Art Burn

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Thunderboy’s Horse by Linus Woods

People talk about the "language of painting" and the "language of dreams," and the analogy is useful in discussing both subjects — to a point. Elk Dreamers Dream, the solo exhibition by Linus Woods currently at Urban Shaman, consists primarily of paintings steeped in dream imagery, so it seems not entirely unreasonable to ask, with due caution, what "languages" these dream-paintings might be said to "speak."
   
Whatever sexed-up vision of art history Hollywood and Dan Brown might try to sell you, paintings aren’t generally things you can "decipher" with the right dictionary of symbols. Neither are dreams, the popularity of "dream dictionaries" notwithstanding. Spoken language itself is rarely as straightforward as we might wish, dreams and paintings even less so, but all three develop by similar processes of borrowing, repurposing and forgetting. I can talk of deciphering a painting without knowing that the word comes to us via the Arabic sifr, meaning "zero." Painters unknowingly echo bits of paintings that they’ve never actually seen and, in dreams, the familiar and the half-remembered resurface in inexplicable new configurations every night.
   
Stylistically, Woods’ paintings speak a language seemingly indebted to the late-19th and early-20th-century European (and Euro-North-American) avant-gardes, which have since come to shape our expectations of painting as a medium, and inform even the wall art sold at frame shops and seen in hotel lobbies. Those avant-gardes, with their mix of exaggerated colour, playfully stylized figurative elements, bits of geometric abstraction and knowingly expressive brushwork (all of which figure into Woods’s own painterly vocabulary), of course cribbed their best material from first peoples the world over —think of Gauguin in Tahiti, Picasso and his African masks, or Emily Carr among the Haida, Gtixsan and Tsimshian of the Pacific coast.
   
This is one language that I can comfortably read, but I make no claim that it figured into Woods’ own thinking and process. Even if it did, I couldn’t say what it might mean for Woods to use it to make paintings that (we’re told) serve as "expressions and extensions of his spiritual journey" and that reflect his identity as "a Dakota/Ojibway Indian artist."
   
The talk coinciding with the opening, which might have filled in some of these gaps, was postponed with no new date currently set. I don’t doubt that learning some specifics of the work and its intended references would only further enrich and enliven it. These details are certainly there already, even if they’re presently illegible to me. I gloss over them here partly because I’d certainly get them wrong, but also because Woods’ work, with its focus on dreams and the messages they might (or might not) impart, seems to be as much about not knowing as anything else.
   
What do I understand of this work? I think I understand something about the lone figures on horseback, backlit by impossible-looking (but instantly recognizable) Prairie sunsets, or about the whirling tapestries of step-pyramids, bison and inchoate geometries, dense with the weight of history, that they stand on. Above all, I know the experience of waking from a dream, hoping — with no real certainty — that it will reveal its meaning to me later.
   
Steven Leyden Cochrane is an emerging artist, writer and educator from Tampa, Fla. The less he knows the better.

Linus Woods: Elk Dreamers Dream
Until March 10, Urban Shaman Contemporary
Aboriginal Art Gallery