The Bookwas inspired by fairytale illustrations but instead of glass slippers and enchanted forests audiences will see plastic crocs and barren fields in Carol Wainio’s paintings.
The Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) exhibit focuses heavily on scarcity, the Ottawa artist said.
“Long ago, a clever cat dressed a peasant as a prince. Far away, in a field of cheap shoes, magic seeds multiply crops and destroy soil,” Wainio said in her artist statement which resembles the makings of an industrial fairytale.
These symbols are most evident in Puss in the Subcontinentwhere piles of books frame images of Puss tricking farmers into thinking that he owns their land, an Indian farmer with a scythe and a desolate landscape.
Wainio said that piece was inspired by a news photo that showed a single plastic sandal in front of a dry field. It accompanied a story about the mass suicides of Indian farmers when their fields would no longer produce crops because of genetically modified Monsanto seeds.
“She relates social ideas of different periods to social conditions in which people live today,” said CUAG director Diana Nemiroff.
Wainio said her paintings take stories set in scarcity and reset them in excess to emphasize the rampant western consumerism with the emblems of plastic bags and mass-produced shoes omnipresent in her work.
One of the social ideas of the past that Wainio presents in her work is the motivation of copyists. Puss in Boots Copies show illustrations of a story from different time periods. Wainio said this copying reflects the historical and material scarcity.
“There were very few objects so things were to be modeled and emulated,” the artist said.
This copying reflects the history of printing. While there is a scarcity of objects shown in her paintings there is no lacking of history and content in the exhibit.
“What distinguishes her work as an artist is that it is based on research,” Nemiroff said.
Wainio’s paintings include influences from editorial cartoonists, versions of fairytales from different time periods and from her trip to Frankfurt, Germany where she visited illustration collections.
All three of the current exhibitions at CUAG deal with the role of illustration.
Lucas van Leyden: The Passionis curated by Randi Klebanoff and Eros and Endearment: The Look of Love in 18th-Century French Printsiscurated by Adrienne Foster.
“Each show works of art that are very specific to their own society,” Nemiroff said. “The role of the printed work of art is to be communicated from one place and one point in time to another—to our time.”