Geoffrey Farmer is a seasoned architect of worlds collaged from references to music, literature, theatre, history, and more. His latest for Catriona Jeffries is simply titled The Kitchen. On entering the gallery, we are confronted by a monumental baby blue broomstick. The broom’s status in magic is unflappably intact in this towering representation and, as the first thing we encounter, it most definitely trumps the modest works on paper around it.
Image may be NSFW.
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Geoffrey Farmer, The Kitchen, 2017, installation view (courtesy: Catriona Jeffries, photo: SITE Photography)
Each framed drawing depicts a little matchstick man who spits a rhyme contained in a speech beside it. This little character, a small thing containing both catastrophes and ambiance, is made more ominous in the same way that someone who speaks in rhyme unsettles. Thin, tender-tomato red theatre backdrops create a quaint company of kitchen appliances, wares, and cabinets. The objects are of relative scale to the broomstick and drawn with chubby black lines that seem to outweigh the cloth that wavers over the gallery’s white walls.
Farmer provides a passage from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as a dusty and scratched lens to think through this installation. However, the lens he’s supplied is practically opaque. There are scratches on the glass that impose an accumulated composition; the particles of neglect are the dirt of suggestion. The obscurity isn’t remotely mean spirited, but it’s not the kind of lens we associate with enlightenment, clarity, orienteering, or telos. We probably all prefer the fertile lens of Stein, which is actually a cushion for our imaginations (Farmer’s imagination?).
Amidst the density of Stein’s poetics in relation to Farmer’s invocation of it, my clarity is found in a question posed without a question mark: “Why is the perfect reestablishment practiced and prized, why is it composed.” As a statement, it dismisses the ritual re-staging of an ideal. Does this mean Stein is letting us off the hook? Never! Is Farmer off the hook? Not remotely.
Catriona Jeffries Gallery: http://catrionajeffries.com/
Geoffrey Farmer: The Kitchen continues until February 18.
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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Geoffrey Farmer at Catriona Jeffries
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