Cave art

If you walk into the gallery of the Visual Arts Studio Association to catch Carroll Charest’s newest show, you’ll probably be struck by two things.

First, the recent renovations to the artists’ centre to establish a classroom are still ongoing and second, the artist must have more than a superficial appreciation for the beauty of mountains. It goes so deep that she seems to bring them with her. It’s possible that she never lets them go either.

“I still don’t feel it’s done. I still have some other pieces that I have in the back of my head to add to the series,” she said, remarking on how long it has taken her to get to this point.

The series has mostly been in the works stretching back four or five years although some of the drawings are the results of her student work from her days at the Alberta College of Art and Design back in 1989.

The Hinton-raised Charest has spent no small amount of time exploring the majestic Rockies, seemingly from the inside out.

“Surprisingly, not as much as you’d think,” she rebuffed.

“Yes, I always loved being out there in the woods. I love rock formations about them, definitely. Any time I can get into a cave, I’ll try.”

The mountains come out powerfully in her work, sometimes in ways that are obvious and other times in ways that are subtle.

Take The Queen O’ So Sublime for instance. The immense copper-coloured chicken wire and plaster sculpture towers imposingly over everything else in the gallery, looking like a rather ominous sentinel guarding something precious or perhaps presiding over a memorial. It is both serene and sombre.

After thinking about it in the context of everything else in the show, it dawned on me that it’s actually a large stalagmite, rising out of the minerals deposited by dripping water from many centuries of geological influence.

“I’m glad that came through because that was the plan,” Charest laughed.

Elsewhere, a canvas on the wall protrudes outward with a very obvious waterfall created patiently with application after application of gel medium. The results are fairly convincing.

And then there are some pieces that are a little tougher to determine. On the same corner but opposite wall as the waterfall, there hangs another piece with another three-dimensional extension. It appears as a kind of arm curved out to form a cradle, a large empty pocket being the only thing that it holds. It’s almost like a Rorschach test of putting a concrete idea to something intangible. Was this some rocky outcropping that she saw while she was spelunking?

“The majority of my cavernous pieces that aren’t obvious stalagmites are taken from animal skulls,” she said. “That is actually a rendition of the occipital bone coming out dimensionally and then creating a cavern underneath. It was just creating an inner space in a flat drawing which exuded out into a two-and-a-half dimensional piece instead.”

This is a large part of the wonder of Charest’s show. Instead of portraying large sweeping landscape images of the always-popular mountains, she instead focuses on the relatively small details of rocks and other formations that offer some unique perspectives and resemblances to other things.

It is within these somewhat patternless surfaces that she finds deeper meanings, even recognizable images for the viewer to lock onto. It is within these textures that we can lose ourselves in thought, much as the artist herself seems to have gotten lost in their beauty.