Week of January 22, 2009, Issue #692
ARTS
Crooked Head: Get it straight
Montgomery’s Crooked Head explores masculinity with mixed results
Adam Waldron-Blain / adamwb@vueweekly.com
Despite some solid pieces and an ambition to raise the standard for the type of work displayed at DIY shows in Edmonton, September’s Cockfight at the Artery seemed to be lacking, despite efforts to keep the work cohesive. Many of the works (and not only the weaker ones) felt alone, joined to the show only by a superficial reading of the theme. Compared to the core of the show, the weaker works seemed forgettable, and gave a raggle-taggle impression to the whole show, dampened by the spectacle of the stronger central works.
The work of that show shares a lot with Sean Montgomery’s Crooked Head, up now at Latitude 53. An Edmontonian going to school in Montréal, Montgomery starts in the same place as the September show, and his aesthetic and subject matter overlap with the Mountain Man images of Nickelas Johnson and Norman Omar. Given its own space, Montgomery’s paintings go somewhere which the others could not.
Montgomery turns to the Albertan man of the wilderness, a mythical embodiment of masculinity, and devotes everything to it, down to his roughly hung, unstretched canvases. In his previous works Montgomery has used crude drawing techniques to address constructions of masculinity, and here you can see his painting technique becoming more complicated. “Would You Like to Pet My Trouser Snake?” is an entry point where his historical techniques are the most visible—it is the least subtle of the works, and the weakest, both in terms of technique and subject matter, with its obvious parallels to Cockfight and the more forgettable, literal works therein.
From this point, Montgomery develops a striping painting technique that seems to come to its fruition in mask-like images of a bear and himself. He paints hard, his impasto lines working with his refined but still crude drawing to reinforce the manliness of the process, and draws in other related elements of identity, particularly nationalist ones. Aside from the implicit cowboys, the techniques bring to mind other icons of masculine and nationalistic physical imagination, his striped shapes sitting somewhere between mid-century geometric abstraction and rough, pre-Christian stone-carving.
But not all of the images fight quite hard enough to call into question the mythic cowboy narrative portrayed. Montgomery’s stated aims include “[making] work that reflects both dominant and subordinate viewpoints” and exploring connections between masculinity and destruction. In “Would You Like to Pet My Trouser Snake?” he attempts bold satire, but this appeal to irony is messy and easily overlooked, leaving a bitter impression, and at best the painting seems humorous but hackneyed—certainly not sharp.
His duplicitous and duplicated mask self-portraits are better: in “Jean Mattieu Montgomerie,” he revels in the true nature of his mythical fascistic facade. Exploiting humour as well as his transplanted-to-Montréal status and another layer of nationalistic imagery (the Québec flag and the implied fleur-de-lis), he successfully sets his myths at odds with one another, pushing them into a fatal shoot-out. V
Until Sat, Feb 14
Crooked Head
Works by Sean Montgomery
Latitude 53 (10248 - 106 St)
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