Pluck at Pangée, Montreal

There is an evasive dynamic common to the works in Pluck, wherein withheld intimacy is evoked by glimpses into the artist’s acts of collecting. In new works by Greg Carideo, Katelyn Eichwald, Plum Cloutman, and Bronson Smillie, the curtain is drawn back, but not entirely, inviting the viewer to glimpse a highly sought object, setting, or sentiment. Of course, most artists are invested in looking closely, but these works solicit the viewer to look over the artists’ shoulders, to witness cropped scenes. These works reflect the decision to pluck a motif, a moment, or a mood— and stay with it.

Whether the result of careful study or intuitive response, attunement and responsiveness to detail assume a diaristic quality in Pluck. To wit, a discarded heel nestles like a heart chakra within the awning-like armature of Carideo’s SRM. This particular heel is one of hundreds that the artist has collected over the years. The heel’s inclusion recalls Carideo’s own walks through urban and rural no man’s lands, gathering abandoned garments and textiles to cleanse and use alongside handmade brazed steel structures that enshrine (re)discovered objects.

The stakes of selection looms in Eichwald’s oil paintings on burlap. Her faded, film still- like images of ripening blackberries, swimming pelicans, crosses on a necklace, and tombstones in a misty graveyard depict moments of unnerving calm, prequels or postludes perhaps to suburban horror. The presence of small groupings in Eichwald’s compositions emphasize individual vulnerability—which berry will be picked? Which pelican may bloody itself to nourish its young as in the vampiric Christian allegories? What choices have led the artist to these fixations?

Cloutman’s dense, impasto-style paintings reflect how the selection of a particular context—in this case, interior domestic spaces—can upend the consistency one might assume of relative confinement. Certainty is suspended in compositions featuring surreal human encounters with animated household objects, as in Breakfast for Dinner and Still Life, and existential dread is activated in Forgotten Sauce, in which an unattended stove sparks flames in a Victorian dollhouse-like cross section. As in Carideo’s and Eichwald’s works, the intimate scale of Cloutman’s paintings reflect how zooming in can create a heightened, and perhaps dissembling, relationship to boundaries.

In contrast with the dissociative undertones of Cloutman’s domestic containers, Smillie’s Debris Flow sculptural variations showcase the more intended muta-bility that can arise from externally imposed structure. Smillie pulps recycled print materials, including Uline catalogues and heavily stamped envelopes, and compresses these remnants of commercial and personal communications into three wooden cassette tape holders and one print drawer in his Debris Flow series. Smillie plucks objects from the past and augments them to create new containers of information—the resulting grids convey both limits and leakage, linking these works with the exploration of boundaries in Carideo’s structure and Cloutman’s interiors.

Seen in a certain light, to pluck—an idea, an inspiration, an object—is a decisive and courageous act. But what about when the resulting action warps or reframes the wider context? Does staring too long or fixedly necessarily de- or re-contextualize the subject? Carideo, Eichwald, Cloutman, and Smillie negotiate these dynamics differently, yet they collectively convey how ruminating can both protect and distort the object of fixation. In the end, zooming in on the source of fascination may render it both more and less familiar.

-Text by Esme Hogeveen