Charles Mandel
Visual Arts

Udell slings a hash of new, young artists

Calling a show of emerging artists Fresh Meat, as gallery owner Douglas Udell has done, could be construed as vulgar, provocative or just honest.
After all, the reality is, is the art market is always hungry for the next big thing. So what better to throw the starving collectors but a number of young painters and sculptors right out of art school?
As for vulgar and provocative, the show itself is both. It's hard to say what will catch your eye. Most of the art is hard-hitting and excitable. What sticks with me are Victoria Prince's outrageous sculptures. The Winnipeg artist has one titled Pull Toy that is nothing less than a Francis Bacon painting rendered three-dimensionally.
With its head nothing more than a rictus mouth pulled open in a toothy scream, it's two elongated appendages and its candy-floss pink, matted fur, Pull Toy is a clever quotation of Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Prince also appears to be taking some of her cues from the more recent shock art out of Britain. Primary Thought is a repulsive wall sculpture that replaces the three monkeys that could see, hear or speak no evil with what can only be described as pink abortions.
Each of these have surgical tubing emerging from vaginas that plunge into their eyes, ears and mouth. It's a powerful image, if perhaps a bit gimmicky because of its violent nature.

Saskatoon's Marcel Kerkhoff is equally disquieting. His large oil painting titled Two Dolls is the picture of innocence for all of one moment. In fact, the image is disturbingly sexual.
Two half-naked blonde dolls fondle the upright ears of a beanie baby rabbit in a not entirely appropriate manner. The result is contradictory and perverse.
It's hard to say where Kerkhoff is headed with his art. One of his other pieces, Millennium Princess is odd and amusing, an oil painting of a strangely dancing insect set among a cloud of brushstrokes worthy of the Group of Seven. His bug is inherently ugly, his treatment of it beautiful. All of his art Is very eccentric.
From the University of Alberta comes more conventional work. Cindy Fuhrer's nudes are intense figures swimming in space over top of sewing patterns, of all things. Her colour sense is gorgeous, the orange hair of one woman flaming atop a lime-green aura. The paintings are largely personal, but handsome to look upon.
Tessa Nunn's "Artist and Muse" is a self-portrait with the painter scruitinizing the viewers as if composing them into an image.
The muse is a hugely pregnant woman who bursts with possibility, life and ideas.
Kim Croswell's metal sculptures immediately identify her as a student of Peter Hide. The glossy black finishes from automotive paint and wax cannot hide the rough, upright treatment of pieced-together steel.