Barrier, Breach, Scaffold

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Doug Melnyk, “Danny Kaye’s Eyes #1,” 1990 (detail)

cibachrome print from computer drawing (courtesy of the Gallery)

Artists: Aliana Au | Sheila Butler | Kevin Deforest | William Eakin | Larry Glawson | Patti Johnson | Debbie Mathew | Doug Melnyk | Ann Smith | Reva Stone | Diana Thorneycroft

Barrier, Breach, Scaffold is an exhibition about play, jokes, and the absolute weirdness of living in a body. Taken from the collection of the Manitoba Arts Council’s Art Bank–a repository of contemporary art that was amassed through the mid-1990s–it is a selection of whimsical artworks that coalesce into something sinister, in line with the dark, ironic, and not-necessarily-funny humour of an era defined by self-liberation and the mainstreaming of alternative genres. It was a time that saw individualism become increasingly biological in expression. The gay rights and third-wave feminist movements celebrated prescriptive gender performance, while “heroin chic” recast dying bodies as the height of beauty. Meanwhile, accessible, digital technologies tantalized artists with the possibilities of pop and lowbrow media as a countermeasure to formal analogue techniques. It is no great surprise that sardonic humour pervades the art of this time; unserious, reactionary, and defensive.

Like humour, skin is a defensive barrier, and like all defenses, it exists in three states: built, broken, and building. Barrier, Breach, Scaffold is a collection of testimonials about the effort, the anger, and the hilarity of being oneself at the end of the millennium.