Art Burn

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Chris Reid’s Screaming Bread Flees Grain Elevator, 2010

Something is terribly amiss on the Prairies, at least if the eerie visions shared in I like to believe I am telling the truth — Brandon artist Chris Reid’s ambitious solo exhibition at Oseredok Art Gallery and Gallery 1C03— are to be trusted. The note of hesitance in the title is only our first clue, however, that perhaps they shouldn’t be.
   
Issues of certainty and uncertainty haunt the two exhibition spaces, which are as much active players in the experience of the works as the idiosyncratic and highly personal cast of recurring characters Reid conjures to populate them.
   
The work, consisting of large-scale pastel drawings, fabric dolls, quirky sculptural tableaux and pysanka-style Ukrainian Easter eggs, suggest stories while falling short of telling any outright.
   
The scenes Reid sets operate on dream logic, animated by peculiar juxtapositions that recall the morning-after confabulating we do in an effort to make sense of the last night’s unconscious activities. Images plucked from real life — homes, churches, grain elevators — mingle with unusual personages (a doll with crosses for eyes, an emaciated humanoid housecat and, uh, screaming toast?). Buildings take on lurid hues and sprout legs (a reference to the ambivalent Slavic witch-figure, Baba Yaga), as if threatening to run away. In many respects, these seem like children’s nightmares infected by adult themes which range from housing security to domestic strife.
   
Dream life is certainly a well-explored territory in visual art, as are folk tales (particularly those of Slavic origin), though Reid ably exploits the potentials of each.
   
Visually, the work suggests a Technicolor Tim Burton or a kind of storybook Surrealism. This is stuff one either loves without condition or emphatically does not. Creepy dolls and hypodermic needles (both repeated motifs) trigger a Pavlovian eye-rolling response in me, personally, but that’s true of many things, so don’t let me spoil your fun.
   
That I can recognize Reid’s approach without fully understanding it and appreciate it without enjoying it is a testament to how well-considered and fully realized the exhibition is. Its two halves maintain distinct focuses while echoing one another enough to reinforce the processes of remembering and forgetting so critical to the experience of the work.
   
Still, I maintain that Screaming Bread Flees Grain Elevator, the drawing used for the promotional material, is one of the most aggressively hideous goddamned things I have ever seen in any context. "Screaming bread," it turns out, is a bridge that I cannot and will not cross. Your mileage may vary.
   
Steven Leyden Cochrane is an emerging artist, writer, and educator from Tampa, Fla. He seriously can’t get with the screaming bread, sorry.

CHRIS REID: I LIKE TO BELIEVE I AM TELLING THE TRUTH
Oseredok Art Gallery (Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre)
Gallery 1C03 (U of W)
Until April 14