Perhaps I should begin by making a confession. Though I do understand the urgency of environmental issues, I am a perpetual cynic who recycles reluctantly and who doubts the effect that my behaviour has on pollution.
That being said, I tried to approach the Warm Warmer event with an open mind, always critical of how the artists involved presented environmentally conscious messages in their art.
Out of all the visual artists whose works covered the walls of Sala, Jean-Francois Lemieux's offered the most nuanced look at environmental change. His "Fossile electronique," depicting a white dinosaur skeleton against a colourful patchwork of painted gears and actual electronic circuits, hints at the sinister results of nature and technology's collision.
This theme of people invading nature, echoed in all of Lemieux's work on display, finds its least ambiguous representation in "S.U.V. Mania." Here, a terrain of landfills and smoke is torn apart by marching columns of Hummers, Ford Explorers, and Jeeps. Metallic chocolate coin wrappers scattered along the edges of the collage complete this work's image of nature's desecration by humanity's conspicuous consumption.
Pollution is not openly depicted in the work of artist Bettina Forget, whose "Monsoon Series" simply seeks to put an abstract concept, such as weather, down on canvas. "Weather: it's something you cannot see," said Forget on her placard. So for her paintings, Forget allowed the rain to hit the paint, creating a delicate membrane of circles in the pigment. It is an elegant removal of the artist from the process of creation, as though nature has taken a hand in crafting each painting.
On the other end of the subtlety spectrum was the work of Lea Shabat. Though her simple colour choices and painting technique worked well together, Shabat's message was too straightforward to be at all interesting for the viewer. The painting "Blindfolding Ourselves" showed just that: a group of people wearing blindfolds. As the title card needlessly explained, humanity is "pretending not to see the next catastrophe coming." Thanks for clearing that up for me, I might have mistook the whole thing for a Kraftwerk album cover.
Musically, the roster offered something for everyone, from the free jazz stylings of John Heward and Malcolm Goldstein to the soulful guitar strumming of Anabelle Chvostak. As with the art on the walls, the musicians onstage occasionally tried too hard to make their message clear, but many offered moments of delicate beauty.
Heward and Goldstein seemed to be summoning spirits with their jerky, almost mystical fiddle and drum playing. In contrast, Chvostak, a beautiful singer and accomplished songwriter, let her song "Water" fall into such mawkish moments as in the chorus, "Flow me down to the river/For I am mostly made of water."
On the whole, the Warm Warmer cabaret was quite effective in promoting environmental awareness through art. The offerings were sometimes quite superb, though occasionally a bit heavy-handed in getting their message across. At the very least, this cynic's cold heart was warmed, if even for just a minute. The question is, however, what I am going to do with my pop can once I am finished drinking it.
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Warming up to Environmentalism
Warm Warmer delivers art and ideology at Sala Rosa
By Andrew Ellis, The McGill Daily