Stretched Painting, Expanded Sculpture

Since Rosalind Krauss, sculpture could be anything. Rosalind Krauss is an art theorist who wrote Sculpture in the Expanded Field and changed what we know of sculpture historically.  Krauss speaks of the evolution of sculpture and how sculpture has left the plinth and expanded itself to a different spectrum. According to Krauss sculpture is now a field with finite possibility.  Donald Judd claimed in his essay Specific Objects that painting is not as liberating as sculpture as it is always tied to an idea of creating an illusion and its surface, the canvas. Using Frank Stella as an example, he acknowledges that, overtime a painting frees itself as it interacts with the ideas of sculpture. Stella challenges the canonical shape of the canvas and bridges the gap between painting and sculpture. Emily Grace Harrison, a recent OCAD Graduate also breaks the barrier between painting and sculpture. In her work, Still Life in Complementary Colours (2016), Harrison brings a painting out of its typical canvas, creating an unusual piece that travels between ideas of painting and sculpture. This piece was shown at the Stretched Canvas exhibition at OCAD’s Onsite Gallery, curated by Harrison herself. Showcasing three other female artists who shared the same idea as her, Harrison thoroughly breaks the limits of painting as it enters the realm of sculpture.

Still Life in Complementary Colours is an installation piece utilizing a wall and floor to disturb the divide between painting and sculpture and physically stretches a painting and brings it to physical reality. The work is formed of very vibrant colours as it is meant to reference Henri Rousseau’s painting. In the wall piece, Harrison uses unstretched canvases and painted black stripes along with other botanical elements. She also flipped a canvas to expose its skeletal structure canvas. Across the backside of the canvas, she hung other pieces of fabric; this is an atypical use of the canvas. She extends paintings by not only incorporating sculptural elements but also by using the canvas in unconventional ways to host other components of the work. Additionally, Still Life in Complementary Colours greatly adapts into space as it uses two planes of the wall. Harrison acknowledges the conjunction space of walls by expanding the piece along the corners of the wall. Slightly in front of the piece, it holds a small pot of plant. At the very front, we have her sculptural floor piece using found objects. An assemblage of everyday objects follows the original colour scheme she has set for this piece to go along with the tropical colour scheme of Rousseau’s painting. She uses juice cans, basketball, plants, bricks, rocks, an assortment of fruits, ceramic tiger, bags of chips, and toy snake to creating an assemblage and ties them all together with ropes.

At the beginning of her career, Harrison’s background was in Drawing and Painting, but she has since branched her practice out to sculpture, installation, and curatorial works over the years. In Still Life in Complementary Colours, Harrison not only challenges the typical notion of painting but sculpture as well. It is a piece that explores the limits of painting by bringing out painterly canons, (i.e., the perspective to the real world). Harrison’s background in painting and prevalent in this work through her use of physical space. Even while creating sculptural work she divides up the space among foreground, middle ground and background. The background space is occupied by painted canvases and sets the overall vibrant mood of the work. Then sculptural objects(plants) and installations take place in the foreground and middle ground to complete the work. 

 The common notion is that sculpture exists without a specific perspective since most sculptures are thought to be a sculpture in the round, meant to be placed in the middle for viewers to observe from different perspectives. Sculptures typically consider all possible perspectives as it is a 3-dimensional work rather than a flat 2-dimensional work. Harrison’s work breaks this unsaid rule. Much like the exhibition title she stretches a painting out form its canonical canvas and brings it to the real world. Harrison says in her curatorial statement that her work “Push beyond the flat rectangular format to occupy space and new materials.” Still Life in Complementary Colours achieves this by merging a wall piece with the floor piece. The two elements of the work are closely related as the two cohesively creates an illusion of depth (or real depth). The two elements of the work may also exist separately, but when you stand in a certain position in front of the floor piece and align the two works together it becomes one piece that is all very referential to Henri Rousseau’s historical painting. She greatly incorporates an element of foreground, middle ground and background into the realm of sculpture. This is usually a strategy used in painting to create an illusion of depth and sculptures do not typically need this strategy as it exists in the real. By placing her objects in the lines of this strategy Harrison seems to closely follow Rosalind Krauss’s notion that sculpture can now be anything, especially in the modern era. She doesn’t just push paintings limit by allowing paintings to have sculptural elements, but she pushes sculptures to be a painting as well.

Harrison’s work has a sense of irony for me, along with the fact that she was using a sculptural tactic in a painting to make it become sculpture and vice versa, she brings art historical reference to her piece to give the work more context. This referencing creates slight humour for me. Tori Maas writes that Harrison’s work is created in relation to Henri Rousseau’s painting Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo (1906). Henri Rousseau is known to be fascinated with the idea of the exotic, and the tropics. In his practice, he creates some problematic issues of exotification of other cultures which many artists of modernism perpetuated. Harrison seems to resist exotification and cultural appropriation in Rousseau’s work by referencing his work through colour scheme while only using everyday objects. She brings in basketball, bags of chips, fruits, tape, cans of juice, plants, stool, and a small statue of a tiger. These modern and everyday objects (except for the statue) stand as a sit-in for the exotic elements of Rousseau’s work, and through their original colours, the reference towards the historical painting is achieved.

Emily Grace Harrison’s artwork Still Life in Complementary Colours is an installation piece that incorporates both the element of painting and sculpture through the vibrant and creative use of paint, canvas, assemblage, and painterly canons. She challenges the limits of painting as well as sculpture-like Donald Judd had critiqued the painting practise. Her work stretches a painting to be a sculpture and expands the sculpture to be a painting. She plays with the idea of perspective in a 3-dimensional piece by creating a work where two-dimensional elements of the artwork work in close relation to the three-dimensional floor piece. In the modern art world, she pushes the limits of two separate practises, sculpture and painting, to create an all-new and interesting work.

Harrison, Emily Grace. “STRETCHED PAINTING.” OCAD UNIVERSITY, 24 Aug. 2016, www2.ocadu.ca/event/stretched-painting?_ga=2.177059042.639414695.1508476949-245377478.1506452485.

·  Maas, Tori. “Stretched Painting.” Peripheral Review, 7 Nov. 2016, peripheralreview.com/2016/11/02/stretched-painting/.

·  Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects,” Charles Harrison and Paul Wood eds., Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (London: Blackwell, 1992), 809-813. CANVAS

·  Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October, Vol. 8. Spring, 1979, pp. 30­ 44.