Art Burn

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Eric Lesage’s Re:Definition, an installation of paper tapestries woven from a 1956 Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary.

For many, the most noteworthy feature of the work in Re:Definition, Eric Lesage’s solo exhibition at RAW Gallery, will be the frankly staggering amount of time he’s spent making it. For the past six years, Lesage has cut apart a single 1956 edition of Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary and painstakingly woven the pieces back together to form a growing number of free-hanging paper works that serve at once as inscrutable new texts and delicate tapestries, variously recalling fabric, skin and bark, among other unexpected materials. Which is fine, I guess.
   
All other considerations aside, the work is impressive as a feat of endurance — that much is undeniable — but "impressiveness" is, at best, an unreliable benchmark of artistic merit, whether it stems from time spent or commitment to craft or material inventiveness or sheer beauty or whatever (Re:Definition lacks for none of these). In some cases, the very features that make a work immediately "impressive" can eclipse the subtler decisions and processes that make it genuinely satisfying to experience.
   
Perhaps you’ve seen those ghastly art-and-design "listicles," passed around on Facebook and easily recognized by their headlines ("Ten unbelievable portraits of Third-World dictators made of jellybeans!" "Six incredible Star Wars vehicles sculpted out of bacon!"). The formula is constant: mundane material + hours of labour = some unexpected, "impressive" object. They’re all about what something’s made from and how it was put together, with little thought given to why anyone might care. Good for a momentary ooh-ah, these works offer little to reward closer consideration. 
   
So pervasive and irritating (to me) is this trend that, I’m sorry to confess, it wasn’t until my third time approaching Lesage’s show that I was willing to think of it as anything more than "(however-many) dazzling tapestries made from old dictionary pages!"
   
My mistake.
   
Because they do dazzle, but they do more than that. Faced with the work, there’s no escaping thoughts of how long it must have taken to fashion those hundreds of thousands of strips of paper into the diverse sheets, sprays, whorls and eddies (to cop a descriptor from the gallery text) on display. The works didn’t just take time, though; they exist in it, and here’s where the depth of Lesage’s material and thought processes (slowly, in my case) becomes apparent.
   
Some will have seen earlier configurations of the work at the WAG or the Maison des artistes, but the since-expanded grouping at RAW is arranged in concentric rings, with older pieces pushed toward the edges by newer works positioned at the centre. Just as the tapestries render otherwise-immaterial language palpable, their chronological arrangement gives physical form to time itself — not just to Lesage’s, crucially, but to our own as we navigate toward and then away from the centre like pilgrims in a medieval labyrinth (a ridiculous but obvious analogy, given RAW’s moodily lit, cellar-like exhibition space).
   
It’s a rewarding experience, but it’s one that requires you to, even momentarily and depending on your individual hang-ups, either pick your jaw up off the floor in the face of genuine spectacle or set aside any knee-jerk mistrust that spectacle might inspire.
   
I might have been the only one in the latter camp, anyway.
   
Until Jan. 29 the exhibition will host daily performances of Village Wooing by George Bernard Shaw as part of RMTC’s ShawFest.
   
Steven Leyden Cochrane is an emerging visual artist, writer and educator from Tampa, Fla. He’s as much a joy to be around as you might expect.

Eric Lesage: Re:Definition
Until Feb. 19, RAW Gallery of
Architecture and Design