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Having fun messing with Mother Nature
By GARY MICHAEL DAULT
Saturday, August 21, 2004 - Page R10
Ottawa-born artist William Gill has been living and working in
St. John's since 1996 where, according to the gallery statement for
his exhibition at Toronto's Peak Gallery, a good deal of his
time is spent "absorbing and being witness to natural process."
This close association with elemental nature, in heady and sometimes
troubling conflict with the artifice of the industrialized world, has
clearly informed his current practice as an artist -- a practice that
can generate equally, in this exhibition, both meteorite ("elemental
nature") and satellite ("the artifice of the industrialized
world").
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There is a good deal of mordant wit in Gill's production that might
at first seem a little out of place in a program of work that addresses
big questions about the place of man in the province of nature. But
I suppose if you think of the whole turning wheel of nature as a sort
of sublime toy, a kind of cosmic pinball game, then existence is just
as much a comedy as a tragedy.
These are the sorts of weighty thoughts that come to mind when you
stand gazing upon a work such as Gill's Meteorite Narrowly Missing
a Tree. In this wholly delightful piece, certainly the best work
in the show, a vertical thrust of maple tree (painted a creamy white)
supports, on one side, near its truncated top, a lumpy, green-painted
bronze blob about the size of a basketball -- the "meteorite"
of the work's title. This wonky, rather endearing "meteorite"
seems not so much to have "narrowly missed" the tree as to
be, instead, clinging to it fiercely, like a terrified cat marooned
too high up in the branches. What seems so funny, and touching, though,
is the over-particularity of the situation. You can imagine a meteorite
narrowly missing the Earth, maybe, or narrowly missing a city, maybe,but
narrowly missing a single tree? And such a down-at-the-heels meteor
too! The whole situation, instead of seeming noble and stellar, seems
like a moment of galactic slapstick.
Less charming than his Meteorite Narrowly Missing a Tree, but
no less striking, and no less witty, is Gill's Upside Down Sky.
Here, a big gathering of tree-sized spruce saplings, carefully shorn
of bark and trimmed of branches, and leaning together against the gallery
wall, have been torched from the middle downwards. At first glance,
you assume the saplings have somehow been torn from the Earth, so that
the Earth-darkness still clings about their lower halves. Then you read
the title and you see that all this burnt-blackness is supposed to read,
in fact, as sky and that the snipped branches at the top of the trees
are, in fact, their roots. The whole thing is upside down, just as the
work's title told us it was. The piece is admittedly fraught with problems,
the most pressing of which is that the burnt trunks still read as burnt
wood, not as night sky. And the strict, minimal trimming and shaping
and stacking of the trees militates against any naturalistic reading
at all. But there is great charm in the elaborate conceit of the piece
and a goofy, winning poetry about it that says, "Look, I know this
doesn't really look like an Upside Down Sky, but isn't it an arresting
idea?"
$650 -- $9,000. Until Aug. 28, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108.
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