CREAK

Colin W Davis and Dunstan Topp -- curated by Alexander Rondeau

Exhibition Text


Feel the creaking floorboards, the whistling wind, and the glow of taillights flaring like diamonds. There’s cobwebs, mosquitoes, a full moon, and no one for miles. CREAK, curated by Alexander Rondeau with works by North Bay-based artist Colin W Davis, and Sudbury-based artist Dunstan Topp, is situated in the psychic tension of the rural gothic. The woods have long figured as a cultural site of mystery and even horror precisely for this marginal setting and unfamiliarity to visitors. 

Staged in a former horse barn, the exhibition is coded with filmic references and steeped in visual storytelling strategies to create unease like red lighting and fog. Though with a prolonged examination, the affective charge of the exhibition space slowly shifts as a clearer image emerges, like the scratch at the window revealing itself to be but a branch in the wind. A cloaked figure raising an ax on a Ski-Doo might simply be waving a friendly hello rather than signalling aggression. The opacity of the metacultural signs and symbols of the rural obfuscate their legibility, often producing wayward readings. Unease makes its home in this unknown field of registry – like a creak, like a shadow. Inversely, there may even be a clear familiarity to these works that invites rather than scares away some viewers. While parked along Main Street North Bay to help Colin W Davis load his giant 6’x9’ foot painting into a cargo trailer, a passerby expressed clear excitement at how specific the ‘Skandic’ model of the Ski-Doo in the painting is, and offered the following roughly paraphrased anecdote:


“You know the Skandics are the best to go off trail, they’re nearly impossible to get stuck with those long-tracks. Any other sled going through the deep powder will get you stuck and you’ll need ten big guys with hairy backs to get you out”.


This interplay of the familiar and the unfamiliar is precisely what makes Davis’ paintings of rural cultural and visual material so incisive and cunning: these are complicated tableaus that aptly capture the dynamism of the rural rather than its falsely presumed static slowness. 

Davis’ painting Crystal Shed, with its collection of glassware and bottles, marries the two artists’ bodies of work together like a portal. Much like Crystal Shed, Topp’s ceramic pieces invoke an indelible feeling of sentimentality and a desperate desire to hold on to what might otherwise escape us. Topp’s ongoing experimentation with low-firing techniques have led him to understand clay as a vessel for holding memories – much like an urn – that can seep into the porous soil. But memories can also be inaccessible, and these newer pots and slabs impart this fallibility by introducing inscriptions and found images thus producing objects that feel almost legible though shrouded in spectral mystery. Similarly, the barn itself that houses the works in CREAK is also a time-capsule of the owner’s own mysterious backstory; we can tell that this is a former horse barn based on the stall in the back corner, and there are various pieces of horse decorations that continue to haunt the past life of the space. 


Did you hear that… what was that noise?



Bios

Colin W Davis is a painter living and working in North Bay, Canada. He uses realist painting to explore contemporary issues including masculinity, belonging, and self-worth. His work is largely autobiographical and often explores how the environment can affect self-identity. He holds a BAA in Illustration from Sheridan College and has exhibited work in multiple commercial and public galleries throughout Ontario.

Dunstan Topp is an emerging sculptural artist from Sudbury, Ontario. His hand built ceramic works, characterized by their asymmetries, incorporate screen-printed images and text, recalling story while exploring the memory of clay. The Japanese technique of Raku centers these works, celebrating imperfection and creating variations and irregularities that preserve these memories in a semi-vitreous state. His first exhibition, I hide so you can see (2023), was presented in Sudbury in an outdoor space downtown known as La Crac. Curated by Philippe Bourdeau, it was a first presentation of Topp’s most recent works, following a two-year period of study and trial of low-fire technique. Following a long-standing series of sound-based collaborations, he has been working with silkscreen mentor, Jenn Herd, on a performance-based project called fauxcils. Goth and coldwave set to installative video works, the duo has just completed their first full length LP, set to release before the end of 2024. In 2022, he was invited by Yes Theatre to collaborate on a permanent installation with his teacher Heather Topp. Working together to create a series of screen- printed ceramic plates, Tongue and Cheek (2023) commemorated the opening of the new local performance space, the Reffetorio.

Alexander Rondeau is a queer artist, curator, and writer living in Arcata, California. Rondeau is from rural Northeastern Ontario, Canada and is currently working towards his PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario). His doctoral research centres queer, trans, and two spirit contemporary artists working in rural Northern Ontario. Rondeau also holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from the Ontario College of Art and Design (Toronto, Ontario), and a BFA in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University. Rondeau has served as the Executive Co-Director of the Near North Mobile Media Lab (North Bay, Ontario) and Curatorial Assistant at Union Gallery (Kingston, Ontario). In 2021, he opened an experimental presentation space in the pheasant coop of his family farm called Between Pheasants Contemporary. He has curated and co-curated exhibitions for the Durham Art Gallery (2024), la Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario (Sudbury, 2023), Union Gallery (Kingston, 2022), the Ice Follies Biennial (2020), and the White Water Gallery (North Bay, 2019).

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