South Korean artist JeeYoung Lee’s Loveseek, pigment print, 2014.courtesy of the artist
I should begin by telling you: I believe in magic. I’ve encountered it many times in my life, when the reasoning mind goes quiet and the moment seems bursting with possibility. It is the feeling of wonder. And I’ve felt it most of all through art.
Wonder is perhaps the zenith when it comes to the kinds of experience art can provide us. However, it’s also elusive. What inspires wonder for me may not be the same for you. That makes it both exciting and a little audacious that the Art Gallery of Hamilton has staged an exhibition completely dedicated to it. Wonder gathers 30 artists – all Canadians save for one – whose work courts our curiosity.
It all began, funny enough, as a show about realism, explains curator Tobi Bruce. But when reality right now feels especially unsettled – what with fake news, artificial intelligence and a chasmic political landscape – it seemed to her equally important to investigate how reality is manipulated, challenged and invented. “What are the kinds of works,” she asks, “that take us outside of ourselves and make us question who we are, how we are and where we are?”
JeeYoung Lee, The Best Cure, pigment print, 2007.Courtesy of the artist
Those intellectual underpinnings may return to you on the ride home, but they’re not what will drive you through the show. Standing in the gallery, what you will experience foremost is the pursuit of that electric feeling. What confounds? What dazzles? What demands a closer look? And there are enough spectacular works on view that anyone will catch the feeling at least once.
Fittingly, Wonder begins with a portal. Attendees enter through Frolic Trellis by Stephen Altena (one of six Hamilton locals included). A mass of paintings and drawings clipped from the past six years of the artist’s daily studio practice forms a grand doorway. Each cutting is a picture of a tiny marvel the artist has encountered: blooms sketched en plein air here and figures found on toile de Jouy fabric there. The display invites viewers to first admire the big, then the small and then the both at once. “I want visitors to be overwhelmed, like you would be stepping into someone’s beautiful garden,” Altena says. “Overwhelmed, but then, like in a garden, you stop and begin to look at the layers of flowers.”
In the next gallery over, Robin Arseneault’s abstract figures, titled Dancing Men (Troupe), enact a rollicking vaudeville routine, boisterous and sprightly, though technically, as inert as the wood they’re carved from. Tim Whiten’s most solemn Awk – a leather tunic with a shark’s jaw burst through the chest cavity – hangs in counterpoint nearby, commanding reverence and quiet contemplation. The recent Governor-General’s Award winner considers himself a maker of cultural objects, and Awk feels like a magical artifact or a holy relic, but one belonging to no religion in particular; except perhaps instead if belongs to the mysteries of human experience.
Stylo Starr, planetary bodies: luna, analog collage, 2023.Courtesy of the Artist
Across the room, Evan Penny’s sculptural portrait Camille, portraying Canadian performance artist Camille Turner, draws visitors closer almost magnetically with the uncanny power of its hyperrealism. Penny is known and collected around the world for such astonishingly lifelike works, made from hair and fleshy silicone, materials the artist has borrowed from the special-effects industry. The magic here issues from a discrepancy in expectations, the artist says. The work contains as much detail as a photograph, but it exists, bafflingly, in three-dimensional space, just as you and I. It’s “art’s job,” Penny says, to inspire wonder, and to push beyond the threshold of the ordinary. “As we move through life, we’re moving from the known to the unknown constantly, and so we need some assurance that that unknown is a place worth entering. I think art does that. Its function is to make representations that are novel enough that they move you forward.”
Of course, there’s also wonder’s other meaning – to ponder or question – and there are plenty of works that engage that, too. Beside a gorgeous, but more conventional magic-in-the-mundane oil painting of Jell-O by Mary Pratt, you’ll find one of her best renderings of Donna, her friend and also her husband’s mistress, who’s captured here in a private moment locking eyes with the viewer through the reflection of the bathroom mirror. Nearby, an Alex Colville that could prompt a whole mystery novel shows a woman undressed with a man in tuxedo watching from the background, a handgun displayed prominently on her vanity. There’s Carmela Laganse’s unorthodox furniture; Chloe Wise’s decadent urethane foodscapes, their syrups and sauces dripping down the plinths; and Kim Adams’s two-headed bicycle, which you can only delight to picture in action.
Emmanuel Nwogbo, The Nigerian Prince: Coming to Halifax, printed digital collage, 2019.Courtesy of the Artist
“When we wonder as a verb, it’s always generative,” Bruce says. “And wonder as a noun is transportive.”
In one of the final galleries, Chun Hua Catherine Dong’s Out of the Blue – No. 3 is an exuberant arrangement of laboratory gear, artificial flowers and cutesy 3-D-printed animals. Dong’s middle school teacher in China prohibited female students from using the chemistry lab. Here, the artist revisits the childhood memory, now a glorious and fantastical subversion: the laboratory they could only ever dream of.
Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Out of the Blue – No.3, 3D-printed sculptures, artificial plants, Plexiglas, laboratory accessories, 2023.Courtesy of the Artist
Then, in the backroom, a true grand finale for the show about wonder. Xiaojing Yan’s Spirit Cloud is a completely otherworldly thing. Made from more than 33,000 freshwater pearls, the cumuliform body afloat in the gallery approaches the sublime. It compels your gaze, appearing to reshape itself as you explore it. And there, with your own private cloud to spot, surely, your imagination will be ignited once more.
“When I experience wonder, it feels like a doorway to the infinite has opened up,” the artist says. “It’s a reminder that there is so much more to life, so much beauty, mystery and possibility waiting to be discovered. … In moments of wonder, we are like children again, seeing the world with fresh eyes.”
