Canopy / Chamber
“Though object and material are part of Shantz’s language in her artistic process, the sensibilities and concerns she raises bring us to broader spiritual and ethical considerations…The world of objects and subject exists as a set of mutual expectations, setting variant concepts and different materials in an unnatural opposition.” (John K. Grande, “Nature in Parentheses: Between Creation and Manufacture”, catalogue essay)
photo credit: Robert Keziere (canopy), Harwood Truscott (chamber), Susan Shantz (to bind together)
Solo Exhibitions:
canopy, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, SK. 2007
chamber, Art Gallery of Regina, Regina, SK. 2011
to bind together, Boreal Art/Nature, La Minerve, PQ. 2003
Related Links:
canopy (Solo exhibition; Mendel Art Gallery, 2008): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDAFijSKMho
Landscape as Muse: Frenchman River Valley with Susan Shantz (291FilmCo; 2006): https://rover.edonline.sk.ca/en/rover/videos/2674
Exhibition Publications:
Alexandra Badzak, “Introduction,” canopy, Mendel Art Gallery, 2007 + link to full text pdf
Susan Shantz is a maker; the slow, methodical handling of objects informs her art. The act of sewing, wrapping, encasing, and hanging may be seen as a kind of intelligence, another way of knowing or understanding the world … Shantz is interested in “reclaiming nature as subject matter,: not in terms of grand vistas or epic journeys, but through the desire to merge “art/culture with the domestic or agrarian.” Her artwork, however, resists sentimentality or nostalgia. It does not deny or retreat from the effects of contemporary culture. Instead, Shantz’s installations stitch together a history of natural and cultural presence on the land.
John K. Grande, “Nature in Parentheses: Between Creation and Manufacture,” in canopy, Mendel Art Gallery, 2007 + link to full essay pdf
Though object and material are part of Shantz’s language in her artistic process, the sensibilities and concerns she raises bring us to broader spiritual and ethical considerations. The tiny door that we have to step through into the canopy room invokes a sense of passage from one world to another. The world of objects and subject exists as a set of mutual expectations, setting variant concepts and different materials in an unnatural opposition. The constructs, the readings, made of a language Shantz has evolved over the years, are inherently rational, yet at the same time challenge those precepts as they are used. We confuse the two, ust as we are confused by what an image represents and what it actually is. Both of Shantz’s canopies seem, at times, to be illusions. The monofilament lines of the floating leaves present, from certain angles, the appearance of a hologram in space. The lit rectangle of the small door leading to the canopy room seems, from a distance, to be a luminous mirror or mirage. Each reveals that the manufacture of the image is as important as the object itself, and that matter may dissolve into nothing.
Bruce Russell, “Chamber,” in Susan Shantz: Chamber, Art Gallery of Regina, 2011 + link to full essay pdf
The elements of Chamber comprise appropriated commodities that are manufactured to represent natural elements: Astroturf, printed fabric leaves, the wooden blanks hobbyists use to carve decoy birds. All of these are likely to be imported, manufactured by people who live continents away from the nature they represent, sourced from big box stores and otherwise destined, at best, for re-gifting or garage sales, at worst for the landfill which increasingly displaces green space around our urban agglomerations. The trickery of such simulacra is pervasive and devious, but Shantz’s Chamber serves a very different purpose than the false security offered by the enchanted forgery of nature offered for our consumption. Despite appearances, for all its lyrical beauty, this quiet meditative space is in a sense a Chamber of horrors; its familiar components are offered to us with subtle juxtapositions to awaken suspicion of our complacency in the ways in which we are manipulated by such familiar tropes of land and nature.
Art Gallery of Regina, chamber, link to on-line pdf: https://8fd0663e-541f-46d2-970d-3a33d1a01bf7.filesusr.com/ugd/d8079a_e3db715c90b744049edc184c413ec8d4.pdf