Reviews
CARYN NUTTALL - VICTORIA REGINA HAS POSTHUMOUS FUN IN THE COLONIES
NOVEMBER 4-20 1986
Ufundi Gallery, Ottawa
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In this exhibition, Caryn Nuttall ventured for the first time into painting with such confidence and originality that one can only wonder why she hadn't done it sooner. To this new medium she brings both the wit and the socio-political thrust of her earlier clay works, which poked serious fun at everything from royalty to political campaigns. In these pieces, Nuttall's humour is less caustic and her theme more focused.
These half-moon-shaped paintings combine the intimacy and decorative gaiety of her previous work with a pictorial breadth and scale that clay could not afford. Even here, though, her predilection for three-dimensional forms cannot be suppressed. Indulging a lifetime habit of junk-shop browsing, she adds banners, a miniature rubber boot, wheels and other found objects to create pieces that appear to work. They are as much sculptures as they are paintings.
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When Nuttall was a girl of 15 prowling the junk shops of her native Wales in search of Victoriana, Queen Victoria had fallen from popularity in Britain. In this group of works, she resurrects the shy, misunderstood queen and sets her loose in the colonies to act out whatever fantasies royal protocol once inhibited her from enjoying. A likeable, 40-ish Victoria, with whom the artist confesses an affinity, brings a buxom dignity to the diversions of commoners. In one mixed-media piece, which uses the underside of a table, two teams of clay "Victorias" in baseball uniform follow the game from the dugout. On the field above them, more Victorias, their wimples fluttering from beneath their caps, strain to catch a fly ball or shoulder a bat, poised to swing.
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State of the Art Colonialism is reminiscent both of popular "fat-lady" postcards from the British seaside and the honest, naive colonial portraits of the 18th century. Victoria, sober in a red-striped bathing suit, wades ankle-deep in the Atlantic Ocean. Behind her, an orderly flock of polka-dotted sheep - her loyal subjects? - grazes on a verdant hill. The addition of red wheels and a flag gives this work the aspect of a circus van or an antique pull-toy.
Throughout this witty exhibition, in which every piece is a surprise, the medium itself is as much the object of fun as is Victoria. Nuttall delights in challenging our assumptions. Victoria enjoying a naughty second life, is more than a queen in these pictures, just as each work is more than a painting. Dorothy Labarge
Visual Arts
By Nancy Baele, Citizen stall writer
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Queen Victoria, the monarch remembered for her phrase "we are not amused”, is making up for lost enjoyment in an exhibition at Ufuodi Gallery, 541 Sussex Dr., until Nov. 20. Titled ‘Victoria Regina Has Posthumous Fun’, the mixed media works made of plaster, wood, paint, electric lights by Caryn Nuttall show the queen in a sporting mode. She plays base-ball, rides bicycles and a carousel horse and drives a Tonka truck in a noblesse oblige gesture as she brings gifts of Russian caviar to the taxpayers of France in readiness for the Mulroneys' next visit.
Even when she is decked out in her red-and-white striped baseball outfit, her big breasts prominently separated as she rides the prow of a Thames barge, or regally balances herself with two Union Jacks as she walks a tightrope, she never lets the side down.
It's this send-up quality of empire and empress that gives the works a sense of gentle amusement. Nuttall's satire falls within an Ottawa tradition, where artists like Alex Wyse, Betty Davison, Victor Tolgesy make tongue-in-cheek narratives with the charm of nursery school toys. They humanize and deflate history and expose human foibles in the process. It's hard to think of the monarchy as an unapproachable institution when Victoria is enshrined in a cage with parrots, or shown with her cloned team members as they wait in a baseball dug-out.
Even the old force of the anthem Rule Brittania has the stuffing knocked out of it by the little construction State of the Art Colonialism with Victoria standing ankle-deep in waves, surrounded by spotted pigs and sheep and balloons.
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Eccentricity, Nuttall shows us, can make watching the decline of an empire fun.
Arts festival puts on best art show ever
By Nancy Baele, Citizen stall writer
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Ottawa is a fertile breeding ground for artistic humor.
Witness the Festival of the Arts exhibition Snakes in the Garden in which 14 artists who live, or once lived in the city, show what strikes them as incongruous and amusing.
The best visual arts show in the six-year history of the festival, it was put together by curator Garry Mainprize. He decided to do it on a grand scale with a range of wit and many works by individual artists
He put each artist's work in a separate room, so the exhibition unfolds like linked excerpts.
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Caryn Nuttall makes a wall work showing a pyramid of the government bureaucracy looking like one big aerobics class. She strings the members of the bureaucracy up in red tape and wheels that turn within wheels.
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Christmas at the galleries
By Nancy Baele, Citizen stall writer
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Ufundi Gallery is the dash of ginger in the mix of Christmas shows at local galleries. Its Tall Tales show is packed with flights of fancy inspired in part by living in a government town.
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Caryn Nuttall is in her element with miniature sculptures and Xerox sendups of RCMP horses kneeling in front of Mila Mulroney. She never strays far from political realities - making her comments about U.S.-Canada relations with a headless hawk and a long line of women who were guinea pigs for CIA experiments and are now waiting their turn to see a psychiatrist.
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Her miniature worlds deliver a type of satire that is quite compatible with Alex Wyse's painting ‘Smoking Fish, You're Losing All Your Attributes of the Smoke’.
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In fact in this exhibition, there's a case to be made for an Ottawa area mindset. Whether it's the streaker on the canal in Betty Davison's cast paper sculpture or John lkeda's two cows hand painted on ceramic and subtitled /Two Views of Canadian culture, Best of the Year’, there's a sense that the world's a stage and life is not to be taken too seriously.
