Deborah Thompson: Pan-dulum

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Deborah Thompson, “Reason Unchained: Screaming Goat,” 2018

mixed media on canvas, 46" x 52" (photo by Jeremy Addington)

Deborah Thompson’s exhibition, Pan-dulum: A Call to Unreason, is like walking into a spell cast by Pan, the half-man, half-goat pagan god of nature. Panic, according to myth, is to flee with unreasoning fear from nature.

Saturated colours just this side of psychedelic set up viewers for a dash through unreason in Pan-dulum, on view until Nov. 3 at the Kootenay Gallery of Art in Castlegar, B.C. Ten paintings, three drawings and five kinetic sculptures feature human and animal faces in states of anguish, ecstasy and everything between.

Thompson, based in Nelson, B.C., has long explored mythical subjects but felt her facility in drawing had become a crutch. For this body of work, she decided to separate drawing from painting by sketching faces on paper that she then used as stencils to compose the paintings.

Those stencils, stacked and enlarged, were also used for the aluminum sculptures suspended from the gallery’s ceiling. Set into motion by viewers, they cast nuanced shadows on the wall.

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Deborah Thompson, “Pan-dulum,” 2018

installation view at Kootenay Gallery of Art, Castlegar, B.C.; photo by Jeremy Addington)

Some paintings sport cloven hooves and there is a portrait of a goat, Reason Unchained: Screaming Goat. These are traces of Pan, as is the partial goat skull that oversees exhibition documents in a quiet corner.

Thompson’s deep reading of French philosopher Michel Foucault, Canadian addiction expert Gabor Maté, and James Hillman, an American Jungian psychologist, is reflected in titles such as Hungry Ghosts and House of Confinement.

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Deborah Thompson, “Inscape,” 2018

mixed media on canvas, 46" x 46" (photo by Jeremy Addington)

The watery blue Nightmare Triptych is informed by Francisco José de Goya’s Los Caprichos, a series of 80 aquatint etchings published as an album of social commentary in 1799. The most famous, The Sleep of Reason Produced Monsters, no doubt influenced Thompson. Reason failed Goya’s Spain, while Thompson sees unreason as a remedy for her era. Her call, a plea for life itself, amplifies Goya’s.

Pan-dulum suggests a pendulum between fear and desire amidst the current climate of environmental crisis, political turmoil, escapist activities and addictions. It calls us to our senses and to compassion. You don’t need to know that as you visit the gallery, but you will feel it. ■

Pan-dulum is on view from Sept. 21 to Nov 3, 2018 at the Kootenay Gallery of Art in Castlegar, B.C.