By Joel Faflak (The University of Western Ontario)
London, long one of the most fertile centers of the Canadian artistic imagination in the middle of one of Canada’s most conservative enclaves, is having something of a rebirth. Gerald Vaandering’s show at the Michael Gibson Gallery, which is turning into one of the most forward-thinking venues on the contemporary Canadian art scene, is a sure sign of this renaissance. One story about the genesis of Vaandering’s new pieces is this: work on a large print in his south London studio was not going well, so he discarded the print in the studio backyard. Glancing at it sometime later – disintegrating, forgotten – Vaandering came to a necessary realization: even when we go in the wrong direction, we end up in the right place. Such a revelation, as the afflatus for his newest work, begs fundamental questions: Is art anything more than grappling for meaning in Plato’s cave, missing its own cues? Does culture, losing sight of itself, need art? At what moment does the soul, moving about in darkness, suddenly feel present to itself?
The title of Vaandering’s show comes from the English poet John Donne’s “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward,” a poem about confronting fate and death. The poet is “carried towards the West,” but, as Donne writes, “my soul’s form bends toward the East,” where he will find redemption in the “Sun” of an “endless day.” The poem struggles between the sacred and the profane as a necessary prelude to their resolution. The poet John Dryden criticized Donne because he “perplexes the mind” with the “speculations of philosophy.” Vaandering seems to take this criticism as a starting point, for in this newest work he treats speculation as an aesthetic possibility that cuts both ways. The metaphysical conceit of his work, like that of Donne, evokes the excessive speculations of an overly rationalized existence. It risks, well, conceit itself, even cliché. But that’s also the way an imaginative speculation works. It can’t directly promise redemption, but it can transform how we see the world, which seems powerful enough.
A particularly human past-time, speculation is one of those things designed to give us comfort. It is supposedly where we transcend our own instinctual life. But Goya reminds us that the sleep of reason breeds monsters, the inevitable result of an enlightenment promise. The ruins of this promise become compulsively repetitive motifs in Vaandering’s work: the stock market indexes, the fragments of glass and steel post-industrial architecture, the phantom drones of Bay or Wall Street. All evoke the austere volatility of the global marketplace, the dehumanization and spiritual barrenness of late capitalist life. Plywood and aluminum, Vaandering’s present materials of choice, are the right mediums for this message. Both convey at once the sterility of a fabricated culture and the flexible, unruly, and fragile gesture of the human, an imagination anxiously complicit in the very manufacture it attempts to transcend.
The images in Vaandering’s work – fragments of computer generated and manipulated photographs and print media – sometimes appear with a clean precision (“Together,” “No Room”), reminiscent of Vaandering’s earlier work. There the images were screened onto wood then painted over with coloured encaustic, usually an earthly but deadly black barely but fatefully edged in red. He further layered the surface with random graph curves, bar codes, and numbers. In the current show these fiscal gestures have morphed into an abstracted diacritical iconography of lines, swipes, and fields. These both productively and eerily echo the images, the manipulation of which now appears as a deliberate distortion – the dizzy warping of bodies, stock market quotes, and architecture in “Give Away,” “Background Noise,” or “Side Swipe,” for instance. The effect, woozy and deconstructive, is at once inhuman and liberating, a visual bent that shows us a potential insight beyond the imposition of perspective.
Because the semiotic field of Vaandering’s surfaces are now less literal, they evoke both an aesthetic postponement and a conceptual possibility, a more powerful way of seeing otherwise. Before, encaustic was the obvious mark of the organic, of art’s human nature re-asserting its momentary prerogative in a rote, technological landscape (and it needs to be said that Vaandering’s use of encaustic made productive sense of an otherwise overused and often cliché medium). Here that assertion is subtler, integral, but thus also more disturbingly embedded in the same technique from which it wants to liberate itself.
This change came with Vaandering’s shift to working with metal in his 2005 show (entitled, simply, “Metal”) at the Gibson Gallery. At first Vaandering sometimes employed a cumbersome steel whose heaviness one felt in the pieces themselves. The effect, like the show’s name, was often too one-dimensional, falling flat without always moving forward. But Vaandering sensed an “intellectual” relationship between wax and metal:
Wax is an organic medium made under the corporate structure of the hive. Steel is very similar. It is a commodity largely driven by a market enterprise that makes me marvel. Nothing seems to be able to stop it.
In this new show the metal is aluminum, which makes more productive sense of Vaandering’s themes of the alloy between nature and the human, the personal and the corporate, the soul and the marketplace. The effect is lighter, pliant, as if the material created a space for the artist’s imaginative and thematic tensions to play themselves out more freely.
Ironically, by flattening its sculpted encaustic surfaces, Vaandering’s work has become oddly more three-dimensional. Something more vertiginous and dangerous, and thus more urgent and energetic, has been released in his vision. At first the effect is one of cool rationality, a post-industrial sheen that is emphasized in the clear finish of plywood, Vaandering’s other chosen surface. Juxtaposing the materials, however, creates an expected dialogue. The plywood lends a natural warmth and texture that has to be coaxed from the metal through grinding and burnishing. But that effect in turn reveals an unexpected vitality and depth, a receptiveness to light that plywood largely resists, making it seem banal, vapid, lusterless.
The most powerful instance of this juxtaposition are the show’s centerpieces, “The seat of all our Souls” and “Dancefloor.” Both are made of 25 individual pieces of the same size assembled to form two identical, monolithic images. One is plywood, the other aluminum. Their nearly-seamless surface, puzzled together by Vaandering’s faultless craftsmanship, is the sign of confidence in technology to parse reality and not get it wrong. We are reassured about art’s ability to make something of chaos. But we are also reminded of the technology of perception itself, of the fact that human perspective is at some level no more than the digitized increments that make up the organic whole of our virtual psychological realities.
“Seat” and “Dancefloor” are like those puzzle pieces that my parents gave me to occupy my solitude in the back seat of our family car on long vacations. The pieces came slotted but jumbled within a tight plastic frame and one had to figure out how to re-organize them into a coherent picture (Rubic’s Cubes are the three-dimensional version of these puzzles). The work was at once intensely satisfying and maddening, imagining a final perspective that might never come. One wanted to break the frame and simply re-arrange the pieces on their own. Vaandering slots his images onto horizontal runners to form a series of courses that built toward the final image. Yet the frame around them is entirely imaginary, arbitrary. This mechanical orchestration stages the artificiality but also the malleability of perspective, the possibility of a human re-imposition.
The show articulates this visual syntax most tellingly as a traumatic breakdown of perspective, the site where technique and vocabulary collapse into one another. Two signs of this breakdown are the suture and the wound, deployed by Vaandering as two kinds of thresholds. Starting with his first metal pieces Vaandering would “use a welder turned up to a high temperature so that when the electrode touches the metal it just digs in and breaks through the surface. I wanted to show a ‘breaking of the surface’: a way of showing the metal, but showing an aspect that you would not expect from the metal.” This break is echoed by gouges and routed lines in the plywood, as if to make its entirely artificial, laminated depths speak like the lost voices or markings of a palimpsest. Where in Vaandering’s earlier metal works this surface “breakthrough” sometimes seemed to me contrived, here its falling flat succeeds by, literally, “falling flat.” The tensions are, as it were, all on the surface.
The surface of “Outside Track,” for instance, is pocked by a series of random gouges whose revealed red interior seems to provide a sparse and tenuous syntax between the surface’s left and right sides—bullet wounds that are, paradoxically, the one sign of an inner life. The five walking figures on the left side—a community in spring green—is marginalized to the left side. The dominating right side contains a single silver figure—lonely, taut, awkward—menaced by the advancing traffic behind him. The left side is happy variations, but the single theme betrays their inner anxiety. In “Give Away” this anxiety is figured literally as the ghostly image of a woman at once emerging and vanishing. “Dancefloor” is scarred by a series of wavering yet perfectly articulated vertical lines, veins of bright red pigment that cut across the work’s entire surface. The effect is at once disfigurative, even sadomasochistic, and transformative. “the seat of all our Souls” is covered with green-filled pockmarks scattered, once again, like gunfire.
Red and green, blood and nature, life and death. Vaandering says that he gouges surfaces to “highlight damage” but also to create an effect of something “really quite beautiful,” as though he is “lifting the skin.” This deeper beauty redeems a surface automatism. Only by destroying, Vaandering says, can art and the human reveal what “what we look for . . . beyond our comprehension.” Creativity is born of violence and pain. In the pristine, glistening, and accelerated surfaces of these works one reads an anxious tension between refinement and brutality, sleekness and the insensate. The human imprint of gouges and burnishes, scars and polish are marks of visual trauma made by weapons of creative destruction—blowtorches, routers, and grinders, as well as brushes.
The overall effect is one of both forward advancement and nervous flight, the dark unconscious of our culture’s myth of progress, blown apart by an inner apocalypse that reveals at once the surface’s buried life and its immanent destruction. Surfaces are both reparative and degenerative, brushed and burnished in order to replay the tension between the refinement and revelation of inner depths and a kind of technical stasis that rather ominously leaves things as they are. The technological extensions of the human, the inevitable product of the imagination’s syntax, are also the tools of a prosthetic cruelty, a way of marking the human’s still-born political economy.
The other innovation in Vaandering’s work is his decision to assemble metal and wood together in some pieces. This suture recreates the violence of his surface gougings as a reparative binding that is also a fragile restoration. The resin that cements the plywood and aluminum surfaces in “Long Day” or “Give Away,” for instance, marks a vital limit that also deforms the aesthetic, a way of stitching together nature and what the human makes of it, a replay of the manipulated syntax of Vaandering’s images. In “Watch Your Back,” this monstrosity is signified by an ominous and anonymous figure who, turning away from the viewer, literally bleeds into darkness at the scarred and melted right edge of the surface, a rift with no chance of mending. In “Falling High” the winding joints between wood and aluminum repeat the images of a building warped to itself uncannily repeat the falling towers of 9/11, a binding that re-makes traumatic sense out of a structure that cannot hold.
The startling range of Vaandering’s visual language and technique offers a metaphysical conceit that is at once archly staged and deadly serious. Samuel Johnson, author of the first English dictionary, condemned Donne for his discordia concors, his “combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike,” wherein the “most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” As Johnson fears, “nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions.” Paraphrasing Johnson, T. S. Eliot said that Donne yoked things together but didn’t unite them, to create a “confused magnificence.” Eliot says this “dissociation of sensibility” sets in the seventeenth century, “from which,” he concludes, “we have never recovered.”
What one age calls confused or dissociated, another calls Cubism: the con-fusion of art’s ephemera and detritus in what Walter Benjamin calls the “mechanical age of reproduction.” Modernism fetishized this serial disarray to evoke the chaos into which the twentieth century had descended, from which it wrenched a nostalgia for what Wallace Stevens calls a “rage for order.” Eliot captures this painful ambivalence in his great Modernist ruin, The Wasteland; Yeats captures its spiritual nexus in “The Second Coming.” The ruin, its impossible reconstruction, and the dark transformation and tragic insight that comes with seeing the ruin as ruin—these are themes, but also dark inevitabilities of Vaandering’s current work.
Postmodernism sees this ambivalence as its defining quality—dissociation as pastiche. Nietzsche writes that the world of truth is a “mobile army of metaphors,” like the phantasms of business workers wafting across and off the sutured and distressed plywood and metal surfaces of Vaandering’s pieces, themselves a combination of one-offs, assemblages, and wall installations. This “mobile army” of figures and figurations define no essential structure of meaning except as ghostly schemata written on water. They bend, shift, transfer, and transmute into a variety of anthropomorphisms that mark the hazy boundary between nature and culture, the human and inhuman.
There is something profoundly dissociative and at the same time profoundly human and redemptive about Vaandering’s work. This isn’t to locate his work within a dialectic that resolves the difference between these two, to find the “unity” out of the yoking, somehow to conserve or sentimentalize his accomplishment. Rather, it is to mark the dissociation as the human, out of which he finds redemption. Accident, contingency, disaster, brutal conformity: out of these, as Yeats says in “The Second Coming,” a terrible beautify indeed is born. Bodies and minds can break. But human souls bend—ambivalently and with the painful knowledge that they’re working mostly in darkness. Nonetheless, they do bend, sometimes into the abyss, sometimes toward light. Vaandering’s show us that such renewal is possible. There is no promise of redemption; but there is hope.
Joel Faflak, BA, MA, PhD, UWO
Professor of English, University of Western Ontario. Has published and edited books on romanticism, psychoanalysis and philosophy.
Gerald Vaandering lives and works in London, ON. Has shown his work across Canada and in New York, Chicago and Washington. His work is in the collections of BMO Financial Group, TD Canada Trust, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, London Life Contemporary Art Collection and the National Bank of Canada.
London, long one of the most fertile centers of the Canadian artistic imagination in the middle of one of Canada’s most conservative enclaves, is having something of a rebirth. Gerald Vaandering’s show at the Michael Gibson Gallery, which is turning into one of the most forward-thinking venues on the contemporary Canadian art scene, is a sure sign of this renaissance. One story about the genesis of Vaandering’s new pieces is this: work on a large print in his south London studio was not going well, so he discarded the print in the studio backyard. Glancing at it sometime later – disintegrating, forgotten – Vaandering came to a necessary realization: even when we go in the wrong direction, we end up in the right place. Such a revelation, as the afflatus for his newest work, begs fundamental questions: Is art anything more than grappling for meaning in Plato’s cave, missing its own cues? Does culture, losing sight of itself, need art? At what moment does the soul, moving about in darkness, suddenly feel present to itself?
The title of Vaandering’s show comes from the English poet John Donne’s “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward,” a poem about confronting fate and death. The poet is “carried towards the West,” but, as Donne writes, “my soul’s form bends toward the East,” where he will find redemption in the “Sun” of an “endless day.” The poem struggles between the sacred and the profane as a necessary prelude to their resolution. The poet John Dryden criticized Donne because he “perplexes the mind” with the “speculations of philosophy.” Vaandering seems to take this criticism as a starting point, for in this newest work he treats speculation as an aesthetic possibility that cuts both ways. The metaphysical conceit of his work, like that of Donne, evokes the excessive speculations of an overly rationalized existence. It risks, well, conceit itself, even cliché. But that’s also the way an imaginative speculation works. It can’t directly promise redemption, but it can transform how we see the world, which seems powerful enough.
A particularly human past-time, speculation is one of those things designed to give us comfort. It is supposedly where we transcend our own instinctual life. But Goya reminds us that the sleep of reason breeds monsters, the inevitable result of an enlightenment promise. The ruins of this promise become compulsively repetitive motifs in Vaandering’s work: the stock market indexes, the fragments of glass and steel post-industrial architecture, the phantom drones of Bay or Wall Street. All evoke the austere volatility of the global marketplace, the dehumanization and spiritual barrenness of late capitalist life. Plywood and aluminum, Vaandering’s present materials of choice, are the right mediums for this message. Both convey at once the sterility of a fabricated culture and the flexible, unruly, and fragile gesture of the human, an imagination anxiously complicit in the very manufacture it attempts to transcend.
The images in Vaandering’s work – fragments of computer generated and manipulated photographs and print media – sometimes appear with a clean precision (“Together,” “No Room”), reminiscent of Vaandering’s earlier work. There the images were screened onto wood then painted over with coloured encaustic, usually an earthly but deadly black barely but fatefully edged in red. He further layered the surface with random graph curves, bar codes, and numbers. In the current show these fiscal gestures have morphed into an abstracted diacritical iconography of lines, swipes, and fields. These both productively and eerily echo the images, the manipulation of which now appears as a deliberate distortion – the dizzy warping of bodies, stock market quotes, and architecture in “Give Away,” “Background Noise,” or “Side Swipe,” for instance. The effect, woozy and deconstructive, is at once inhuman and liberating, a visual bent that shows us a potential insight beyond the imposition of perspective.
Because the semiotic field of Vaandering’s surfaces are now less literal, they evoke both an aesthetic postponement and a conceptual possibility, a more powerful way of seeing otherwise. Before, encaustic was the obvious mark of the organic, of art’s human nature re-asserting its momentary prerogative in a rote, technological landscape (and it needs to be said that Vaandering’s use of encaustic made productive sense of an otherwise overused and often cliché medium). Here that assertion is subtler, integral, but thus also more disturbingly embedded in the same technique from which it wants to liberate itself.
This change came with Vaandering’s shift to working with metal in his 2005 show (entitled, simply, “Metal”) at the Gibson Gallery. At first Vaandering sometimes employed a cumbersome steel whose heaviness one felt in the pieces themselves. The effect, like the show’s name, was often too one-dimensional, falling flat without always moving forward. But Vaandering sensed an “intellectual” relationship between wax and metal:
Wax is an organic medium made under the corporate structure of the hive. Steel is very similar. It is a commodity largely driven by a market enterprise that makes me marvel. Nothing seems to be able to stop it.
In this new show the metal is aluminum, which makes more productive sense of Vaandering’s themes of the alloy between nature and the human, the personal and the corporate, the soul and the marketplace. The effect is lighter, pliant, as if the material created a space for the artist’s imaginative and thematic tensions to play themselves out more freely.
Ironically, by flattening its sculpted encaustic surfaces, Vaandering’s work has become oddly more three-dimensional. Something more vertiginous and dangerous, and thus more urgent and energetic, has been released in his vision. At first the effect is one of cool rationality, a post-industrial sheen that is emphasized in the clear finish of plywood, Vaandering’s other chosen surface. Juxtaposing the materials, however, creates an expected dialogue. The plywood lends a natural warmth and texture that has to be coaxed from the metal through grinding and burnishing. But that effect in turn reveals an unexpected vitality and depth, a receptiveness to light that plywood largely resists, making it seem banal, vapid, lusterless.
The most powerful instance of this juxtaposition are the show’s centerpieces, “The seat of all our Souls” and “Dancefloor.” Both are made of 25 individual pieces of the same size assembled to form two identical, monolithic images. One is plywood, the other aluminum. Their nearly-seamless surface, puzzled together by Vaandering’s faultless craftsmanship, is the sign of confidence in technology to parse reality and not get it wrong. We are reassured about art’s ability to make something of chaos. But we are also reminded of the technology of perception itself, of the fact that human perspective is at some level no more than the digitized increments that make up the organic whole of our virtual psychological realities.
“Seat” and “Dancefloor” are like those puzzle pieces that my parents gave me to occupy my solitude in the back seat of our family car on long vacations. The pieces came slotted but jumbled within a tight plastic frame and one had to figure out how to re-organize them into a coherent picture (Rubic’s Cubes are the three-dimensional version of these puzzles). The work was at once intensely satisfying and maddening, imagining a final perspective that might never come. One wanted to break the frame and simply re-arrange the pieces on their own. Vaandering slots his images onto horizontal runners to form a series of courses that built toward the final image. Yet the frame around them is entirely imaginary, arbitrary. This mechanical orchestration stages the artificiality but also the malleability of perspective, the possibility of a human re-imposition.
The show articulates this visual syntax most tellingly as a traumatic breakdown of perspective, the site where technique and vocabulary collapse into one another. Two signs of this breakdown are the suture and the wound, deployed by Vaandering as two kinds of thresholds. Starting with his first metal pieces Vaandering would “use a welder turned up to a high temperature so that when the electrode touches the metal it just digs in and breaks through the surface. I wanted to show a ‘breaking of the surface’: a way of showing the metal, but showing an aspect that you would not expect from the metal.” This break is echoed by gouges and routed lines in the plywood, as if to make its entirely artificial, laminated depths speak like the lost voices or markings of a palimpsest. Where in Vaandering’s earlier metal works this surface “breakthrough” sometimes seemed to me contrived, here its falling flat succeeds by, literally, “falling flat.” The tensions are, as it were, all on the surface.
The surface of “Outside Track,” for instance, is pocked by a series of random gouges whose revealed red interior seems to provide a sparse and tenuous syntax between the surface’s left and right sides—bullet wounds that are, paradoxically, the one sign of an inner life. The five walking figures on the left side—a community in spring green—is marginalized to the left side. The dominating right side contains a single silver figure—lonely, taut, awkward—menaced by the advancing traffic behind him. The left side is happy variations, but the single theme betrays their inner anxiety. In “Give Away” this anxiety is figured literally as the ghostly image of a woman at once emerging and vanishing. “Dancefloor” is scarred by a series of wavering yet perfectly articulated vertical lines, veins of bright red pigment that cut across the work’s entire surface. The effect is at once disfigurative, even sadomasochistic, and transformative. “the seat of all our Souls” is covered with green-filled pockmarks scattered, once again, like gunfire.
Red and green, blood and nature, life and death. Vaandering says that he gouges surfaces to “highlight damage” but also to create an effect of something “really quite beautiful,” as though he is “lifting the skin.” This deeper beauty redeems a surface automatism. Only by destroying, Vaandering says, can art and the human reveal what “what we look for . . . beyond our comprehension.” Creativity is born of violence and pain. In the pristine, glistening, and accelerated surfaces of these works one reads an anxious tension between refinement and brutality, sleekness and the insensate. The human imprint of gouges and burnishes, scars and polish are marks of visual trauma made by weapons of creative destruction—blowtorches, routers, and grinders, as well as brushes.
The overall effect is one of both forward advancement and nervous flight, the dark unconscious of our culture’s myth of progress, blown apart by an inner apocalypse that reveals at once the surface’s buried life and its immanent destruction. Surfaces are both reparative and degenerative, brushed and burnished in order to replay the tension between the refinement and revelation of inner depths and a kind of technical stasis that rather ominously leaves things as they are. The technological extensions of the human, the inevitable product of the imagination’s syntax, are also the tools of a prosthetic cruelty, a way of marking the human’s still-born political economy.
The other innovation in Vaandering’s work is his decision to assemble metal and wood together in some pieces. This suture recreates the violence of his surface gougings as a reparative binding that is also a fragile restoration. The resin that cements the plywood and aluminum surfaces in “Long Day” or “Give Away,” for instance, marks a vital limit that also deforms the aesthetic, a way of stitching together nature and what the human makes of it, a replay of the manipulated syntax of Vaandering’s images. In “Watch Your Back,” this monstrosity is signified by an ominous and anonymous figure who, turning away from the viewer, literally bleeds into darkness at the scarred and melted right edge of the surface, a rift with no chance of mending. In “Falling High” the winding joints between wood and aluminum repeat the images of a building warped to itself uncannily repeat the falling towers of 9/11, a binding that re-makes traumatic sense out of a structure that cannot hold.
The startling range of Vaandering’s visual language and technique offers a metaphysical conceit that is at once archly staged and deadly serious. Samuel Johnson, author of the first English dictionary, condemned Donne for his discordia concors, his “combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike,” wherein the “most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” As Johnson fears, “nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions.” Paraphrasing Johnson, T. S. Eliot said that Donne yoked things together but didn’t unite them, to create a “confused magnificence.” Eliot says this “dissociation of sensibility” sets in the seventeenth century, “from which,” he concludes, “we have never recovered.”
What one age calls confused or dissociated, another calls Cubism: the con-fusion of art’s ephemera and detritus in what Walter Benjamin calls the “mechanical age of reproduction.” Modernism fetishized this serial disarray to evoke the chaos into which the twentieth century had descended, from which it wrenched a nostalgia for what Wallace Stevens calls a “rage for order.” Eliot captures this painful ambivalence in his great Modernist ruin, The Wasteland; Yeats captures its spiritual nexus in “The Second Coming.” The ruin, its impossible reconstruction, and the dark transformation and tragic insight that comes with seeing the ruin as ruin—these are themes, but also dark inevitabilities of Vaandering’s current work.
Postmodernism sees this ambivalence as its defining quality—dissociation as pastiche. Nietzsche writes that the world of truth is a “mobile army of metaphors,” like the phantasms of business workers wafting across and off the sutured and distressed plywood and metal surfaces of Vaandering’s pieces, themselves a combination of one-offs, assemblages, and wall installations. This “mobile army” of figures and figurations define no essential structure of meaning except as ghostly schemata written on water. They bend, shift, transfer, and transmute into a variety of anthropomorphisms that mark the hazy boundary between nature and culture, the human and inhuman.
There is something profoundly dissociative and at the same time profoundly human and redemptive about Vaandering’s work. This isn’t to locate his work within a dialectic that resolves the difference between these two, to find the “unity” out of the yoking, somehow to conserve or sentimentalize his accomplishment. Rather, it is to mark the dissociation as the human, out of which he finds redemption. Accident, contingency, disaster, brutal conformity: out of these, as Yeats says in “The Second Coming,” a terrible beautify indeed is born. Bodies and minds can break. But human souls bend—ambivalently and with the painful knowledge that they’re working mostly in darkness. Nonetheless, they do bend, sometimes into the abyss, sometimes toward light. Vaandering’s show us that such renewal is possible. There is no promise of redemption; but there is hope.
Joel Faflak, BA, MA, PhD, UWO
Professor of English, University of Western Ontario. Has published and edited books on romanticism, psychoanalysis and philosophy.
Gerald Vaandering lives and works in London, ON. Has shown his work across Canada and in New York, Chicago and Washington. His work is in the collections of BMO Financial Group, TD Canada Trust, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, London Life Contemporary Art Collection and the National Bank of Canada.