Subtlety has its advantages. When faced with, say, several exhibitions aggressively clamouring for attention, the subtle can sneak right on past all the showy aesthetic sound and fury, and smack you upside the head before you realize it. Okay, maybe it helps a bit if the exhibition occupies choice gallery real estate, but truth to tell I wasn't expecting much out of Into the Woods: Etchings by George Raab at the Art Gallery of Peterborough. Don't get me wrong – I am a fan of printmaking, and Raab is unquestionably one of the best in the field. But I arrived with a set of preconceptions, anticipating little more than the ho-hum of printmaking convention. Quality stuff, to be sure, but nothing to get all worked up about.
George Raab, Into the Woods
However, the very first thing that catches your eye as you descend the long ramp to the main exhibition space doesn't have much to do with convention. Rather, it's an installation. Into the Woods is mounted in a corner space and comprises a series of curtains – much like theatrical legs. Arranged two layers deep, they're transparent fabric overprinted with monochromatic images of a dense forest of birch trees. Gaps between individual legs leave room to walk into the space, to meander between the trees to the back wall, which is itself one solid image of dense arboreal forest.
This is what a printmaker can do by setting foot outside the conventional parameters of the medium while simultaneously bringing them to the fore, all so as to installationally reshape a space simply, meaningfully, even poignantly. The latter adverb is necessary, for with Into the Woods– and I mean the exhibition as a whole, and not just the titular installation – Raab would have us experience what are in fact representations of another world, a world that once comprised the Real and which has now become little more than a virtual ghost of itself. I mean the forest, the defining natural phenomenon of our planet and now so incredibly rare as to be a truly endangered species, now almost solely the preserve of the photograph, painting, print, and, increasingly, digitally wrought sur-reality.
The rest was primarily a show of Raab's framed prints hung salon-style and largely comprising long, narrow images of dense forests – images of a bygone thing – with nary a living being to be seen. The triptych Pine Forest exemplifies the artist's approach to his subject: we are given to see a dense stand of pine trunks, though never the forest canopy itself; trees rising from the ground, the image a dense thicket of verticals abruptly truncated by the upper edge of the print, as if Raab was echoing the equally truncating devastation of a logged-out forest.
And it is devastating. Truly. Oh, there are prints here like Fire in the Sky that comfort with the arboreal beauty of a dawn or a sunset, or Field Line, a print comprised of five overlapping images depicting a lovely wintry field looking toward the edge of a forest in the background.... Yeah, there's the stuff of the picturesque to be found here. And it's good, to be sure, but Raab also gives us the better. It's not showy. It's not aesthetically noisy and insistent. It's just better.
Art Gallery of Peterborough: http://www.agp.on.ca/
Into the Woods: Etching by George Raab continues until September 1.
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. McElroy lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather. He is Akimblog's roving Ontario correspondent and can be followed @GilMcElroy on Twitter.
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George Raab at the Art Gallery of Peterborough
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