Maps to a Vista
Patti Randazzo Beckett and Linda Lee Blakney
July 30 to September 11, 2016

The work of Patti Randazzo Beckett and Linda Lee Blakney emerge from source material that is as dissimilar as it is interconnected. On the one hand, Beckett’s paintings and illustrations, in a variety of media, continue to engage with her autobiography—those little moments of time spent looking, listening, and thinking. In her case, this is deeply bound up in farm life, in her daughter’s farm, the place where she spends much of her time. There, the animals and experiences and labour make up the stuff of her paintings. It’s something undeniable. “I combine the things I love,” she says, “the line, the form and the farm.” On the other hand, Blakney’s work is concerned with the conditions of industry and its impact on the socio-economic health of community. This is precisely why her paintings (and her technique) employ the vernacular, everyday materials of production, of the manufacturing process—metals, hammers, and chisels. Ultimately, this exhibition positions the art of industry alongside the art of agriculture to question their coexistence. 

In recent years, Beckett’s eye has turned to horses. For centuries, the horse has occupied a special position in art and art history because of its symbolic link to power, to honour, and to, of course, humanity. Let us not forget that some of the earliest cave paintings feature idyllic pictures of horses. From the period of antiquity to the Renaissance, to the Impressionists, through to our current epoch of “contemporary art,” the horse has been there at every turn. Think of the large-scale oil paintings of Napoleon sitting triumphantly atop a steed, or the Surrealists introducing horses into their pieces as a way to map the terrain of the unconscious mind. So too have the connections between human civilization and the horse have been well-documented; horses have been a central facet of travel, of agriculture, of hunting, of the military, not to mention their place in human companionship. Beckett does not stop there, however. In other works, chickens, sheep, and goats are visible in these paintings of abstract fields of colour. They appear almost as tangled webs of animalism, as aestheticized animal farms. That being said, there is more to the story here; she approaches the common farm as a crucial site of sustenance, of labour, and of life itself. It speaks of the land as it does of the family who cultivates it. “Everything interconnected,” she writes, “family, farming, and land.” These sentiments creep their way into her work; it’s on and behind the surface of every image. 

For Blakney, the transition from medical imaging professional to practicing psychotherapist has provided a breadth of perspective on what images and the imagination can proffer. Art is the form that this negotiation takes. When Blakney first moved to Brantford she was well-aware of the city’s long and complex history as an agricultural manufacturing centre; namely, that the Cockshutt family was responsible for Brantford becoming a leader in tillage tools, equipment and machinery. In the early 1960s, after the company was bought by White Motor Company, production in Brantford ground to a halt. Blakney has traced the Cockshutt buildings with her eye and with her camera, seeking to translate their disrepair into paintings that comment upon the consequences of industry and entropy. For example, in works such as Battered and Pods (2016), she approaches a metallic background, which serves as a kind of indestructible canvas, with instruments to bend, break, and batter its surface. The result is a cacophony of scrapes and scars, not wholly unlike the graffiti that now rests upon the former Cockshutt buildings. In other pieces, metal, wood, glue, screws, and wire combine to create an aesthetic structure that oscillates between the possibilities of ruin and renewal. 

Alas, the aesthetic relationship between these two artists comes down to the collision between animal and human animal, between the nuances of nature and technology. It’s an attraction of opposites that fundamentally questions the circumstances of both.