People are attracted to Lucy Pullen’s legs. There are 50 pairs of tiny cast iron women’s legs on the carpet at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery. The legs join delicate, frescoed, plaster arms posed in gestures from American Sign language, a self-portrait out of rock candy and more conceptual works in Pullen’s shared exhibit with young painter Mitchell Wiebe. Pullen studied painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, graduating in 1994. Then she turned to sculpture. Her work has a playfulness and directness that opens it up to any viewer. It can be critically linked to conceptualism, and to a NSCAD trend to use unusual materials to make metaphysical points, but it is not necessary to know a secret art language to understand or enjoy it. She seems to be free from some of the conformist pressures at art school.
Curator Gordon Laurin sees two threads in Pullen’s work, and investigation of the geometric-social order and figurative sculpture. Most of Pullen’s art is rooted in being human, and has a simplicity that resonates. She is true to conceptual art’s processes, recording her materials and the numbers of them. One of her works is a spill of 1,000 tiny bright blue buttons, missing any kind of slogan, on the top of the gallery’s baby grand piano. Another is Vertical Splatter, a delightful tumble down the gallery window, on to the window sill and the carpet of cut-outs of clear plastic, that are from the interiors of cubes in her work Perfect Solids. She defines these cubes, which each represent one of the five Platonic solids, as friends and as geometric shapes, i.e. Erin (icosahedron). Each cube is made out of 1,000 thin sheets of transparent acetate. The sheets are cut so each cube has a geometric shape inside that is really negative space. Pullen’s wheeled green carts holding university library books seem to be portable identity cases; the academic books are about women, feminism, philosophy, mathematics and art, which are themes that come up in the show. Pullen contrasts historical monuments to men and women in a work that features a bronze bust of her grandfather, created by women artists, and a rock candy head of a young woman, lying in its side, looking vaguely classical and also asleep or dead. The neck has a raw drippy rock candy look like blood. This is Pullen’s cast of her own head, and it’s called Sucker.
If Pullen’s investigations of the universe are playful and full of a scientific, philosophic and material curiosity about life, painter Mitchell Wiebe’s are much darker and focused on moral and emotional bankruptcy. Wiebe graduated from NSCAD in 1996. His paintings are giant canvases of scrawls and swaths of paint that depict monstrous cartoon or stuffed animals. In Piñata Skyline, two striped dog characters are at the base of the canvas. One doggy looks up. One doesn’t. There are some dots of paint in the slightly sunsetesque, beige-orange background. There is a story series that is fun at the start of the show, a triptych called Gray, that includes some lovely surrealistic art historical poetry with a line, “a wagon pulled flaming arrows from the sky, while the half-baked manifestos of Lichtenstein settle domestic battles in the kitchen of Seattle,” some apt dreariness of images on dirties canvas and a reference to the grayness of the rainbow.
Alyssa Bernard