STEVE GOUTHRO "Deadringer," October 14 to November 27, 2010, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Brandon

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"Trio"

Steve Gouthro, "Trio," oil on canvas, 2010, 40" X 48".

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"Between"

Steve Gouthro, "Between," oil on canvas, 2010, 48" X 48".

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"Trio"

Steve Gouthro, "Trio," oil on canvas, 2010, 40" X 48".

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STEVE GOUTHRO

Deadringer, October 14 to November 27, 2010, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Brandon

BY: Jill Sawyer

“I’ve been taking photographs of reflections for 30 years,” says Steve Gouthro over the din of a Brandon bar. “Mirrors are interesting, because they have a way of framing things.”

For his fall show at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Gouthro is placing the frame around himself. Called Deadringer, it’s a series of oil self-portraits, most capturing his wide-eyed, slightly startled face in glass, mirrors, and mottled surfaces, the tentative light of elevators and fluorescents throwing a dull sheen over the wrinkles in his forehead. It’s a series that’s been a long time in gestation, but one he thinks is perfectly positioned, timing-wise.

A previous portrait series at the Winnipeg Art Gallery took him into automotive manufacturing plants — he’s drawn to settings filled with complicated detail — and he describes those paintings as being about degeneration and decay, of the people who work in them, and of the industry itself. For Deadringer, the decay is more personal.

“I’m in my late 50s,” he says. “Actually in another year I won’t be in my late 50s anymore. Seeing myself at this stage of life, there’s a certain awareness. I’m still alive but I see the degeneration, and I can still see what I was.”

In one portrait, Between, Gouthro snapped a moment in an elevator — he and a woman look up at the mirrored ceiling, she’s blurred in movement and he clutches the camera, a look of raised-eyebrow detachment on his face. This one captures every significant element in the series — reflections, distortion, self-awareness, elevators, cameras.

The artist is particularly taken by the division of the mirrors in the ceiling, and the way they divide the portrait’s subjects from each other. He connects that dividing “X” with the process of printmaking, the medium he used before turning to oils. “After every printmaking run, you make what’s called a cancellation print, with a big X through it. That’s evidence that the series has expired. That X is a very powerful thing.” In Between, for Gouthro the X in the mirror creates a natural division between permanent and transitory existence.

Another portrait, Fissure, catches the artist, and a woman, gazing at the viewer as the stippled doors of the elevator close on them. Gouthro, in this one, has a quiet, half-lidded look on his face, a sliver of awareness as the doors swish closed. He’s drawn to elevators for the same reason he’s drawn to reflections — they create a space that captures a brief moment. “Elevators are literally a state of abeyance, between origin and finality,” he says. “For me, they’re a metaphor for existence.”

While Gouthro has rarely used the framework of reflection in his paintings before, this show tackles head-on the notion of time passing, and self-evaluation. The nakedness of the faces furthers the idea. “I’m looking at this face in a very objective way,” he says about the self-portraits. “It’s as if I’m looking at it from the outside, as an object. In a reflection, you recognize yourself, but at the same time you don’t recognize yourself.”

Chair of the Faculty of Visual Art at Brandon University, Gouthro has been in this prairie city for five years, moving there after working as a sessional instructor at the University of Manitoba. While he’s been working on these quiet, self-referential works, he’s been embracing the growing art community in Brandon, which is stoked by the University and by the Art Gallery, and is skewing more youthful. It’s while surrounded by young artists all day that he’s been inspired to think creatively about time.