Between Views (Detail)
1994. Detail centre structure with red side wall.
Wood, glass, painted silk-screen on sintra
90” x 126” x 24”. Collection of the artist
Photo: Isaac Appelbaum

© Renée Van Halm

The works in Anonymous Volumes refer to the specific exhibition site, a 1922 Arts and Crafts-style house that now houses the Gairloch Gallery at Oakville Galleries. The style of this house with its reverence for tradition and attention to materials and craft, collided with my interest in early modernist architectural practices, domestic settings and gardens.

In these works I used, for example, the Gerrit Rietveld’s Schrœder house built in 1924-25 in Holland as a modernist counterpoint in Quotation 1924/25.  In addition, the autumn garden surrounding the house provided a location for further thoughts about still life. The remaining evidence of the house’s former domestic role and the abundant reminders of that past made it possible to insert more structural references, either by denial or affirmation.

Between Views

< Between Views asserts itself as an object that denies the site, a formal living room with fireplace. This work consists of three freestanding wall sized elements. The first is a two-sided curved black screen, each side displaying a different narrow black and white painted image of a deteriorating garden. Each of these vertical paintings impose an anthropocentric reading onto the landscape genre and identifies it as a cultural construction. Coupled with the two gingham covered walls these exaggerated, familiar elements become an imposing and discomforting presence.