reviewed by Adam Lauder
Morley Shayuk’s From Within the Stone (August 17-31, 2010), the final exhibition at Paul Petro Special Projects Space in Toronto, presented a focused exploration of the speculative landscape of suburban development. A one-time construction worker, Shayuk displays a professional knowledge of the manufactured textures of that terrain, having at one time or other “seen every parking lot in Southern Ontario.” This working relationship with the stuccoed surfaces of strip mall and artificial rock pool was reflected in the ersatz masonry of Shayuk’s monolithic styrofoam-and-stucco Untitled, the centrepiece of the set of three new works.
Untitled conflates references to the genius (non)loci of urban sprawl with megalithic reveries nourished by an auto-didactic practice that has also spurred the artist to revisit the contemporary landscape through the precisionist lens of prairie modernist Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890-1956). The impersonal finish of Untitled’s non-objective network of incised lines (executed by professional contractors with experience doing structurally similar but, needless to say, formally uninspired work for Walmart and Shopper’s) echoes the Manitoban artist’s obsessive but strangely mute system of textured brushwork. Shayuk invests the non-stick surfaces of retail décor with the taciturn energies of FitzGerald’s domestic modernism. Shayuk’s affinity for FitzGerald is symptomatic of a general re-evaluation of historical models and a search for new role models from the history of Canadian art. “No one feels like Lawren Harris,” reflects Shayuk; “the big cheese running the show in Toronto, keeping everybody happy. If you read about FitzGerald you’ll feel like him too. Trying to make ends meet; someone finally gave him some money in the 40s and he was able to spend a year painting.” Another anti-hero who figures prominently in Shayuk’s personal mythology is the Hanover, Ontario-born Carl Schaefer (1903-1995). Schaefer’s no-nonsense approach to the medium of painting (“you can tell that he was right-handed,” observes Shayuk) resonates with the sculptor’s own utilitarian treatment of the machine-cut styrofoam slab as a (structural and formal) unit in his constructions.
The metaphor of suburban geology extended to the mineral palette and facture of the modestly-sized oil Untitled. Executed in a quietly pulsing spectrum of complementary greys and tans (all three primaries are present, each heavily diluted by an admixture of black and white), the painting’s faceted planes echoed the abstraction of the three-dimensional work installed opposite. “I wanted something really dry. I was thinking about the way a rock looks when it’s out in the sun and you splash water on it; the way it shimmers. I wanted to paint the rock before the water.” Shayuk is obviously serious about painting; however, the personal touch in this work introduces a degree of literalism that is absent from the artist’s investigation of the cognitive and sensuous landscape of modernism in the more rigorous, impersonal sculpture.
The final work exhibited as part of From Within the Stone, an eponymously-titled video work, stacks footage of non-descript (but consistently angular, in a Vorticist sort of way) interior design shot by Shayuk in malls across Ontario into a layered homage to the later work of FitzGerald. In this piece, prairie modernism returns with the force of a repressed regional dialect with the power to provoke new questions about the legacy of international modernism on the post-colonial landscape of soon-to-be-urban rural Canada. However, From Within the Stone (the video) required a larger screen. Moreover, like its two-dimensional companion, it was ultimately too faithful in its interface with FitzGerald’s abstraction to be fully situated in the present.
These qualifications do not detract from the considerable achievement of Shayuk’s best work in the suite, nor from the ambition of his historically-nuanced and environmentally-responsive project. From Within the Stone showed Shayuk to be one of the most reflective yet bold in a group of emerging and mid-career artists currently mining lesser-known episodes and regional narratives in Canadian modernism by way of entry point into the contemporary international conversation.