It would be easy to walk into the upper gallery at Chinatowns Wing Sang building and be tempted to turn around and walk back out.
The white walls in the large room are bereft of anything except for two small images, one at each end of the room. The images look like photos. Each one shows an art exhibit in the midst of being either dismantled or erected in a large white room. Theres a broom leaning up against a wall, a vacuum to clean up the dust from the crating, plastic covering the art, an electrical wire snaking across the wooden floor. The images show an exhibit in its prosaic form. Theres no mystique, no ta-da moment, no hushed moment of artistic revelation.
Is this one of those hoity toity art exhibits that only the uber cultured will get? Is the artist, and the gallery, laughing at us for being na茂ve fools and thinking this is art?
Ah, but thats the thing. In this very large room, get right up close to the small image. Really close. And then look at it again, realizing that this is not a photo but a painting. Its a painting of a photo that the artist, Andrew Grassie, took in this very same room of an earlier installation. The brush work seems impossibly fine, especially when you consider that he uses tempera paints paints mixed with an egg yolk, causing it to dry very quickly.
And thats when your mind starts to wander deeper into the painting. Why choose an incredibly difficult art form hyper-realism done in miniature and make it even more difficult by choosing tempera paint? Why decide to follow exactly what the photograph has captured instead of using artistic licence to move that electrical cord over here, or change the colour of the chair?
If youre as lucky as I was, thats when Wendy Chang appears beside you to act as your guide into the exhibits wondrous complexities.
Five of the exhibits paintings two in one room, three in another were specially commissioned by Rennie, who must have been beguiled and just a little transfixed by Grassies work to go to such lengths for the exhibit. (Chang says the gallery no longer wants to paint the exit signs electrical box in one room because Grassie has recorded it for all time as being metallic silver.)
If you backed up enough youd be exactly where [Grassie] was when he took the photo, says the director of the Rennie Collection, which is hosting the first solo exhibition of the Scottish artists work in North America.
Grassie was one of those art students who excelled at whatever medium he tried, Chang says. Modernist, realistic, landscape, portraits, abstract he could master them all. But none of them was the right fit. He was immobilized by the pressure to pursue just one style until he took out one of his abstract paintings and did a painting of him painting the painting. It led to his current focus of creating exhibits using paintings of photos he took at exhibits.
He removes the need for making decisions, says Chang.
And just as the theme of Grassies work is deceptively simple, luck has nothing to do with Changs presence by my side. The Rennie Collection at the Wing Sang is a curious entity. Privately funded by 麻豆传媒映画developer and marketer Bob Rennie, the gallerys open hours are limited to when volunteer guides are available to take you on a tour. In the case of the Grassie exhibit, if you didnt have someone guiding you along, you wouldnt know how many ta-da moments there really are.
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