Dana Slijboom at Zalucky Contemporary

What is a lawn, anyway? As North American suburban sprawl continues to spread across the land, I wonder how many hectares are covered by the manicured and wellkept swaths of green mowed grass meticulously outlined with edging shovels. How many times do you think our neighbours have looked over the hedge and snickered at the scraggly state of our unkempt lawn and wilting flowers after weeks of neglect? It is as if lawn and garden care is an essential pillar of the social contract of urban life—egad!

Curiously enough, the birth of the lawn is rooted within class conflict. During the 16th and 17th Century in Europe, lawns were a manifes-tation of luxury by the ruling class. Rolling hills of cut grass signaled two main points to members of the public: first, a wealthy landowner had means to employ several servants to manually maintain the grounds with hand scythes; and second, the landowner opted to use their land for play and recreation rather than farming and livestock production. It wasn’t until 1830 that Edwin Beard Budding invented the first mechanical mowing device. This tool effectively eliminated the need for manual labour thus empowering people of any class to flaunt a lawn of their own.

By the late 19th Century lawn mowers were being mass produced at an industrial scale. The American Dream was coming and it included a house, a picket fence, and a freshly cut lawn. To analyze the lawn is to analyze the tension between the world and the representation of the world in the life of the human being. We have the tendency to want to be of the world but not in it. A lawn reveals an imitation of the natural world stripped of any of the chaotic energy that gives mother nature her lifeforce. It is a graduated boundary between the realm of the natural world and the human world—a likely construction for a monotheist culture. National parks, golf courses, and even Disney World are other examples of humans shaving the rough edges off of nature for our pleasure. Representation becomes a transgressive act as we modify and mark the world to appear more like our image of it. Perhaps the camera obscura operator fills a room with an inverted image of the world beyond its walls in hopes of confusing the image from the index.

Only one year after Budding invented his push-operated mechanical mower, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre successfully created the first photochemical representation of the world. This process—called the daguerreotype —produced a unique image on a silvered copper plate. Appearing like a mirror at many angles, early daguerreotypes rendered the first images of the world with the reflections of mystified onlookers superimposed into one. In this moment the mental and optical unconscious were forever fused. For nearly two hundred years we have basked in a constant and forever expanding flow of images in our reflection. What was once transgressive is now commonplace.

Not Your Garden, a solo exhibition by Dana Slijboom, reveals the transgressive nature of representation through a new series of nine oil paintings. Depicting houses, flowers, a crown, a zebra, and slippery sssssnakes, Slijboom attunes the optical unconscious of the viewer to the way subject matter is twisted, perverted, and often violated through the process of representation. The first clue to this critique is visible in Slijboom’s painting style which renders childlike forms with meticulous and exacting perfection. With no trace of brushstroke, the focus burns on that which is being depicted rather than the one that is constructing the depiction. Moreover, where blocks of colour collide does not reduce to a painterly blur, in fact the opposite occurs, the jagged line you might expect from a pixelated image appears rendered in paint.

Slijboom’s paintings intentionally confuse our optical flow to reveal the inherent contradictions of an image-based painted medium. A shim-mering effect flickers across the eye, one that allures the senses but not without fatigue. The colour pallet oscillates between sensuous beauty and abrasive contrast through bright and sometimes electric pastel shades. These optical techniques force the viewer to question whether or not to give the works a passing glance like a scrolling image or scan deeply like a painting. The realization that they are both at the same time sends vibrations through the eyes and into the brain.

Distinct from the manicured lawns of the Disney World fantasy, Slijboom uses fanciful abstraction to reveal the obscene and show the viewer signs of the world as it really is. The painted ridges that line the edge of each shape in Slijboom’s paintings appear as fractures in the surface of representation. The illusion cracks open, revealing a disturbing truth about the ways images operate today. Not Your Garden uses and abuses representation so that the viewer is confronted by the abstraction of subject matter as a casualty of culture as much as an aesthetic.

– Parker Kay

Dana Slijboom is a Canadian-Dutch painter living and working in Toronto. Recent exhibitions include BOOM DOOM ROOM at The Plumb, Toronto (2021), Twenty-Four at Bricks Gallery, Copenhagen DK (2020), Romance at Erin Stump Projects, Toronto (2019) and Ranch Dressing at Towards, Toronto (2018). Her work is included in several catalogues including Caniche Vol. 4 published by Revista Caniche, Mexico City, Nut Volume 2, plublished by BookArt, Montreal and Confetti Generation published by Polly’s Picture Show, Amsterdam. She holds a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam NL (2009). Her work is included in the collections of TD Canada Trust, Scotiabank, the Royal Bank of Canada as well as several private collections.

Dana Slijboom, Not Your Garden, 2022, exhibition view, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto

Dana Slijboom, Installation view of Black and White and Read All Over, 2022, oil on canvas, 52 x 40 inches and No I am The King of the World, 2022, oil on canvas, 52 x 40 inches

Dana Slijboom, Black and White and Read All Over, 2022, oil on canvas, 52 x 40 inches

Dana Slijboom, No I am The King of the World, 2022, oil on canvas, 52 x 40 inches

Dana Slijboom, Pretty Pink, 2022, Flashe and oil on canvas, 36.75 x 28.5 inches (framed)

Dana Slijboom, Pretty Pink, 2022, Flashe and oil on canvas, 36.75 x 28.5 inches (framed)

Dana Slijboom, Not Your Garden, 2021, oil on canvas, 48.75 x 64.75 inches

Dana Slijboom, Waterfront Property, 2022, oil on canvas, 44.5 x 50.75 inches (framed)

Dana Slijboom, Waterfront Property, 2022, oil on canvas, 44.5 x 50.75 inches (framed)

Dana Slijboom, Stop and Go, Nice and SSSSSlow, 2022, oil on canvas, 43 x 56 inches

Dana Slijboom, Not Your Garden, 2022, exhibition view, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto

Dana Slijboom, BEES, 2022, Flashe and oil on canvas, 30.5 x 24.75 inches (framed)

Dana Slijboom, The Not Today Flower, 2022, flashe and oil on canvas, 30.5 x 24.75 inches (framed)