A newly-opened joint exhibition by Sechelt-based artists Claudia Sageele Cuesta and Bill Baker changes perspectives without uttering a word. While orbiting their works at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery, the angles shift, lines converge, and shards of mirroring glass under the upraised table of Cuesta’s the silence of war capture transitory fragments of viewers themselves.
The show — Parallels — opened during a public reception at the downtown Gibsons gallery on Feb. 15. Its title alludes to the duo’s collaborative relationship since 2003, during which they have used international residencies and commissions to define a fusion of art and architecture (Baker is an urban designer and a former urban planner for the City of Vancouver).
Local artists Jennifer Love and Karen Love urged the pair to showcase their work on the Sunshine Coast. “They pushed us really hard,” recalled Cuesta, who has taught at universities in her native Colombia, in England and in Vancouver. “They said, ‘Come on, you guys, you haven’t shown on the Coast before, and we need to see some of your work.’ We were reluctant because we’re very insular. But I’m grateful because it’s been fantastic to have worked together and to see the works together in relationship.”
Cuesta’s sculptures invite moments of spiritual reflection. In the mixed-media Frequency, rose-coloured threads cascade over a variegated white substrate. The interplay of loose tendrils and the rough irregularity of the surface hint at a subtle conversation, just out of earshot. A similarly textured motif appears in the monumental sculpture visible invisibility — a place of prayer, whose bas-relief ridges flow and ebb, converging in a crescendo before receding to its muted periphery.
“It’s challenging,” Cuesta said. “It’s about being in our time, making work about our time, and who we are in our time. It’s challenging and the work reflects that challenge. With my works, where you’re trying to speak what cannot be spoken, you’re constantly making and undoing, trying to get it right. And perhaps you never get it right.”
Her wall-height sculpture Leap of Faith — fashioned from wood, canvas, and acrylic paint — coats a fractured panel in a field of tranquil blue. As with the plexiglass surface that encapsulates the monochromatic canvas striations of Under my skin, logical resolution of Cuesta’s patterns lies just out of reach; she creates in the realm of intuition and allusion. In the silence of war, the cotton covering evokes the women who sewed tablecloths for wartime conferences. “Was this what kept them sane?” she asked. “Being silent, having no influence, but threading a needle in and out in organized patterns?”
The angular abstracts of Bill Baker grapple with similarly existential matters, including time and space. “Each person is living in a specific time zone, 100 years if we’re fortunate,” he said. He grew up in an isolated countryside (his father was a trapper) without recourse to libraries. “I had to leave to find out what the world meant for me,” he recalled. “A lot of what I experience when I go abroad is that I’m looking at the whole environment: to experience myself in my place, in my time.”
Baker’s vivid-coloured works in pastel and charcoal may be paper-thin, but their shapes defy two dimensions. Always anchored by a field of black (most prominently in the breathtaking #3, where a yellow bolt seems to open a passage through the darkness), intersecting walls or panels lead to glimmers of transcendence.
Parallels remains on display at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery until March 9. Baker and Cuesta will present a free artist talk at the gallery on Feb. 22, starting at 2 p.m.
