Cliff Eyland

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Cliff Eyland, “Treaty Landscapes with Art and Crosses of Faith and Lost Faith,” assembled in 2017

detail of 273 mixed-media paintings on MDF board, 3” x 5” each (collection of the artist’s estate, photo by William Eakin)

This expansive exhibition – it spans four decades and features more than 1,000 of Winnipeg artist Cliff Eyland’s works, along with videos, photos and archival documents – started out as a collaboration with guest curator Robert B. Epp. After Eyland’s death in 2020, Library of Babel: A Retrospective became a moving tribute to the archivist, teacher, curator, writer, mentor and friend to many, whose creative reach and intellectual curiosity had always seemed endless. 

The show, on view at the Winnipeg Art Gallery until May 15, operates in the charged territory between word and image, idea and object, library and gallery, as it circles around Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’ metaphor of “the library as universe.” Eyland, raised in Dartmouth, N.S., was a lifelong bibliophile, and his best-known works were large installations in public libraries in Winnipeg, Halifax, Edmonton and Moose Jaw. 

He also worked with easy, unstinting energy in a three-inch by five-inch format, producing thousands upon thousands of small paintings and drawings on Masonite, MDF board or cardstock, the dimensions referencing the file cards used in library catalogues in the old pre-digital days.  

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Cliff Eyland, “Self-Portrait with Yellow Streak,” 1987

acrylic on Masonite board, 5” x 3” (collection of the Nova Scotia Art Bank, Halifax)

These small works operate at both micro and macro levels. Seen from afar, many of Eyland’s big assemblages of small rectangles read as grids, suggesting the order of rational, rules-based information systems. Move up close, however, and they separate into specific, sometimes anarchic, visions. Within an arm’s reach, they can range from Goyaesque grotesquerie to Pop playfulness to Surrealist fever-dreams. He can reference the sheer beauty of landscape painting, conjure up sublimely silly nudes, and experiment with messy abstractions that revel in paint’s squidgy physicality. 

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Cliff Eyland, “Smartphone,” detail from the series “Cameras, Cellphones and Hard Drives,” 2003-2018

33 mixed-media paintings on MDF board, 5” x 3” each (collection of the artist’s estate, photo by William Eakin)

Eyland treats the book as a repository of knowledge but also as a physical object, with its own heft, feel and look. A 2009 series featuring laser-print images of bookshelves namedrops authors, from the famous to the obscure, while channelling the clear colours and clean lines of hard-edged abstraction. Another work, 28 Librarians (2014-17) challenges cultural stereotypes of libraries as prissy and protected silent sanctums, its sketched-in characters fizzing with scribbled and scrawled vivacity, underlining Eyland’s belief in the eroticism of ideas and the dangerous promiscuity of knowledge. 

Eyland’s outlook was, in one sense, highly cerebral – he studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the 1980s, when the Halifax school was still steeped in Conceptualism – and, in another, insistently corporeal, with an intense engagement with the physical processes of drawing and painting.

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Cliff Eyland, “Peach Tree Chronicles (Book Painting),” detail from the series “Librarians, Books and Clouds,” 2014-2016

300 acrylic paintings on MDF board, acrylic on inkjet print on MDF board, 5” x 3” (collection of the artist’s estate, photo by William Eakin)

The mind-body issue takes on more poignance in intimate documentary footage shot by Winnipeg filmmaker Adam Brooks. Here, Eyland, who lived with pulmonary sarcoidosis, a rare disease of unknown cause that destroyed his lungs, faces his physical mortality with characteristic equanimity by talking about the “extra time” he gained after a double lung transplant to think, read and draw. “I’ll be dead within 10 years, likely five,” he says. “That’s cool. I’ll just hang out until then.”

Library of Babel offers another chance to hang out with Eyland and to experience – through his art – his emotional generosity, his intellectual sharpness and his sideways humour. It’s wonderful. ■

Cliff Eyland, Library of Babel: A Retrospective, at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from Jan. 22 to May 15, 2022.

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