There is an implied logic in the way we approach life (there has to be in order to relate to each other) but as if there is a door open at the far reaches of things-as-they-are, there is a light beyond that opening illuminating ideas outside the room of logic.  By willing consciousness towards this light, change brings us into this future room where objects that have never-before-been come to exist. It sounds like a fairytale, but it is the process of life, moving from earliest times through centuries until the Renaissance, then to the industrial age followed by modernity where, notably, the idea of ‘progress’ became the primary driver. The metaphor of passage can also be applied to the creative process.

GIZMOS resides in that realm that moves from the past into the future. Gizmos, those things that we don’t quite have a word for yet and which is so ephemeral that the dictionary definition is just “gadget, thing”. ‘Gadget’ tends to diminish and what exactly is a ‘thing’? That’s a broad term that could be, well, just about anything. Extend the concept into the act of making an art piece and (since art can be just about anything or just about anything can be called art) GIZMOS is a good title for these works by Steve Mennie whose studio is in Salmon Arm and Chuck St. John, who lives and works in Lee Creek. Each artist gathers material from the jetsam of their complicated lives and makes it into art. And Ditto for Ortansa Moraru, drawing ‘things’ in her Toronto studio; hers is flotsam of the mind and these floating bits of drawn things are currently swishing and swirling from Ortansa’s head onto paper. 

 Steve Mennie has nimbly moved between and through artistic genres, He has had periods as an adept realist in both drawings and paintings but has also produced significant abstract series. He is a master printmaker (silk screen), a videographer and this latest work also uses collage.  He possesses a critical, ironic wit fueled by media exposure and a disappointment at man’s stewardship of the earth. In these new works he uses drawings in conjunction with found imagery and manipulated images which he has assembled and enclosed in vintage frames, underlining the fact that we are conditioned and ‘framed’ by our time. His is a spare, tilted and yet styled vision, each piece sedate and wry.

Mennie’s new collages could be related to the work of the Dada-ists who used collaged photos along with drawings and paint, often with political innuendo within the imagery. Mennie uses a similar sophisticated palette that brings attention to the design or formal structure of the works and from there the underlay of meaning may be gleaned or at least suggested like a question exemplified. Mennie’s judgement, a combination of taste backed up by unwavering opinions and suggested mores, comes off with elegance intact – no coarse street slurs here but rather finely turned phrases.

Where Chuck St. John weighs in is with reference to the metaphysical through an unmistakably iconic allusion. His sculptures may appear weighted in cement but actually the artist has developed a compound that looks and works like cement but is markedly lighter.  As if the sculptures could have been instruments used in scientific experiments or objects to be worshipped by ancestors in either case the imagined predecessors neglected to pass down manuals for their applications so that ‘use’ is mysterious.  St. John also has a firm grip on the fabrication of stained glass, a medium which comes with unavoidable cultural associations to religion. Whether in glass, stone, cement or found objects, his works suggest architectonic sacred spaces, naves, altars or pulpits fashioned as if the language of art nouveau has cosmically tuned in to the design embodied in nature and combined it with magical systems – astrology, numerology, lunar and solar influences. 

And Ditto answers Ortansa Moraru in The Drawers Gallery, sassily. Bringing with her works a comparable level of technical and artistic expertise, Moraru sheds the significant to play. These exuberant watercolors cast a joyous energy, the shadow of figures striding unavoidable and with the association, because of the ebullient gestural mark making, an uplifting wind carries the imagery.  Funkily pop, the early cartoons of hippiedom (Fabulous Freak Brothers) in costumed pageantry acting out theatrical emotive scenes comes to mind or animated emojis and manga characters caught in a blurring bounce, a psychedelic cloud.