painting by numbers
Patrick Pound's recent show at GrantPirrie, painting by numbers, seemed at very first glance to be either a group show (did I go through the wrong door?) or a large installation. The show consisted of sixteen works of differing materials, some floor pieces, some photographic wall mounts, found images, signage, a few works-that-are-like-paintings.
The piece, Cancelled, comprised seven title pages torn from books, stamped 'CANCELLED' in red ink, presumably declaring the end of the book's utilitarian life in library circulation. lt hardly matters whether the books have indeed been withdrawn, or if this, like Pound's fictional curriculum vitae, is pure fabulation. Removed from the books themselves, the creamy-white, pristine title pages floated within their framed mount, bearing titles that, now cancelled, appeared like relics of social promise and domestic hope: Cardboard Mode/craft, Art in Everyday Life, Freedom From Fear. Thomas More's Utopia bore a 'CANCELLED' slash directly across the title word, UTOPIA. A line drawing of the author's face from the frontispiece showed through palely.
A blown-up photographic image of shirt and dress collars, circa 1930s, was mounted on foamcore board. Four pictures occupied the main quadrants of the image, which was perhaps once a page from an instruction manual or guidebook for tailors or pattern-makers. Shifting the scale of photographic images beyond life-size is a fairly reliable procedure to allow for a fascinated fixation upon an image. Blowing up these black-and-white pictures and shifting their context from instruction manual to single mounted image evokes pathos for tender lost details. A loose thread on a buttonhole or the slightly stiff shoulder inset embodies the loss forever of its original context and its particulars. Waylaid meaning hovered over the piece like