Review:
FACULTY DRAWING EXHIBIT

By Chris Bradshaw

A new era of creativity dawns at Emily
Carr and with it we find ourselves the
beneficiaries of an age-old tradition, the an-
nual Faculty Exhibition.

This year’s exhibit is a foray into the
realm of drawing, that nebulous area which
claims for its own an ever expanding
crossover zone which ventures (sometimes a
little too confidently) into areas of sculpture
and painting, as well as media.

If the underlying theme of the show is to
re-evaluate traditional modes of drawing,
then in some ways it was successful, but I
have serious doubts as to whether you could
ever convince me that Sally Micheners’
ceramic pieces could be categorized as
‘drawings’ per se. This is a clever attempt
to introduce architectual, three dimensional
pieces of drawing, merely because they
have been inscribed with well executed
markings.

From there we travel to the other extreme
in drawing, which is represented by Bob
Evermons ‘‘First and Last Drawing’’. Here
we see the results of a strict adherence to
traditional disciplines, both in concepts of
drawing and of lifestyle. What I see in this
piece is an artist who has learned to draw
the human anatomy reasonably well in the

PHOTO: SEAN DRYSDALE, WORK: FRED PETER

past forty or so years, but very little else. I
would truly have appreciated an example of
work which shows where the artist has been
in those years, as opposed to a somewhat
melancholic retrospective.

Possibly my most emphatic objections of
the entire exhibition belong with the piece
by Tam Irving. It seems to me that the ar-
tist has thrown it together at the last minute
in order to fulfill a contractual obligation to
the show. The quality and presentation of
the piece is reminiscent of exercises
undergone in Foundation year, with one
exception; any foundation year student who
submitted a similar piece for the year end
show would like as not have it relegated to
an obscure place somewhere in the founda-
tion area. Don’t get me wrong, my objec-
tions are not with the aesthetics of the piece,
but with the politics of the situation. Why is
it that members of the faculty are not sub-
ject to the same standards of excellence as
are the students? What is evident from this
piece is, that when a person has gone
beyond the ‘due-paying years’ of studen-
thood and gained political status in the
school, they automatically seem to obtain
“executive privilege’. This cannot be allow-
ed to happen and it is only by bringing such
examples to the light of the entire school
that we can achieve any degree of change.

Similarly, I view Fred Peters’
calligraphic piece as being an example of an
artist who has used the open-endedness of
the theme of the exhibit to promote his
religious ideals. I view his piece as being
both out of sync with the precepts of draw-
ing and as an unnecessary imbellishment.
Indeed, would not a page from the Bible
itself have sufficed? His attempt to ‘‘draw
praises to God’’ (see catalogue) are to me an
attempt to play with ambiguities in the
English language to justify the existance of

PHOTO:SEAN DRYSDALE, WORK: DON JARVIS. the proverb in the exhibition.

. . . And then we have John Wertscheks’
series of photo/drawings; a small joke
wrought with cliche and attempted intellec-
tualization designed to obscure the simplici-
ty of the technique, which stands on its own
despite his attempts to sublimate it.

* * *

Not to make you think I am behooved of
total cynicism, there are many bright :spots
in the show and I would like to take this op-
portunity to comment on what I feel are the
focal points of the exhibit, being the work of
Don Jarvis and Rick Williams.

Both artists have achieved what I see as
total unity of thought and action; Jarvis in
an immediate and dynamic sense and
Williams in his ability to achieve a controlled
sense of immediacy. Williams’
‘““Transmaterial Studies’ are to me like a
frozen moment in time, a scraping of ex-
istance which is only minutely different
from that which occurred both before and
after, but unique unto itself. The key to this
sense of immediacy in Williams’ work lies
in a passage from the catalogue; ‘‘to retain
the motion and life energy of the concept it
is necessary to interact actual and virtual in-
formation’’.

Jarvis, on the other hand, exerts this
same sense of the moment through the in-
timation of the presence of the artist in the
piece (as witnessed by the aggressive nature
of the strokes and erasures). The presence
of underlying form in the drawing suggest
unmistakable connections with reality, but
his refusal to give those forms recognizable
characteristics upholds his contention that
he must ‘‘first of all remove any distinction
between ‘objective’ and ‘non-objective’.
‘Reality’ ’’. In this work, Jarvis has gone
one step beyond the Modernist tradition, in
that he has discovered an amenable solution
to sate both diehard Modernist and Realist
alike.