JAY SENETCHKO The Course of a Distant Empire NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - JANUARY 18, 2018 @ WINSOR GALLERY OPENING RECEPTION: NOVEMBER 23, 6 - 8 PM 258 EAST FIRST AVENUE VANCOUVER BC JAY SENETCHKO :: PRESS RELEASE About the Exhibition The Course of a Distant Empire visualizes the tension of our present historical situation by collapsing antagonistic acts from past, present and future into single images, setting them in a cyclical format, and implying their repetition. Acts are made, others cancel them. The goals of one person impede those of another. Progress is made, but immediately encounters an obstacle or an equally regressive act. Mobility becomes impossible; and in its place, a migration towards the poles of decadence and destruction serves as a substitute. Consistent with previous exhibitions, Senetchko created an all-encompassing sensory installation whose central element were 5 large scale, classically framed paintings. Winsor Gallery was transformed to accommodate the works and create the necessary environment. The gallery space was painted black and concealed from the front entrance by floor-to-ceiling black velvet curtains, providing viewers with an initial reveal of the suite, and an intimate atmosphere in which to view the pictures. A central mechanical mobile (built by Senetchko) rotated 20 iPhones hung in a parabola pattern echoing the mountain range presented in the paintings. The mobile completed a complete revolution every 25 minutes, the same amount of time the video and audio file played by each phone took to complete one full cycle. Each phone showed looping panoramic videos taken by Senetchko over the past decade during hikes in the Canadian Rocky Mountains which were set to TS Eliot’s reading of his 1922 Wasteland. At the completion of each recitation, the video and audio would repeat. The cycle repeated indefinitely. The combined elements of the installation created an atmosphere of circularity, repetition, opulence, and unease. About Winsor Gallery Founded by Jennifer Winsor in 2002, Winsor Gallery (www.winsorgallery.com) has distinguished itself locally, nationally, and internationally as a premier source for contemporary art. Winsor Gallery strives to ensure the long-term development of our artists’ careers through promotion, collaboration, and thoughtful curation. A cornerstone of the Vancouver art scene, Winsor relocated from its seminal South Granville space in 2012 to the burgeoning industrial neighborhood of The Flats, located on East 1st Avenue. Innovation compelled by artistic curiosity, Winsor Gallery continues to modernize the contemporary art scene of Vancouver by hosting an annual bloc party in The Flats, facilitating an art collective between galleries in order to showcase the most experimental, progressive, contemporary art on the West Coast. The Course of a Distant Empire Installation at Winsor Gallery November 2017 The Course of a Distant Empire Installation at Winsor Gallery November 2017 The Fire Sermon, Oil on canvas, 72” x 96”, 183cm x 244cm, Jay Senetchko, 2017 A Game of Chess, Oil on canvas, 72” x 96”, 183cm x 244cm, Jay Senetchko, 2017 The Burial of the Dead, Oil on canvas, 72” x 96”, 183cm x 244cm, Jay Senetchko, 2017 Death by Water, Oil on canvas, 72” x 96”, 183cm x 244cm, Jay Senetchko, 2017 What the Thunder Said, Oil on canvas, 72” x 96”, 183cm x 244cm, Jay Senetchko, 2017 Tangled Hierarchies: Remnants, collective endurance and strange loops Essay by Sunshine Frère, 2017 A strange loop is a phenomenon that occurs when someone, or something, moves either upwards, downwards or through multiple levels of an abstracted hierarchical system. At some point, moving through the system, the person or thing doing the moving, unexpectedly arrives back where they or it started. MC Escher's Lithograph, Drawing Hands (1948) illustrates this concept in a succinct manner. These types of experiments form what author Douglas Hofstadter describes as a tangled hierarchy, “a complex system where beginning and ending are undefined, and even the direction or movement of a system is not apparent”1. The Course of a Distant Empire, is an installation by artist Jay Senetchko, it consists of five large-scale paintings. The artist invites the viewer to navigate a maze of strange loops within this series. Tangled hierarchies of communal polytely and historical referencing, conflate past, present and future. All tenses collide, forming a cacophonous vortex. A cluster of human figures feature prominently in all five paintings, the majority of them carve out a large elliptical shape in the foreground on each canvas. The group is not exactly a unified anomaly, they are more of a loose configuration of active beings, in close proximity. Process and polytely feature overtly; each individual, or small group, is focussed on the completion of a particular task: the removal of debris, the building of a fence, barbecuing, thinking, clearing snow, or even, simply relaxing. What we observe is a collective of people working, but not necessarily symbiotically towards a common goal. This central foregrounded space is simultaneously everyone's, and yet, also, no one’s; a busy commons of sorts where intertwined cycles of action and non-action recur throughout the seasons. An interesting tension is established between the individual and the collective in this series. A sea of red poppies coats a huge portion of the surface of What the Thunder Said, a bewitching depiction of summer. The people of the commons perform contemplative gestures, relaxing on a blanket, stopping to chat, daydreaming. Traces of productivity hang in the air, the laundry is being put out to dry, truck parts, buckets and fan belts are left in limbo - part of a project that is finished, or something to start, it is not clear. This scene is arguably the most pastoral of the series; visual tropes form tethers that connect it to genre painting and even abstraction. Senetchko's colour palette, particularly in reference to the clothing on the figures, is a nod, not only to Malevich's abstract Peasant Paintings, but also to genre painters like Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and Ukrainian painters such as Nikolai Pimonenko and Vladimir Makovsky. Nature is in all its splendour at this point in the painted polyptych cycle; bright blossoms, lush greenery, and a big blue sky 1! Douglas Hofstadter, “I Am a Strange Loop”, (New York: Basic Books, 2008) demonstrate the season's awe-inspiring presence. A Game of Chess features many work strategies unfolding. Someone examines a smoking truck engine, whilst others transform tree trunk cut-offs into shingles, and others still, stack and roll away log piles. Nearly everyone is focussed on a productive task, preparing for the winter ahead. As a sun sets over a crisp sky, autumn casts a shadow into the valley. Productivity also runs throughout Death By Water. Most individuals are working away; there is an attempt to revitalize the melted cross-walk, and to salvage parts from the truck. Someone is framing up a house, whilst someone else is sowing seeds in a field in the distance in preparation for spring. Both of these paintings are haunted by a past genre of themselves. In socialist realism, painters portrayed daily life in a celebratory manner propagating life under communist rule as idyllic; paintings often featured a happy and productive proletariat. Ukrainian and Russian painters such as Arkadiy Plastov and Tatiana Yablonskaya depicted farming folk hard at work and loving every minute of it. Senetchko used found imagery of Ukranian immigrants, as well as Ukrainians working in the Carpathian Mountains as source material for some of his figures. Productivity is infused in the painting as is pastoralism, but the sentiment of joyful labour has been subsumed by a practical and pragmatic focus. The artist introduces disparity as a harbinger of reality in these works. Absent in socialist realist painting is the messiness of productivity which is amply represented within Senetchko's work. The remnants of failed attempts are multifarious: a smoking truck, a broken down fence, the fragments of a collapsed house, old parts and tools strewn about. The neat and orderly fashion of production lines is eclipsed with a chaotic bric-a-brac collection of objects and individuals working through specific tasks, often in too-close-for-comfort proximity. There is a vibrancy of colour found in The Fire Sermon. The painting's blood red sunset suggests the peak of summertime, heat is felt throughout the composition. It can be found in the glowing embers of a smouldering fire and in the watery white lines of a melted cross-walk. The colour red is peppered throughout, found on a jerry-can, clothing, beer cans and a barbecue. In this work, individual appearances are at their most contemporary. Clothing design coupled with the way items are worn, serve as queues that speak to our present everyday. A tangled hierarchy presents itself in the form of understanding action and inaction within the painting. Is the fence being built, or taken apart? Are people waiting to go somewhere, or just arriving? What is going on with the scattered back lawn detritus, the result of a big party, or simply collective negligence over time? Transformation subsists in a tangled manner as well, represented in the form of the between states of the objects scattered throughout the composition. In the heat of the summer, a tiredness and sense of boredom permeate. The individuals depicted in The Fire Sermon seem disconnected to a greater degree than any of the others in this series of paintings. Lost in solitary thought, passed out, and minimally engaged in menial chores; there is a lot of waiting and hanging around. This particular piece finds some roots within social realism2; individuals perform mundane tasks, and apathy prevails. Excess is reflected in overindulgence with alcohol, the pile of burning timber, the melted cross-walk and carelessness with cleaning up after oneself.