GALLERY-GOING: VISUAL ARTS: REVIEW
Out of textiles, a sculpture comes into being

GARY MICHAEL DAULT
March 14, 2009

Lyn Carter at Peak Gallery

Prices on request.
Until March 28, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108

There was a genuine cunning, I always felt, in Lyn Carter's inventive employment of commercial fabrics in her sculptural work.
In a typical Carter piece of the past couple of years, the artist would stretch stuff like swatches of spandex or even lengths of heavy tweeds over various objects - actually the material was not so much "stretched" as carefully tailored into place - giving the object beneath (often something as homely and obvious as a golf ball) a new, enigmatic form.

The trouble with these strange, patterned objects, for me, was that they were now not only bodily, but squeamishly visceral - in a way I always found to be vaguely comic. As curator Carolyn Bell Farrell wrote in the catalogue for Incognito, a major Carter exhibition from 2005-6, "...The fabric sheath that covers each piece suggests living tissue. The sensation of gravity's pull on this soft skin evokes a visceral response from the viewer - particularly evident in Drip, Droplet and Sucker, each of which hosts a small turgid ball, slung inside a stretched fabric sack." Well, exactly. For me, these works were just too obviously glandular. Indeed, I once characterized them as "testicular."

All this is simply to point out that for her new exhibition, Cusp - her third at Toronto's Peak Gallery - Carter has more or less left testicularity behind. Two of the three works in the exhibition, wall-mounted fabric works titled By Turn and River of Ocean, still feature arrays of fabric-covered golf balls that fall through the works like teardrops - and they are the least effective things in the show. But the environmentally-scaled Drawn Through Black, that occupies most of the gallery, seems to me a huge step forward for Carter.

The matte-black, slightly rough and fuzzy polyester objects that make up this engaging work have now come decisively down from the wall and are variously disposed in space: One of the two vaguely bottle-like entities lies against the wall - like a figure stretched out on a bench or lying in bed. It is connected, more or less umbilically, to a little black half-round thing supported on a clear plastic stand. (You feel it is potentially a full unit of the work that is still in the state of becoming - or perhaps receding.) This, in turn, is further connected to one of the piece's two floor-hugging polyester pools or stains.

One ought not to be too programmatic about this, I suppose, but however limiting such a reading is, the black floor bits do look inescapably like ink spills or paint spills. There is a second horizontal, vessel-like piece on the floor as well, and it, too, is connected to a spreading stain or pool. Is it leaking vital fluids? Or is it, instead, being nourished into existence?

Cusp is a cunning move for Carter. It allows her to go on tailoring her fabric coverings for the pieces, but it avoids the distancing doubleness of object and covering: Here, the black shapes and their polyester coverings come together as one thing. Yet the new vessels and blobs still give her what she calls "a sculptural presence without the loss of the textile language." As Carter pointed out to me in a recent chat on the phone, textiles "can offer a pattern that is different from pictorial space" (think of the roses on your sofa). Yes, but that difference can diminish as well as divert. With Drawn Through Black, the deep, cat-fur blackness integrates the numerous elements of the sprawling piece, setting up odd, engaging conflicts between - as Carter herself puts it - "what is read and what is experienced."

about the exhibition