My Favourite People are Dead runs until November 11 at The Marquee Room
Local artists get morbid in the Posthumous Portrait Show
What happens to the people we admire when they pass on? In particular what happens to the famous people we like when they die? What does it look like where they are wherever they are? And what are they doing there?
Curator Courtney Thompson gathered local artists to answer these questions in the exhibit Some of My Favourite People are Dead: The Posthumous Portrait Show on display now at the Marquee Room. Artists featured in this group show include Tom Bagley Lisa Brawn Byron Eggenschwiler Ryan Gustafson Mark Hamilton Matt Luckhurst Aimee Qiu Katie Radke Genevieve Simms Curtis Sorensen Fiona Staples and Kipling West.
The show is fittingly timed to appear during Halloween and pass on as it were on Remembrance Day. Rather than being a completely morbid reflection on death Some of My Favourite People are Dead depicts death in a lighthearted fun and sometimes satirical fashion in the spirit of Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico. Much of the themes and artistic devices the artists use border on kitsch. Bagley’s M’whole Body’s a Weapon captures Don Knotts’s perennially wide-eyed look replete with the ’60s camp of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (including Joan Staley in the foreground admiring Knotts’s bug-eyed ghost). West’s The Ghost of Joan Miro Goes to a Halloween Party is a great rendition of what a joyful festivity with the surrealist artist Miró might look like. In the painting it seems as though Miró is quite oblivious to the fact that he is dead and shows up at a fête with characters resembling some of his sculptures. “I mainly wanted to have an excuse to paint something involving Joan Miró who is someone I have always admired” says West of the motivation behind the piece’s subject matter. “This was a good opportunity to do it so I took it.” Indeed in keeping with the portraiture theme of the show depicting Miró with a bunch of bizarrely shaped and playful looking monsters does seem appropriate.
Radke chose to represent a rather different sort of personality in her hilarious Porn-no-neer a dedication to former porn star John Holmes who pioneered the introduction of HIV testing in the porn industry. Complete with wooden frame this digital print is fun simple and direct. Some of the titles for the works are darkly comic such as E for Effort a piece denoting a botched suicide. In contrast Qiu’s collage is brightly coloured and almost sublime and doesn’t even seem to feature death as a theme at all but instead perhaps a vision of heaven.
A particularly large body of work by Brawn is present in the form of stylized pine-wood carvings. These pieces could possibly make up a show in their own right and commemorate celebrities as diverse as Diane Arbus to Ernie Coombs (Mr. Dressup).
Death is in the details in this show — even the pieces are labelled with toe tags. Thompson’s intention was to explore the role of art as memorial. One of the key factors of exploration in her original call for submissions included: how and in what ways we choose to remember the dead in terms of how they were the moment of their demise or how we perceive them to be in the “afterlife” — whatever that may mean. This is done very colourfully and in a diversity of media and styles such as acrylic collage carving digital print and illustration.
The Marquee Room (on the second floor of the Uptown Theatre) as a venue is also a great place to showcase all these diverse artists and pieces as the eclectic décor perfectly complements the multifarious nature of the show.
