Jeanie Riddle at Evans Contemporary in Peterborough

I like alternatives to the intentionally blank white cube of your typical gallery space. And I love repurposed spaces, environments that still have non-modernist architectural baggage and can still carry a charge (to mix a couple of metaphors), places that don’t, won’t, can’t disappear, be rendered mute and inert in the face of contexualizing the visual art that they contain. Rather than vanishing or being subsumed, they more aggressively inform, even challenge, whatever you aesthetically put up against them. Evans Contemporary up in Peterborough is rather like that. It’s a small gallery space – two rooms, essentially, what had once been a home’s living and dining rooms – set in an old Victorian house on a pleasant side street in the middle of town. They’re painted a neutral white, as if to mimic the gallery cube, but they just can’t. For one thing, there are chandeliers hanging in both spaces, gaudy baubles of sparkly glass and incandescent candles. The idea of neutral just ain’t gonna happen. The two spaces surrender nothing of themselves, and so as an artist you’ve got to figure that into your aesthetic equations or you’re dead in the water. Not everyone manages it.



Jeanie Riddle

Jeanie Riddle can, though. Modern Things comprises three wall- and floor-mounted interventions into these spaces, the biggest of which stretches across one wall and onto the floor of the front room. A large horizontal swath of sections of adhesive vinyl printed so as to (badly) resemble wood is intruded upon by an inserted section of red painted wall fronted by three small pieces of vertically arranged wood that are themselves attached to an L-shaped grey bracket that brings the whole thing down to the floor.

The things a bit of red can do – the red rectangle seems to float above the fake wood vinyl surface, visually disengaging itself from the wall and becoming more a part of the sculptural bracket. Nice. What might have appeared to be a sort of floor plan of some space transcends itself, becomes something other.



Jeanie Riddle

Two smaller works are situated in the second room. Tucked into a corner sits a small, neatly arranged pile of bits of cloth, and on the wall above it, slightly to the left, is another amalgam of materials visually arranged around two sections of adhesive vinyl (another wood pattern) split vertically and looking for all the world like a broken toilet seat. And there’s text: to one side of the central vinyl panels are a number of paint sample cards – “ash mist,” “white shoulders” – themselves abutting a large, horizontally striped card with the words “The Decisive Years” printed upon it.

Text, of course, changes absolutely everything, and so we tend to view a visual work through its semantic prism. Perhaps not the best of ideas, but there you are. Riddle’s words on found materials incorporated here shape determined, particular seeings. So too does a pile of cloth stacked neatly nearby, again pulling the work away from the wall, but we keep being yanked back by the imperatives of language – “ash,” “white,” “decisive”…. We can’t help it; it’s ingrained into us.

So I stick to the front gallery space, please, to a chandelier-illumined work unhindered by the constrictions of the linguistic but interestingly contextualized by – not contingent upon – the language of the architectural.


Evans Contemporary: http://www.evanscontemporary.com/
Jeanie Riddle: Modern Things continues until October 12.

Gil McElroy is a poet, artist, independent curator, and freelance art critic. He is the author of Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art, four books of poetry, and Cold Comfort: Growing Up Cold War. He is Akimblog's roving Ontario correspondent and can be followed @GilMcElroy on Twitter.