Optical, a solo exhibition now on at the Chapel Gallery in North Battleford, could be seen as a juxtaposition of the deliberate and random thought processes of artist Patricia Shiplett.
"A lot of the exhibition pieces are about things that I think about every day," says Shiplett, who grew up in North Battleford and now lives with her family in Saskatoon.
It’s all about optical illusions, real and imagined.
The official exhibition statement reads, “Optical illusion forms the main construct, utilizing the properties of light as metaphor and object, in a multi-media installation of thirty-five works. The purpose of this exhibition is to create a fresh, colourful and engaging dialogue with the audience with a focus on current issues of environmental, spiritual, cultural and political events.”
A discussion with the artist reveals Shiplett’s belief that, collectively, we often indulge in the optical illusion that everything around us is fine and likely to stay that way.
The exhibition is comprised of plexiglass structures, two- and three-dimensional paintings and video, some incorporating soundtracks composed by her son Alex Stooshinoff.
One of the video pieces, says Shiplett, is about our passiveness about what's going on in the rest of the world.
“We're going shopping, we're putting in our gardens, we're having babies, we're just going about our lives as if there's nothing going on, but there's a lot of stuff going on,” she says, referring to some of the world’s most worrisome current events.
One of her plexiglass pieces reflects the destruction of the world’s coral reefs. Titled Endless White, it’s a whirl of transparency made from recycled pieces of plexiglass a supplier was going to throw away.
“They were just going in the garbage,” she says. “They’re oil-based, so they are not good for the environment, but I thought if I took them and did something with them I could make a beautiful work of art.”
She adds, “It was so fitting having an oil-based product made into a work of art about the death of the coral reef."
The optical illusion aspect of Endless White is a metaphor in a sense, says Shiplett.
“We're under the illusion that the oceans are endless, that our habitat around us is just going to live on forever, but in fact over the last 40 years we've created a problem of extinction.”
While her work addresses serious subjects, its beauty is not lost in the message.
Smaller versions of the “endless white” theme came to be when Shiplett started putting leftover pieces of plexiglass in small boxes.
“People have been buying them because they are beautiful little things,” she explains. “It’s the simplicity of white on white and clear.”
Other plexiglass boxes lean toward the opposite, using neon colours and mirrors.
Shiplett laughs, “My son says, ‘Oh, Mom, you're stuck in the 1980s,’ but to me it's the 1960s, the psychedelics. I use a lot of psychedelic colours.”
The plexiglass boxes are actually quite expensive to put together (each colour can cost $1,000) and they are also hard to produce, she says.
“On the technical side they are very difficult to make.”
But the results are brilliant, and an experience that adds to her day-to-day life because, when they are not on exhibit, they are part of her home’s decor.
“In my home at four o'clock in the afternoon, there are shards of light everywhere. It's like a kaleidoscope,” she says.
She adds, “The beauty of the work to me is that it has a life of its own. It's not a static object, there's that added element of the phenomenology of the light striking the fluorescent edge.”
The plexiglass boxes started in about 2006 and are similar to work done by an earlier artist. Shiplett had occasion to repair a piece that her mother Anne had purchased from a lake property neighbour, Margot Wawra, who lived in Saskatoon until 1980 before moving to British Columbia.
Her mother’s Wawra piece broke during a move.
“I said I would fix it for her, and I ended up starting to make my own.”
Wawra, who earned her master’s degree with her plexiglass box work, says Shiplett, designed hers as minimal pieces, with subdued colours.
Shiplett moved toward using more dynamic colours, like greens and pinks and blues.
“I like to acknowledge that she came before me,” she says. “I'm not the first, but I'm the only one. I don't know anyone else who does this."
One of Shiplett’s plexiglass boxes might sell for between $1,400 and $3,000. Considering the cost, she’s not making much money.
“You never do,” she laughs.
Other recent works done by Shiplett are in the medium of video. Starting from scratch, she has learned new technology and programs to create primarily abstract video pieces that range from reflections of the innermost elements of abstract thought to images meant to provoke a more global consciousness of current events.
This last is especially important when it comes to children, she believes, and she has used images of her two sons in one of her videos. This has made it resonate with students who saw the video during a recent showing of Optical in Melfort, she says.
Raising thinking children is an important part of the adult generation’s job, she says.
“My children are thinking beings,” she says. “They are very concerned about what's going on, they are very peaceful individuals and they are thoughtful. They are thoughtful in the way they do things, what they are doing and what they're consuming and how they are recycling, and they are always talking about political issues.”
Other works that make up Optical focus less on global awareness and more individual, personal awareness, including her most recent plexiglass works. They evolved out of looking for a way of creating three-dimensional paintings, says Shiplett, whose first artistic works were large-scale sculptures.
She specifically chose an opaque type of plexiglass and painted on the back of it to create a kind of hidden imagery.
One series of three features concentric circles, like the rings of a tree or the ripples that spread outward from something dropped in water. They tell the story of someone’s life, she says, including that point where, in a burst of spirituality, they “get it.”
“They finally figure it out,” she says, adding with a laugh. “That’s kind of where I’m at right now. I've kind of figured out what's important. It took me a long time. I'm getting there."
In fact, Shiplett has been a practicing artist for only the last decade or so.
“I didn't have any art at all until I turned 50,” she says.
She holds an honours degree in finance and had a career in economic development and financial planning. Although she had always been interested in art (and had also been surrounded by it as her mother was the director of North Battleford’s Art Centre and the first curator of the Chapel Gallery) Shiplett was advised, based on an aptitude test, to pursue a career in business.
Her life underwent a sea change when she and her husband, Saskatoon lawyer Nicholas Stooshinoff, decided that because they’d had children late in life somebody should be staying home.
“That’s how the art developed,” says Shiplett. “I didn’t know what to do with myself so I started taking classes.”
From 2001 to 2010, she was a part-time fine arts student at the University of Saskatchewan, enrolled in sculpture and extended media. She was in her second year, in her early 50s, when she found her first calling as an artist – a sculptor working in metal.
“I thought I was in seventh heaven as soon as I touched that welder,” she laughs.
She’d soon developed a large commercial practice, with galleries selling her pieces and commissions for works such as the Town of Blaine Lake’s Centennial Sculpture Project and large-scale outdoor works for the City of Saskatoon.
Then another sea change — the commercial galleries that were selling her work suddenly closed.
She thought, “There’s somebody telling me something, that I maybe need to make a change."
She decided she was probably past the point of moving all those heavy metal pieces about the studio anyway.
“I put my back out often enough that I quit and made a permanent decision to make things that were more lightweight and ethereal.”
In her artist’s statement, Shiplett says, “My art practice is in transition. Over the past 10 years my creative efforts focused on the successful commercialization of mixed media, object-based sculpture for private solo exhibitions and the production of monumental public and private sculpture commissions.
“Since 2012 my art practice is now driven by the pursuit of research in the areas of spirituality, existentialism and anthrapocene.”
Optical will be at the Chapel Gallery until June 24. A reception was held Thursday at the gallery from at which Shiplett was present.
