“Transforming Diorama”
Photography, 2007.
Basilica di San Marco
From the exhibition: Transforming Spaces
Digital pigment print, 22" x 16.5"
2007, MFA Studio, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
MY PARENTS IMMIGRATED to Canada from Holland after the second world war. Their four children were born in Canada, of which I am the youngest. As with many immigrant families of my generation, Opa and Oma still lived in the old country. I saw my grandfathers only once in my life that I can recall on a family trip to Holland as a four year old, although I know they had visited Canada other times before my conscious memory.
ONLY THE PHOTOGRAPHS of me sitting on my grandfather's lap bring back some kind of pre-visual memory. Nonetheless, its the importance of my parents stories of hard times growing up during the war, together with a few black and white photos of their own childhoods that has given me any idea at all regarding what my parents lives might have been like with Opa and Oma.
ONE OF MY OPAS, LIKE ALMOST EVERY other dutchman it seems, took up the avocation of painting. And so, it was from the grandfather I never knew, whose few paintings hung in our home, along with the books of paintings in my father's library, that I developed a fascination and love for Dutch art and painting in general. I looked at the pictures, felt the texture of their painted surface, there was a world behind it that I wanted to know.
THE BOOKS OF DUTCH PAINTING at home, with images of 17th century still life, become like contemplative icons to me. And one particular painting of my grandfathers which was no more than a book, an odd copper pot and echt Delfts blauw (the real Delft's blue) tiles on the back wall, continued to linger in my mind. Objects composed in harmonious balance, just like the way my mother would like to have her house arranged.
IT IS CLEAR TO ME—but likely not so clear to others—that its from a posture that results from my Dutch-Canadian sense of space, and mixed feelings towards that history, that I chose to compose the above forms from vacuum formed plastic; on one level beautifying the mundane, a dialogue of balance and imbalance in nature, on another level signifying our rapacious anthropomorphic projection on to it. Primarily, I chose to observe the nature of space and beauty found in everyday material, most specifically plastic. With photo renderings of vacuum molded plastic the work presented here takes on an abstract composition of realistic form, an ungainly attempt to merge still life with urban landscape and making reference to a contemporary architecture of formally and socially imagined horizons.
THIS WORK was accepted by James Elaine, curator of the UCLA Hammer Museum for the exhibition Transforming space at the CIVA Biennial conference in 2007.
