Gathie Falk’s fifty-year retrospective at Equinox Gallery is a forest of repeated objects. In the west gallery are piles of oblong ceramic spheres glazed to resemble fruit and snowballs, and then stacked and named in the uptight, indexical spirit of Minimalism (e.g. Arsenal: 140 Snowballs or 20 Apples). As you move further into the gallery, the piles get smaller, suggesting that in a ceramic parallel universe a snowball fight or a bad comedy show has occurred in the time it takes to traverse the room. 
Gathie Falk
In the east gallery, cloth and shoe are the reigning referent. Tom’s Shirt A-E is a suite of sculptures depicting five collared shirts with variations on a pinstripe pattern and tie combo. An invisible wearer, presumably Tom, strikes the same meager outstretched arm. Single Right Men’s Shoes is a series of ceramic caste shoes behind glass in wood cabinets. Falk’s clothing always poses lackadaisically, despite the absence of wearers.
Sometimes the gallery’s back room will exhibit a small body of work by an artist different from whoever is featured in the main space, and the sedately abstract paintings composed of small pastel strokes that are currently on display there surely aren’t of the same mind as the works in the larger rooms. But, in fact, they are from Falk’s painting series Pieces of Water. This period of her paintings in the eighties is such a visual leap from the other works (although nothing from the late seventies is represented) that it proves she is not preoccupied with a neat visual teleology of her practice. She has just made whatever was in her mind. With all the domestic narratives that food and clothing bring up, the exhibition is appropriately not titled The Things in My House.
Equinox Gallery: http://www.equinoxgallery.com/
Gathie Falk: The Things In My Head continues until December 12.
Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism, and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print, and online in Canada and the United States. She is the editor of Bartleby Review, an occasional pamphlet of criticism and writing in Vancouver, and a curator at CSA Space. She is Akimblog’s Vancouver correspondent and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram @steffbao.
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Gathie Falk at Equinox Gallery, Vancouver
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