Marcia Pitch: Decompose/Recompose: Off the Wall
In Regina the acquisition and rehabilitation of other people's discards – garage saling- is an ingrained warm-weather tradition. Not surprisingly, a distinctive empathy toward popular and mass cultural forms, also expressed through widespread interest in local folk art, has shaped contemporary "fine" art practice. This tendency is inflected with Funk and Pop in the work of senior artists such as Joe Fafard and David Thauberger. Other Regina artists such as Roger Ing, Gisele Amantea (now in Saskatoon), Gerri Ann Siwek, Grace Rose Klatt and Donna Kriekle routinely exploit the horror vacui of the Five and Dime, recycling found materials and kitsch toward various critical ends.
The "bricoleuse" sensibility shared by these artists, all of whom have exhibited at the Dunlop Art Gallery, is also notable in the work of the Vancouver artist Marcia Pitch. Her proposed installation Decompose/Recompose will spread a vast, disorderly metaphor of regeneration throughout the Dunlop's central space and two vitrine-type display cases. The work has three main components: the music and jewelry boxes thematically decorated with paint and small mass-produced objects; similarly altered second-hand paintings and framed reproductions; and a twelve-by-eight foot relief panel of collaged household items and toys. Selected boxes and paintings will be installed in the gallery with the large relief. The vitrines facing the heavily trafficked Regina Public Library entrance and circulation area will be filled with tableaux of boxes and paintings, like storefront windows. Boxes will be dispersed throughout the Library's public areas in free-standing display cases.
In keeping with the Dunlop's inquiry into art practices that engage with vernacular and consumer culture (Leesa Streifler's billboards, Jeannie Mah's hyperfeminine porcelains), the proposed exhibition of Pitch's work takes issue with hierarchical canons of taste and cultural legitimacy. Pitch's assemblages explore those regions of mass culture directed at women and children, reclaiming outmoded or discarded domestic items and toys into narrative formats that are alternately ironic and apocalyptic. Her readymade framed images crusted with lurid junk place class culture in collision with itself. In them the pretentiousness of art confronts the flagrantly fake. It becomes pointless to try to distinguish, as Clement Greenberg did, between the authentic and the factitious. Pitch seems to reformulate the issue in terms of the semantic inexhaustibility of the once-consumed.
Decompose/Recompose will be especially resonant within the Dunlop's library setting, where it will be encountered by publics who would not ordinarily make a point of visiting an art exhibition. Much of the installation will be visible outside the gallery space, in the vitrines and ambient display cases. This busy and familiar site complements the social aspirations of Pitch's work, while enhancing the Dunlop's objective to extend a cultural free space into the "public" sphere represented by institutions such as the library.
Dunlop Art Gallery
