Have you met Sarah Letovsky? She's running a hot new spot on our blog called "The Westside Loop." Check back every week to see what Sarah has to say about another great new show in Toronto's West end! Check out her first post about Scott Waters' latest show at LE Gallery.
Scott Waters at LE Gallery
Sarah Letovsky
Canada's involvement in the
war in Afghanistan is not often a topic of artistic discussion, but for artist Scott Waters, the nature of modern warfare serves as the focus for his
latest exhibition, “The Keeper of Nothingness”.
When you first enter LE Gallery at
1183 Dundas Street west, you’re immediately drawn to the 48” x 72” piece Mile
Kilometer Zero (2012), a massive depiction of a Canadian military aircraft.
It looms menacingly against the red sky, a striking symbol of Canadian power in
a foreign country, and not without references to a tomb or coffin.
Waters served as an infantryman in
the Third Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry from 1989 to
1992, stationed in Alberta and British Columbia. In 2006, as part of the
Canadian Forces Artist Program (CFAP), Waters visited CFB Gagetown NB to
observe India company, 2 RCR train for the types of situations they would
encounter in Afghanistan. He also flew to Afghanistan to join his former
battalion as they trained the Afghan National Army.
For an artist, the experience of
training for war and being in Afghanistan is one of duality - seeing through
the eyes of both a soldier and civilian. “The Keeper of Nothingness” is full of
these self-conscious conflictions and dualities. The paintings themselves are a
thematic and formal conflict of light and dark. Water’s style itself is
expressive, light handed and gestural, a beautiful play of oranges and blues, yet
it is deployed to grapple with threatening and ominous subject matter. Tracers
(For Greff) (2012) depicts happy orange streaks dancing across a night sky
- a poetic representation of Tracer bullets, which are used to light up a
bullet stream to track live fire and to correct aim.
From his personal statement, Waters
comments on this intentional duality in his work: “The Keeper of Nothingness
also considers the liminal space — where one set of norms is exchanged for
another. This might be mountain to valley, but it might also be safety into
chaos, or representation into abstraction”. Water’s work is a not an
explicit comment on his time in the Canadian Forces, or a political statement.
Rather, it tells a story about the human experience of a modern war, and the
effect it has on real people. Reading between the lines, there is a story of
fraternal bonding, post traumatic stress, violence, and of cross-cultural
pollination.
"The Keeper of Nothingness" closed
on June 2nd. Water’s work can be seen on the LE Gallery website, (http://le-gallery.ca/
Be sure to check out LE Gallery’s
upcoming exhibit of Quebec painter Nathalie Thibault, opening june 7th
