Pop Pastoral

Deborah Campbell wants you to meet Myfanwy Macleod

There is something vaguely David Lynch about the Fortune Garden restaurant on Broadway, where I meet up with artist Myfanwy MacLeod. The blinds on the windows are tightly drawn but the artificial lights are bright enough for surgery. The waiter, whose nametag reads “Sunny,” wears a black undertaker’s suit and never once smiles. Like much of MacLeod’s work, there is an air of hyper-reality, of normal/not normal, about the place

Named for a Welsh country girl who grew up to be an opera singer, Myfanwy (pronounced my-FAWN-way ) is known for her unorthodox, often comedic explorations of modern life and its collective unconscious. For more than a decade the Vancouver-based artist has drawn on references from pop and consumer culture, folklore, horror flicks, and art history in a mixed media practice that encompasses sculpture, sound, film, drawings, performance art and—most recently—photography. At a time when the art world can take itself a mite too seriously, she layers her work with sly humour. Reid Shier, incoming director/curator of Presentation House Gallery and former curator of Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery and Toronto’s Power Plant, has called her one of the most significant artists working in Canada today. She is also one of the wittiest and most engaging.

Take, for example, a looped film for an early solo exhibition entitled “A Brief Overview of Personology,” in which MacLeod plays the part of “The Greeter,” one of the overly-friendly wallet-welcomers stationed at the entrances to stores like Wal-Mart and the Gap. Her face framed by the halo of a headset, she greets gallery-goers with words we almost know by heart. “Hi. Welcome to the gallery. My name is Myfanwy. If there is anything I can help you with please let me know.” Again and again, the message is repeated—always fresh, always —personal.“ By shifting the context from the (low-brow) shopping mall to the (high-brow) gallery, she teases out the contradictions that have become our background noise.

The notion of hyper-reality—being more “real” than real—was formulated by French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. Describing a quintessential American landscape, he writes, “The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert, and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something demented and admirable about them: the endless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.” Baudrillard’s astute social commentary and awareness of a fundamental eeriness underlying so-called “normal life” find an echo in MacLeod’s work.

Last year, as an artist-in-residence at Glenfiddich distilleries in northern Scotland, she was provided with accommodations, production facilities, stipend, and the kind of remote isolation that leaves the mind to its own devices. (Given the nature of the company’s business interests, there was another perk many artists would appreciate as much or more than a solo show: a monthly whiskey allowance.)

Inspired by fantasies of exploring the rural landscape, she soon found that beneath the apparent tranquility of the region lay something else indeed. Depopulated by harsh economic conditions, rural Scotland has become, she says, a “ghost country.” The results of her residency formed part of a recent exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery entitled, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.” The title comes from a chapter in Walden where naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau described his motivations for escaping into the wilds:  

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

The exhibition focuses on the decline of the pastoral and what MacLeod calls “the nature of the economy.” In addition to large colour photographs taken in abandoned houses on the Glennfiddich estate (a filthy bathtub, a tumour-like fungus growing inside a ripped-out wall, a farm gate with a sign that reads, “A Home For Little Children: Strictly Private”) are her drawings of mom-and-pop grow-ops, by now a familiar part of rural and suburban life in British Columbia. For MacLeod, the North American pastoral landscape “is transitioning into a place where we have the rise of the grow-op and the meth lab as the rural economy decays.”

Included are several sculptures: a pristine white carpet with a disturbing clump of hair, a carrot-coloured mold growing up the corner of a wall (she originally tried to grow mushrooms but the dry conditions of the gallery defeated the experiment), and a child mannequin draped in a floral sheet with the eyes cut out. A photograph of a woman in the same costume echoes the ghostly theme while simultaneously mocking it—it’s the kid in the last-minute Halloween costume, the punch line to a campfire ghost story. A final wink comes in the photograph of a pair of laughing eyes peering out through a mail slot. Hysterical? Insane? A commentary on modern isolation? Or merely a joke between friends?

The following are excerpts from my conversation with Myfanwy MacLeod. Our noodle soup was delicious.

On Growing Up in a Jeff Wall Photograph

I was about twelve when my parents bought a house in Stonybrook, a brand new development in London, Ontario, that was right on the edge of town. The neighbourhood I grew up in looked a lot like Jeff Wall’s Steve’s Farm, Steveston, B.C., a kind of netherworld between the suburbs and farmland. As a kid I was always putting on exhibitions at home. I would make haunted houses or have my three younger sisters dress up and do nativity plays with our two Siamese cats playing the baby Jesus. I was really into the TV show Pippi Longstocking and would roam the country side, trying to imitate Pippi’s adventures, but always in a failed way since I didn’t have a TV crew to build sets for me. My dad was a travelling salesman and my mother worked as a secretary, so as kids we were often left to our own devices. The suburbs get a bad rap but I have some very good memories of growing up there. And some very bad memories.

On Early Failures to Reform

My father decided when I was 13 that I had fallen in with a bad lot and decided to send me to a private all girl’s Catholic school to sort me out. It inevitably had the opposite effect since most of the other girls were sent there for the same reason. It’s kind of like the criminal justice system where criminals go to jail and end up learning how to become better criminals. I came out with a worse attitude than when I went in. I eventually transferred to another school but not before I got sent to the principal’s office because of an argument I had about Emily Carr with the art teacher, Sister Mary Perpetual Help. The school was touted as having an excellent art program but after my run-in with Sister Mary I realized I would never be their prize student. Sister Mary was a partially blind albino who produced paintings of Jesus in all his ecstatic glory.

On Pop Culture and Falling in Love

Pop culture is the language I know and I’m using that language to speak to more profound things. It’s not about ideas of authenticity or inauthenticity, but about trying to be as honest as I can about where I’m come from. When I made How to Make a Man Fall in Love with You, a series of silk-screens as part of the “Brief Overview of Personology” exhibition, it featured three types of men: the Auditory Man, the Visual Man and the Feelings Man. The series was based on two inspirations. One was a corporate psychology course we were given when I worked at Fed-Ex that was supposed to help you identify what kind of person your customers were by their eye movements. Which was ironic because we only talked to them on the phone. And then a friend gave me a book called How to Make a Man Fall in Love With You . The book said you were supposed to identify the type of man and then modify your way of speaking so you could connect with him. The Feelings Man would say things like “Bonding is really important to me.” Who actually says things like that? Nobody talks like that. Language is a most unreliable, false and dangerous thing anyway.

On Junk Food as Inspiration

I eat at McDonald’s at least once a week. I even know what the McDeal of the day is. Most people might think that isn’t something to be proud of, but I am. I love old movies like The Thin Man series because they all smoked and drank like fish and I miss that. I get a lot of my inspiration from things that would be considered the cultural equivalent of junk food. I hate cultural Puritanism.

On Anti-Americanism Abroad

I’ve done several residencies and exchanges abroad and there is a kind of animosity towards North America and its excesses that makes me very anxious. One of my favourite quotations comes from John Locke who said, “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.” The sculpture called Gum Table is a model of my thoughts when I was in Paris doing an exchange at the École des Beaux-Arts. I went to a lecture by Jacques Derrida at the Sorbonne where he was dressed all in white, like Colonel Sanders. I was bored and reached my hand under the seat where I was sitting but I couldn’t find any chewing gum. Normally, in Canada, you would find a whole colony of it. I think chewing gum is a disgusting habit but it’s the kind of thing that everyone typically associates with North Americans. So I decided to chew a thousand pieces of gum and stick them to a table. It echoes my anxiety about being considered a philistine, or culturally inferior.

On Whisky Galore, or an Artist’s Dream Residency

I was invited this past summer to be an artist-in-residence for three months at the Glenfiddich distillery in Dufftown, Scotland. I had been to Edinburgh twice before, once to visit friends and again as part of the Hammertown exhibition at the Fruitmarket. But Dufftown is not Edinburgh. It has been said that Rome was built on seven hills and Dufftown was built on seven stills. If you ever get a chance to see the film Whisky Galore it will give you a real insight into the Scottish character.

I saw the residency as a chance to live out one of my own fantasies of being in a rural environment, since I am very interested in Henry David Thoreau and his experimental living project at Walden Pond. But I’m an anxious person and the rural environment started to get to me. There was something very unsettling about the spaces where I photographed. They were on the Glenfiddich estate; the artists were living in a house that had been renovated but the others had been abandoned long ago. One had been empty since the 1960s, when this old woman, Mrs. Riddle, had died. Another was the original home of the founder of Glenfiddich. It had suffered mold and dry rot so they’d ripped out the walls. The setting was so desolate and it probably didn’t help that I was reading Stephen King.

On the Horror of the Mundane

The thing about Stephen King that fascinates me is how he takes something incredibly mundane and turns it into something horrifying. It’s always set in ordinary circumstances and I think that’s really where horror occurs. They’ve been doing this series on Dateline where they set up sting operations to trap pedophiles through the Internet and all the guys that show up are the most innocuous-looking people, pillars of the community. Not the scary monsters you expect. One of the things Stephen King wrote in Salem’s Lot is that the sum of all human fears is found in a door that is slightly ajar. That’s why I did the photograph of a door slightly open. It’s not what’s behind the door that we fear, but the half-open door.

On Domestic Nightmares and Coping Through Comedy

I have a thing about carpets. I really don’t like carpeting because my father used to make me vacuum the carpet in specific directions when I was a teenager and we used to fight about it all the time. I have been watching a lot of CSI lately with the forensic studies and after taking the photographs and doing these drawings of suburbia the idea of finding clues at a crime scene started to gel. The carpet I used in the exhibition also served as a monochrome with this disgusting bit of hair on it. I was fascinated by how many people told me how creeped out they were by the clump of hair on the carpet. The piece is called Bound and I was thinking about the daily rituals people perform. My sister vacuums every day. That carpet is the horror of everyday life.

In The Grotesque in Art and Literature, Wolfgang Kayser writes that comedy and terror are twins. Comedy is ultimately a coping mechanism to deal with the horror of what we live everyday. I think that’s where the humour comes into my work. It’s one way of getting around the pessimism of the modern condition.

On Funny Double Standards

There was an interesting article about comedy and women that I was reading in my dentist’s office. It talked about how men and women both say they want a partner with a good sense of humour but, ultimately, that women want to be with someone who can make them laugh, whereas men want someone who will laugh at their jokes. The art world is no exception.

On Ghosts and Werewolves and Little Grey Men

Before I went to Scotland I was researching the paranormal. I found that in France they don’t have ghosts so much as time rifts--slipping back in time. Werewolves are also popular in France. But in England, ghosts and haunted houses are more common. Here in North America we don’t have that long history, the leftover traces of the past, but we live in an immigrant culture so it’s understandable that the phenomenon of aliens is so prevalent. Actually there are a lot of ghosts in Canada but I think that’s mostly a reflection of the immigrant culture and the fact that so many people from the British Isles brought their ghosts with them when they emigrated.

For my exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, I made a sculpture and photograph of the woman as a ghost, which suggested the burka to me. I thought it was fascinating because there was this political reading to it without being didactic: the idea of the woman as the ghost, the invisible presence, and the ghost of history. And the way it could also be read as innocent fun or slightly horrifying, a child dressing up as a ghost or a dirty sheet with holes in. It is interesting to me that something as simple as a bed sheet with two holes can have so many associative meanings, from ghosts, to burqas, even the Ku Klux Klan.

On Anti-Social Old Buggers

When I was Scotland I saw a great TV program called Anti-Social Old Buggers. I guess anti-social behaviour in the UK has become such a problem that they now have special restraining orders they call ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders). Essentially, these prevent people from engaging in so-called anti-social behaviour like playing music too loud, binge drinking, etc.

Thoreau would probably have been considered anti-social by today’s standards. He might even have been a dope smoker. Mind you, those civil rights people tended to be abstemious. I liked the fact that the grow-ops I drew were ordinary suburban houses like the one I grew up in that ultimately had something illicit going on inside. I have always been intrigued by the idea that you can’t tell from the outside what is going on inside. The website where I culled the images had a section on how to tell if you have a grow-op in your neighborhood. Some of the signs were: there are lots of toys in the yard but no children; people come and go at all hours; scary dogs are leashed in the yard. The list cracked me up. It was rather like “How to Identify a Terrorist.” My interest in anti-social behaviour motivates my work.