays invites Winnipeggers to learn about the art of Bev Pike this Friday at the Free Press News Café. An artist with a long and acclaimed career, Pike makes paintings that are massive in scale, detailing swaths of fabric and piles of clothes. They are incredibly evocative, fraught with multiple meanings. Clothes make the man, become our second skins. We attach memory and emotion to clothes. They are records of our social history and our own shifting identities. Clothes also embody the complexities of womanhood — the laundry and the lingerie, so to speak.

Pike uses fabric and all its associations in atypical ways. At the art talk Friday, the audience will learn about the trajectory of her ideas and how the themes of her work have evolved. Pike is a self-avowed polymath, weaving both personal experience and rigorous, wide-ranging research into her work.

In the early 1980s, Pike began her Ghost series. She was mourning the death of her mother, and the act of drawing the contents of her mother’s closets and crawl spaces helped her grieve, eventually leading to her research on memory and the body — its storage and retrieval.

Though it marks the beginning of her career, the series remains a touchstone, containing all the emotional, murky intensity of her later work. Rendered in a shadowy palette, two points of view are superimposed.

“They depict very conflicted spaces,” says Pike, “and reflect the fact that in their making I was protecting myself.”

In the early ’90s, Pike began to focus on bedrooms, blankets and quilts. Glittering with metallic leaf and silver paint, the contours of the quilts’ creases give way to panoramas of richly hued pattern. The Boudoir series, as it is called, feels subliminal, describing dream states and subconscious events.

It is the acknowledged experience of many artists that their art begins to take on a life of its own, leading them into discovery and awareness. It is interesting to note the topographic quality of Pike’s quilts is exponentially amplified in her later series. By the late ’90s, Pike’s paintings depict fabric that is obsessively twisted and bundled to resemble veins and viscera, a close-up view of the trauma and upheaval the fabric of women’s bodies go through.

Clothes and fabric have a peculiar resonance. Because of their proximity to the body, they retain more “phantom quality” than other objects. Through decades of art-making, Pike has moved from reaction to assertion, from loss to gain, from painting ghosts in cramped closets to creating expansive physical spaces, entire worlds really, that are as beautiful and mysterious as they are aggressive — necessary, she says, for getting her female-centred view across.

In 2013, Pike mounted an exhibition called Hymenal Views at the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery. In the mural-sized watercolours, she amassed knit fabric and woolly sweaters into vistas of mountains and seas.

Pike’s new work moves underground, deep into subconscious territory. Colossal piles of clothes become ornate columns in a labyrinth of magical, macabre grottos.

“I am reclaiming feminine types of visuals like the colour pink and high decoration and making them strong and muscular,” Pike says when asked how she might explain, to a lay audience, the feminism that is implicit in her work.

The talk Friday is a rare chance to hear an artist reflect on her career, and about how and where her art has led.

In the case of Pike’s art, its deepest beauty lies not only in its physical description of fabric, but in bringing us down to the darker recesses of desire and intuition, realms that slip away from our cognitive attempts but we nevertheless continue to feel.

Sarah Swan is the host of Art Talk/Art Walk. For tickets to this event, call 204-697-7069.