Walk into Lisa Figg and Anna Elmberg Wright’s show currently on exhibit at the Union Gallery and you’ll be instantly greeted by a thoughtfully uncomfortable aesthetic.
The show, titled REfuse_reFUSE, is an expression of both artists’ interests in the environment and the effects of human activity on the natural world.
Figg, ArtSci ’08, and Elmberg Wright, ArtSci ’07, began the project as near-strangers, knowing only that they shared environmental concerns. At a talk the artists gave yesterday afternoon at the gallery, Figg read aloud a list of words and concepts the pair came up with when first planning their show. The list included the words cleaning, knowing, understanding and both communal memory and recovered memory. These concepts helped form the artists’ relationship and the final installation of the show.
Figg’s “Tower” is a sculpture made of empty laundry detergent bottles that reaches from floor to ceiling. Colours and brands are grouped together. Figg said the sculpture refers to the Western world’s oil consumption because oil is used to make both the plastic bottle and the detergent itself.
“I wanted it to go from floor to ceiling, to become part of the structure of this space,” she said. “In a sense, it could go on forever, I could keep building it more and more. I could go on working on this one project for the rest of my life.”
“Tower” includes a sound element, accessible through headphones attached to the bottles. The track is a series of water sounds—repeating the idea of “cleaning”—and is interspersed with a confused and broken monologue. “There’s this stream of consciousness that interrupts the water, but you can never make out what’s being said,” Figg said. “The viewer doesn’t know what’s going on.”
Figg also created a film for the show, which plays continuously on the main gallery’s wall. Titled “The Beginning,” the film opens on a woman dressed in red, on hands and knees, washing a bathroom with red cleaning fluid. The same cleaning and wiping actions are repeated as the scene moves into a kitchen, on suburban front step, to the centre of a road and finally ends with the same woman, who is now dressed in green and washing with green fluid, scrubbing the bark of a fallen tree in a wooded area.
“I was trying to link myself to my environment: my house; my suburban life; the natural area around my neighbourhood,” Figg said. “It’s a literalization of greening up. It’s a metaphor, and you can play with it that way.”
Elmberg Wright’s installation, “From Whence Arise,” is an arrangement of found materials ranging from thick chunks of pavement and pillows of pine needles to a more grotesque stretch of acrylic road tar covered in blood-red oil paint and an antique bearskin rug—complete with bared teeth.
The bearskin was used by other students in the fine art department over the past few years for other projects, and Elmberg Wright was offended by the way other artists depicted the bear.
“I reframed it this way, to give a different view of the animal,” she said.
The bearskin lies across a wooden skid, with plastic flowers arranged on it. The scene is remincent of a funeral pyre, and there is a sense of mourning the animal—a commentary on the bizarre way humans both abuse and fetishize other animals.
“I’ve combined what are really disparate elements,” Elmberg Wright said. “There are areas that are really disturbing and problematic and areas that have a different, kind of ritualistic feeling.”
Though they may have been strangers when they initially began the REfuse_reFUSE project, Figg and Elmberg Wright have found their focus a comfortable point of conversation.
In an effort to explain the show, Elmberg Wright said,“We tend to see ourselves, humans, as separate from the natural world when really…” “We are nature,” Figg said, finishing her sentence.
REfuse_reFUSE is on display until Oct. 30. A closing reception will be held on Oct. 20 at 6:30 p.m. at the Union Gallery.
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