Conceiving the Sublime: Tegan Whitesel’s <i>Beginnings I</i> and <i>II</i> at <i>Metascope</i>

'Beginnings I' and 'Beginnings II'

Tegan Whitesel knows a thing or two about scale.  And her execution is impeccable, with crucial attention to detail.  When I visited Metascope:  Perceiving and Portraying the Sublime, I was drawn immediately to the magnitude, the enormity, the sublime beauty of two canvases dominating the left wall of the relatively small foyer at Emily Carr:  these were Beginnings I and Beginnings II.   I will discuss the two paintings first together, and then separately, here, because I feel as though they are profoundly intertwined.  They are not merely pieces in the same series; despite their concrete separateness; to contemplate one is to contemplate the other, and that is precisely why Beginnings I and Beginnings II are so extraordinary.

First, though, a few words about the rest of the show.

I filtered into the modest gallery and observed the artists, the art-types, and the like – young women in tights and loose, bohemian tops, scratching at short, blunt bangs; young men in misshapen beards and thick-rimmed glasses jamming slender hands into tight pockets.  As I found myself amid this socially indulgent din, I wondered how many were here to look at art.  Maybe I was just late, or antisocial.  Probably both.

I approached the first piece in the room, closest to the entrance or exit, depending on your point of view.  Sean Mills’s Untitled hung perpendicular to the rest of the exhibit, and its attention to simplistic precision is truly beautiful. White(ish) lines interwoven with white(ish) lines of another depth (and I realize this horrifically limited description does the painting little justice) seemed to sneer in the face of the whimsical and picturesque paintings it introduced.Although I noticed the minimalist canvas on my way into the gallery, truthfully, I did not completely appreciate its mathematical beauty, its serenity and its austere comment, until I was on my way out of the show.

Sean Mills, 'Untitled', acrylic on canvas 59 x 59 inches

The piece is a graceful remark, I think, on the sublime experience.  It distills perceived natural beauty to its foundation and celebrates the mere beauty in its existence, whether it is embodied in an insurmountable peak, or perfectly taped off and painted white lines intersecting perfectly taped off and painted white lines: a vast and beautiful canvas of white.  Both, I think, manifest the psychological Zen achieved in careful meditation.  Contemplating Mills’ painting, somehow, encourages the mind and body to dismiss the mundane, and instead, to consider the texture and the therapeutic presence of interlocking lines.   Perhaps it is the meticulous, painstaking labour involved, or the tangible beauty in mathematical patterns that, here, takes form as paint on canvas, but occupies the natural world all around us – a woven basket, a honeycomb, a blossoming tree – that make this painting a work of art, and such a minimalist, yet reachable, representation of perceiving the sublime.  Interestingly, however, the piece at once embraces measured exactness in uniform vertical lines, but there is a sense of vagueness where they interlock, a fogginess of white that enables the artist and the viewer alike to contemplate the beauty in the unpredictable, imperfect sublime, too.

On the same perpendicular wall, but across the walkway, hung Caroline Mousseau’s eclectic Puddle of Clouds that dripped paint and plastic pieces up its canvas.

Caroline Mousseau, 'Puddle of Clouds', oil, acrylic, prism plastic, silver leaf on canvas 78 x 36 inches

I noticed that most of the art-viewers at the show seemed to admire the oil, acrylic, prism plastic, and silver leaf on canvas, but I must admit the particular aesthetic did not appeal to me, although it might be a successful inspiration for the next Lady Gaga outfit.  Pieces of rough plastic pressed upon metallic drips that contradict gravity and fall toward the top of the painting, perhaps, reference the sublime in a mythical world.  It also has a lovely feeling of oil and water that, again, to me, suggests a version of the sublime found in confusion and disorder.  I suspect the painting is subverting, and indeed, literally overturning, an artistic convention of which I am entirely unaware, and I appreciate the literal aspect of the comment (if it indeed is so), but I felt as though it was not a comment on the sublime as much as it was a comment on the (consciously) aesthetic.

Chia-Chen Hsu’s Untitled garnered little attention from the gallery patrons, at least in the short time I was there, but is quite provoking, I thought.

Chia-Chen Hsu, 'Untitled', oil on canvas, 36 x 72 inches

Hsu seems to manipulate conventions of abstract art and comic-book art with this piece.  Of course, I know nothing of either.  Interestingly, the canvas depicts a series of striped clouds filled with a spectrum of white-alternated colours piled on top of cartoonish, even Chad Van-Gaalen-esque, rendered feet on a rudimentarily painted conventional floor mat. My initial feeling is that this piece is informed by comic or cartoon conventions, but whether or not this is so, the stacked, rainbow-laden bubbles seem to turn a critical eye on the sublime aesthetic of the natural world by its obvious, cookie-cutter cloud shapes and deliberate, horizontal spectral lines that seem to get darker as they descend the image.  The clouds almost suggest dialogue bubbles, too.  If Hsu is representing the anticipations of a word from a faceless character, and then another word and then another word and then another word, this image compounds its viewers’ impotent expectations, and leaves us to rely on our own devices, a naked and bodiless figure to imagine.  The sublime, here, perhaps, is the colour of imagination.

And now, readers, my sincerest apologies for keeping you; I will return to Tegan Whitesel’s Beginnings I and Beginnings II, which truly stole the show, and took their collective interpretation of the sublime in a unique direction.  The obvious benefit to creating larger than life art that occupies so much real estate on the gallery wall is that it is difficult to ignore; it is impressive in its vastness alone.  But Whitesel’s Beginnings I and Beginnings II are not merely incredible paintings that are incredibly large – although they certainly are that; they are, in my humble opinion, images that require 72 x 84 inches of space.

Both pictures are interesting because they at once create their own, distinct environments, or atmospheres, and feature a singular and unique subject, enlarged and centered, almost as a character featured in a movie poster or a video game ‘choose your character screen’ is, yet they follow a parallel design.  These ‘characters’ appear entirely other-worldly, like things from the pages of a colourful sci-fi novel or a biology textbook.  I think the similar treatment of the two subjects, or characters, or species, or whatever they are, despite their distinctness, is an interesting artistic statement, especially if the subjects are indeed representations of life, or nature, or beauty, or all of the above.  Whitesel’s blatant centering and magnifying her organism-like creations, a hallmark of her work, rejects the tendency of artistic (and social) standards to marginalize certain images, or certain parts of images, to force the unknown and unfamiliar to the edges of the canvas and instead privilege a conventionally pleasing aesthetic that distributes images and colour in a familiar, rolling landscape kind of way.  By framing her subjects as she has – almost like portraiture – Whitesel privileges an unconventional and inclusive sublime:  all life, even human life, is unfamiliar in its earliest stages, all life is dynamic, all life has a beginning and an end, and all life is beautiful.

For all their interconnectedness, Beginnings I and II are equally distinctive.

Tegan Whitesel, 'Beginnings I', acrylic, oil and charcoal on canvas, 72 x 84 inches

The atmosphere in Beginnings I feels, to me, like it exists in on a larger plane than Beginnings II, perhaps, because I find the biological inspirations for Beginnings I so much more familiar.  The image is an interesting fusion of plant and animal life.  I want to describe it as a tangled plantlike tube with huge vacuoles, or chlorophyll-stained intestines, with cuplike openings that spit vibrant, fresh, oxygenated blood.  For me, this piece speaks to the interconnectedness and interdependence of animal and plant life, and I think the red splatters make my response to it more visceral.  Interestingly, upon looking closely at what I interpret to be blood spatters, tiny outlines, subtle suggestions, of the image portrayed in Beginnings II emerge.

These ‘microscopic’ insinuations ultimately suggest that Beginnings I is an organism that exists on a larger plane of existence, and that the two ‘species’ are linked in an even more fundamental way than I may have initially thought:  existence of the first necessitates existence of the second.  Or vice versa.

Close up of the right corner of 'Beginnings I'

Or, the two are symbiotic life forms, requiring each other to survive, just as the paintings themselves, I think, require each other to be completely understood.  The pieces, together, are interesting representations of a creative ecological chain, not in terms of what eats what, but in terms of what gives rise to what, what needs what, what enables what.  I interpret this connection as a clandestine overturning of the classic hierarchical schema of life, The Great Chain of Being, which in many ways still dictates perceptions of the moral functions different life forms fulfill in this world.  (And as a vegan, I feel especially familiar with this – the rationalization, for example, that animal life is not as valuable as human life, and/or that “God put animals on this world for human purpose”).  Rather than suggesting a system of biological and spiritual superiority, the paintings, together, reflect the interconnectedness, the symbiotic and cyclical nature, of life as it exists in the natural world.  Conceptually, I think, it also shows viewers, especially art neophytes like myself, how the creative idea is not born in a vacuum, but arises from another idea, another concept, another canvas.

The zoomed-in image suggested in the blood spatters, and foregrounded in Beginnings II supports my interpretation that there are two scales of existence, here, and Beginnings II is the  more minute of the two.

Tegan Whitesel, 'Beginnings II', acrylic and oil on canvas, 72 x 84 inches

The centered object, this time, is duplicated repeatedly in the background and (relatively) large orange plasma-like blobs float about, which also suggests a world further removed from our own in terms of scale, but perhaps more connected to human life on a fundamental level:  who knows what strange-looking little beasts are floating around in our bloodstream?  Well, biologists know, but I don’t.  The suggestion of blood plasma cells, too, supports a biological interpretation of Beginnings I, and leads me to believe the red sprays are indeed blood.  Maybe Beginnings II depicts ominous life – although interconnected and symbiotic; maybe it is a disease or a virus, benign or detrimental, infecting Beginnings I.  The enlarged image itself is a cluster of irregular, surreal, yellowish spheres with ominous green thorns protruding from their centers.  Interestingly, they do not look unlike an abnormally ripening raspberry.  So, from my perspective, the interesting cluster is both reminiscent of strange young plant life and cellular animal life, and even primordial life:  beginnings indeed. 

The tiny ‘single-cell’ replicas of the centered cluster not only indicate its presence in a vast world full of others like itself, they accentuate the under-the-microscope feel, and they add to the environmental authenticity in Beginnings II, and by extension, Beginnings I.  I feel as though I am not merely looking through the microscope at some weird little bacterial creature; I am there, with it, under the microscope too.  And I think that might be the point.  Life is alien, unfamiliar, uniform, and it embodies sublime, awe-inspiring beauty in all its forms, whether they are visible through a microscope, in the diagrams on textbook pages, by the naked eye, or on Whitesel’s tremendous canvases.

My amateur musings do not begin to convey the complexity and the sophisticated beauty in Whitesel’s aesthetics, and the unique way she approaches “perceiving and portraying the sublime.”  Although Metascope is over now, you can see some of her work for yourself at the Emily Carr Grad Show Opening 2010.  Don’t miss it!

– nora

Thanks to Tegan Whitesel, Metascope, and Rory Conroy for the images.