Essay by Laurie White from the catalogue Meghan Hildebrand : Lorafauna
The Forest at Night
The vibrant worlds of Meghan Hildebrand’s paintings are instantly captivating. Densely layered compositions create a sense of depth that invites a viewer to spend long moments investigating the scenery. Overflowing with colour and texture, her images draw their audience nearer, rewarding close looking with subtle details. The joyful palettes and painterly mark making for which Hildebrand has become well known continue to animate her artistic practice. In this new body of work, Hildebrand returns to a mode of painting in which chaotic energy is conveyed through a closer relationship with abstraction. Foreground an background seemingly interwoven, the works in Lorafauna give the viewer the sense of being lost within a jostling environment, replete with chirping wildlife and watchful trees.
One way to read Lorafauna is as a collection of nocturnes. While previous series appear to hover in a realm beyond the temporal confines of night and day, this collection sees Hildebrand focusing on those hours in which human power is weaker, allowing a host of other forces to emerge and take control. In this way, Hildebrand situates herself within a younger generation of Canadian landscape painters who counter a prevailing myth that wilderness is uninhabited. Additionally, Hildebrand incorporates the evidence of industry into her work and is unafraid to show the pollution of forests and waterways. Yet her view of these places as alive and enchanted still remains strong. This blending of environmental degradation with a magical sensibility is typical to her work and she deftly holds the two in balance without casting judgement. Understood in this light Lorafauna can be seen as the mapping of an imaginative terrain, the everyday places and journeys suffused with uncanny activity and a glimpse of otherworldy presences.
This exhibition sees Hildebrand achieve her effects through two distinct, medium specific approaches. Half of the works collected here are large scale acrylics, on canvas and on wood. In these works Hildebrand continues to develop her now familiar approach to bold colour palettes, complex compositions and painterly brushwork to show the lush forests and jagged mountains of British Columbia’s landscape. The second half of the exhibition is comprised of watercolour paintings, shown in series for the first time.
The artist uses the fluidity and immediacy of this medium to aptly describe the many bodies of water that define this coastal region. Despite numerous experiments in watercolour before now, Hildebrand here enlarges them, giving the medium more room to develop and revealing watercolour to be just as strong a medium as her acrylics.
As a collection, Lorafauna constitutes an important stage in Hildebrand’s oeuvre. The reconciliation of distinct styles, as well as the new forays into the potentials of watercolour, show Hildebrand to be an artist committed to the constant re-evaluation of her own practice. It is this sustained inquiry into the potential of forms to be flexible and reconfigured that has produced Lorafauna as a body of work at once instantly recognisable yet ever new and surprising.
Visual Ecologies
Over the course of her career, Meghan Hildebrand ha become well known for a style that blends representation with techniques of abstraction. Fields of colour are layered upon one another forming vibrant backgrounds. Upon this base is added a wealth of marks and symbols creating a rich tapestry of textures akin to a patchwork quilt of many fabrics. In recent work, clouds of dots can be seen hovering over these already complex surfaces, creating shimmering optical effects. In Felt So Nice, a curved form, seemingly composed of many threads, weaves around a tree trunk to create flickering visual vibrations. With these deceptively simple painterly techniques, Hildebrand’s works produce a haptic form of seeing wherein “sight discovers in itself a specific function of touch that is uniquely its own.” In this way, abstraction in Hildebrand’s work can be understood to extend beyond form alone, and into the realm of tactile sensation.
A similarly tactile effect is created by the close grouping of symbols, as in the foreground of "Black Bunting". Crosses, arcs and triangles are densely packed to form a variegated area difficult to visually process. Elsewhere, the triangular chevron motif is deployed to form mountain ranges, forests, and even campsites. Capable of being assembled in multiple variations, landmarks and the paths between them are in constant variation in these works. This flexibility of forms constitutes a shifting lexicon where meaning is always contextual and never reducible to any one sign. Hildebrand activates her viewer’s tendency to narrativise by using these symbols as hooks into th painting. She says of her work, “often my paintings become a version of the childhood dream of searching a familiar place, that is not itself, for something that is never revealed.” The viewer thus becomes akin to a reader moving through a fragmented text, appropriating bits and pieces to form their own interpretation of the image.
An equally important feature to consider in understanding how the work operates is the format of the series. Hildebrand produces identifiable bodies of work with clearly defined visual styles, to the extent that collections become entities in and of themselves. This allows the artist to set up relationships between works, forming a kind of ecology of images that resonate with one another. In this collection, a particular method of applying paint in a continuous scraping motion with the flat edge of a palette knife communicates a rawness that flows across multiple images. Of the various works which use this technique, Cache explores it the most fully and the artist layers many of these strokes with other angular forms. The effect is distinctly mineral, at once crystalline and sedimentary, and recalls the visceral landscapes left behind by glaciers. Having set up this visual characteristic in Cache, links are formed with the other works that utilise it and some of that earthy quality is conferred to pieces like Badger and Creeping Thyme. The work of representation is therefore distributed across the collection of images and demonstrates Hildebrand’s skill in crafting relationships both within and across works.
Unruly Landscapes
Meghan Hildebrand was raised in the northern city o Whitehorse, Yukon Territory by her mother, an artist, and her father, a miner. After completing her education at Kootenay School of Arts and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Hildebrand and her husband relocated to the small town of Powell River, traditional territory of the Tla'amin First Nation, tucked away in a nook on the Salish Sea. Once a prominent mill town, Powell River is distinguished by the hulking Catalyst Paper Corporation on the town’s northern shore. Plumes of steam gently rise from the factory’s tall cooling towers, capping the town like fluffy signature. On all sides stretch blue and green vistas, the many lakes and inlets punctuating the verdant green forests.
This tension between wilderness and the stark forms of industrial infrastructure is a perennial theme in Hildebrand’s work. In Lorafauna this same concern persists, yet with a more subtle focus on the traces of human intervention, not just into landscape, but into natural rhythms and processes. In the watercolour works such as The Kinglet’s Regatta, BC’s logging industry is indicated through bald hillsides speckled with tree stumps after clear cutting. The harvested logs are seen on the ocean, waiting to be transported and processed. In another work, Awake and Listening, a red glow in the distance suggests a forest fire burning through the night. In 2017, long-term effects of the forestry industry, combined with years of suppression by settler societies, led to a record number of forest fires in BC, placing the province in a state of emergency. But while this year may have made the headlines, fires are an annual reality for BC’s rural residents and an ordinary part of the forest’s cycles of renewal. Hildebrand’s restrained representation of the fires signal both the realities of living in an economy based on natural resources and the power of natural processes to assert themselves, over and against human attempts to control them.
Other works also point to ecological disruption. In Tanglebound, an area of black paint in the upper left of the image bleeds across the painting’s surface next to the sketched outlines of two trucks, suggesting an oil spill from which the shapes of birds flee. Two tubular shapes in the upper right of Spruced Up recall pipelines and tank shaped furnaces release emission clouds throughout the series. The refusal to hide these aspects of the landscape and to show them imbricated in chains of effects (are those clouds of acid rain falling from the sky in Tanglebound?) shows the artist’s critical awareness of her surroundings and her commitment to processing that reality through her work. In Lorafauna, this awareness is grounded even further by the submersion of the viewer into a recognisable landscape. While earlier bodies of work may have taken up the theme of industry, they tended to show the effects as detached: floating worlds amid clouds. The new work by comparison is in and of the earth and shows a keen interest in the materiality of that earth, its forms and textures. A future utopic dreamworld is replaced with a turbulent present in all its complexities.
The Watchers
One of the most charming aspects of Meghan Hildebrand’s work is that her landscapes are inhabited a manifold of flora and fauna, some fantastical, others more familiar. It is this multispecies community that Hildebrand pays tribute to in her title, Lorafauna, a made-up word meaning something like “beautiful creatures.” More often than not these critters act as witnesses to the scenes in which they are implicated. A recurring motif in Lorafauna is the magical plant expressed as bushes full of grumpy looking fruit or chirpy root vegetables peeking out from behind tree trunks Hildebrand has noted that this image first began to appear in her work during a residency in Oaxaca, Mexico. After a visit to the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Pre-Hispanic Sculpture, she began to incorporate the enigmatic expressions of the faces she found there onto onion-like figures and rocks. Whether intentionally or not, these enchanted plants reference a long and diverse history of magical folk lore across continents. One such reference would be the ninmenju, a Japanese spirit or yokai that takes the form of a tree filled with head shaped fruit that laugh at passersby. These yokai are “undomesticated expressions of nature, denizens of a wild territory beyond human agency.” The viewer’s gaze is thus returned by the communities of plants, animals, and even landforms that inhabit the scene. In Chaperone, the very mountains themselves keep a watchful eye on the valley below. The warm tones of the painting further add to a sense of vitality, of the hills as living entities.
Hildebrand frequently presents animals in her works, her stylised forms having become a signature feature. But it is important to note that she also presents them in clusters. No lone wolves here but rather packs and collectives, flocks and herds. Moreover, the animals often appear to be in dialogue with one another, alluding to cooperation and communication. In Duck Lake Mainline, a quartet of ducks quack towards the hills, their expressions translated into language by the characteristic speech bubble. In the foothills, a pack of wolves bark back their dissent while a wizened mountain spirit looks on in amusement. This cacophony of voices challenges the conception of wilderness as uninhabited and grants agency to those who inhabit it. It is important to note that such a world view is not new to these lands. Indigenous peoples of the northwest coast have long held the understanding that the land, and the other-than-humans we share it with, are active participants in human endeavours, whether we like it or not. Hildebrand’s re-enchantment of the forests and seas is thus a playful yet necessary tool for reconfiguring relationships with the natural world.
A State of Flow
Bringing us ever closer to this enchanted realm is Hildebrand’s new collection of watercolour paintings, their softer tones and delicate layering suggestive of half-remembered dreams. In these works the perspective is kept low, close to the shoreline with its ebbs and flows, starry skies overhead. Boats cruise past one another, propelled by the tide, as flocks of waterfowl go about their business and ferry ports slip by. Hildebrand once again weaves a tapestry of possible narratives; the crossing ships elude our ability to know where they are going, or where they have been. A broken-down truck covered in pine needles, the residue of rural life, sinks into the earth suggesting projects forgotten or abandoned. As the title of Porchside implies, life on the coast has a different pace and more time is given over to simply watching the world turn.
One watercolour stands out from the rest. At more than twice the size of her other works on paper, this piece commands the same presence as any canvas. It is a wintry scene replete with icy crags and frozen pools. Nightcrowned Northern Shoveler deftly utilises negative space, the whiteness of the paper coming to represent a snowy land. The effect is spartan, slightly chilly, but conveys a monumentality to the northern landscape that Hildebrand expresses more clearly in this piece than any other. Like a foot in the door, this work holds open the possibility of further exploration into visual languages and imaginative terrains as yet uncharted by Hildebrand’s existing work. It shows the artist’s unrelenting commitment to experimentation while testing the limits of her existing lexicon. As her approach to the tricky subjects of ecological degradation, multispecies cooperation, and the unique identity of place continue to develop it is this creative energy that will continue to distinguish Meghan Hildebrand as an innovative and exciting artist in the field o contemporary painting.
Notes
1 See John O’Brian and Peter White, Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).
2 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, (London: Continum, 2003), 150.
3 Meghan Hildebrand, “Artist Statement,” http://yukonartscentre.com/calendar/ event/meghan_hildebrand_look_at_the_things_weve_found/
4 Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yokai, (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 115. The medieval European example of mandrakes would be another compelling example.
5 Kim Tallbear “Beyond Life/Not Life: A Feminist Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialisms” (keynote address, University of Texas at Austin, February 2015), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE-gaDG-kLQ
POCKET ESTATES by Theresa Slater
Pocket Estates is a kaleidoscopic series of acrylic paintings by Canadian artist, Meghan Hildebrand. The title of the series acts as a poetic device to interpret and engage with the symbolic language of this prolific painter. Hildebrand’s current work is built upon multiple containers of narrative - it is explosive; dense; layered; and full to the brim. Remarkably executed, these paintings announce that the universe is a plenitude of things, spirits, and tales.
The underlying principle of the universes as whole and full, allow each piece to represent a singular and complete universe (albeit magical, sensuous, spirit-inhabited, and sometimes post-apocalyptic) that sits within a larger contextual series of contemporary economies and history. Within each painting, an estate; within each estate, a spontaneous colour field whose function transcends ornamentation while offering a fractal effect echoing substantial narration. These expressive ‘pockets’ host meticulously executed characters who are embodied with emotive faces and agency. They have a story tell - it’s your undertaking to hear them.
This analysis positions Hildebrand’s work as maximalist in optical sensation, narration, and artistic procedure. Her amplification and evaluation of modernist abstract tendencies are met with a dizzying array of symbolic efforts and techniques producing work that is sublime in its complexity while maintaining ease in its enjoyment. Unpacking her technical procedure allows for insight into how the work functions contextually.
Pocket Estates expands Hildebrand’s practice by centering atmospheric perspective exemplified in Soundstage (48 x 66, 2019). This new approach to add a shadow line under larger ‘pockets’ of gesture, creates the optical illusion of push and pull between the foreground and background adding tension and interest. Hildebrand uses multiple layers and figures which compete in tension leading the viewer's eye throughout the composition, illuminating a full canvas. Evident in most Maximalist work, Hildebrand's compositions emphasize shape and pattern, with a vibrant colour palette offering some instances of select black moments reminiscent of early expressionists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (b. 1880) or Perle Fine (b. 1905). This dimension obscuring use of black is evident in the series namesake, Pocket Estates (48x66, 2019). Hildebrand accentuates optical sensation as her dense compositions focus on the interplay between colour, form, and movement. Hildebrand's Dinner Bell Collector (48 x 66, 2019) positions movement as a key formal element in her series, the flow of logs define a direction for the viewer and the perceptual colour mixing dots add visual dissonance. More is more in her legendary style, allowing for multiple art modes to be activated while utilizing technical knowledge that emphasizes discovery and multiplicity in the narration. The series is held together formally in the repetition of motifs. Many of these motifs are signature marks, indicating the continuous and habitual language of her painting technique.
Hildebrand’s technical prowess comes from a committed creative process focused on problem solving and visual ambiguity resolution. She begins to work intuitively to energetically cover the canvas, then selects and accentuates points of tension and ease within the voluminous colour forms. Everything she loves about a painting happens fast at the beginning of the expression. Following this moment of creative responsive mark-making, her focus becomes calculating which specialized symbolism is required to finish the work. Hildebrand’s commitment to colour is demonstrated at the onset of the creation when her palette is comprehensively chosen and honed based on hue, value, and mood. Pocket Estates revitalizes perceptual visual colour mixing, adding interest and art historical reference to Op Art and Pointillism. She is careful of adopting artistic appropriation and maintains a post-modern denial that everything is available for citation. Assuredly Hildebrand’s ideation and execution have more than enough punk-rock intentionality - it is individualistic, unruly, and rebellious. Her effort to stop sooner is evident in Peaches of the Moon (36 x 30, 2019). The effort of this important artist is to remain discerning about the movement and gestures, to remain attentive and active while honing and equalizing the abstraction of expressive painterly magnitude into harvestable worlds and stories.
Pocket Estates series is exemplary at functioning as a perceptual puzzle or code. Each colour pocket becomes an escape window into an imaginary landscape where viewers are enveloped by chroma and captured by whispered stories. Hildebrand’s audience participates in these eerie and enchanted narratives by piecing together interactions between the colliding characters and patterns. She successfully administers worlds full of coalescent communities and energetic interplays of storytellers and does so miraculously without representing the human form.
Hildebrand asserts there are no morals, judgments, or ethics inherent in the conceptualization of the work. Rather, it is a simply innocent and astonishing discovery that is mobilized in the artist and audience alike. The general attitude of the artist, like the work, is approachable and welcoming. She deliberately avoids instructing her audience to behave and interpret the work in a particular way. The artist maintains and encourages painting as a refuge and the work resists figurative representation for this reason. Hildebrand is a master of representing the traces of people, she paints what they leave behind; their footprint remains and stain.
The histories present in the series are personal, colonial, and regional. The economies of forestry, mining, fishing and homesteading are markers of place that inform Hildebrand’s painting process. These landscapes speak to miraculous Canadian resources extraction, whose logs and water are harvested without labour and ownership. In Level Up (40 x 36, 2019) the characters, ghosts, or acorn spirits function to add narrative by fostering community and mirroring family. The artist’s creative process includes the solace of nature walks, where things felt and unseen watch her move through the forest. The forests awareness is present in her paintings. Her poetic exposition of landscape and narration, utilizing the mandate that more is more delivers an astute series of work; Pocket Estates is a reflection on the mark we leave in the world and the stories therewithin.
Theresa Slater is an artist and writer who works with creative facilitation, ethical theory, new materialism, digital bodies and the intersections of feminism and technology. She is an MA graduate of Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art from OCAD University in Toronto, Canada.
SHIP IN THE WOODS written by Gordon Young
Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
- The Tempest, Act III, Scene II
2018 was a busy year for Meghan Hildebrand – her U.S. debut at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art was followed by a successful appearance at the Skye Gallery in Aspen, Colorado – and 2019 looks like it's going to be just as hectic. Already set to launch her second solo show of the year, this increased activity is a direct result of the widening awareness of Hildebrand's work among curators – including Danielle Krysa, aka The Jealous Curator, whose influential podcast has brought even greater recognition to this artist's bold vision. That's why her most recent show at Mayberry Fine Art, Ship in the Woods, offers an exciting opportunity not just for fans and collectors, but also for those who have yet to journey into the revelatory landscapes of Hildebrand's imagination.
As its title suggests, two symbols dominate this series of paintings. The first, a technological achievement that broadened the reach and scope of the human species: the floating vessel capable of crossing vast oceans. The second, a site of wonder and mystery, abundant with natural resources and proliferating life: the wildernesses into which seafarers and assorted stragglers have ventured over the centuries. Yet what we find in these works is not a glorious evocation of the grand visions and triumphant conquests of the pioneers of human exploration. Instead, we enter a post-historical, post-human realm, where the grand narratives of human history have long since vanished into the ocean of oblivion, leaving behind mere relics washed ashore, abandoned, or transformed into playthings for the same kind of miraculous beings populating Prospero's enchanted isle in Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Take, for instance, the eponymous painting, Ship in the Woods – the most monumental work of the series. Before us we see the ghostly apparition of a galleon (masterfully evoked with a transparent, earth-hued wash) from the now almost mythical days, centuries past, of discovery and domination. Scattered around it lies the debris of humanity: bottles, tires, and apparently a delivery truck half-buried in the fecund earth. And yet the galleon (a testament to the technological wizardry of the human mind), lying in a languid horizontal across the bulk of the painting, is literally having vertical strips torn out of it by abstract tree-forms adorned here and there with eyes, while elemental patches of coloured grid-like patterns simultaneously begin to swallow it up. In the background, pure white verticals multiply and vault triumphantly upward and out of the painting. This galleon, almost a dream in the mind of the forest, has become a faded curiosity for the watchful inhabitants. They observe – perhaps murmuring among themselves, or chattering like birds at dawn – its magical metamorphosis.
In many of the paintings, the vessels are like rocks that have been subjected to the endless waves of time, worn down and smoothed till they resemble toy-like shapes, sometimes only vaguely reminiscent of their original forms. In others, they resemble skeletons – ancient dinosaurs of engineering. And their purposes have also undergone magical transformations. In Afloat in the Woods, for example, the remnant of what might once have been a cargo ship has seemingly been transformed into a site of alchemical experimentation, where a being – resembling a cloud of fireflies – rises from one of its funnels. In the vessel's lower-level compartments, containers emit the sparks from which this firefly-being was created, presumably placed there by other fantastical inhabitants of this forest.
But what are these mysterious spirits that populate these paintings? Are they, perhaps, representations of essential energies as understood by the pre-scientific mind – the mystical precursors of the "virtual particles" that quantum field theory tells us are forever flitting into and out of existence in the vast quantum vacuum? Are they the anthropomorphic ancestors of the slightly more predictable, though less relatable, elements of the Standard Model – muons and gluons and the swiftly decaying Higgs boson? Maybe they are the very spirits known intuitively to men and women of past eras who harvested forests for shelter and warmth, strangers to the climate-controlled dwellings of the contemporary condo owner. Does this explain why the forest spirits have allowed the quaint old forms of rustic cabins and triangular piles of logs to survive like museum pieces dedicated to the memory of less destructive human inhabitants? Hildebrand doesn't offer clear answers to these questions, leaving viewers to seek solutions for themselves.
What is clear, however, is that these paintings represent dimensions of reality beyond linear conceptions of human history – and all without recourse to a single mathematical equation. Space and time are shattered. Shards of moments and sites flash like lightning across the canvases. Night slices through day. A field of stars suddenly manifests in a terrestrial forest, and a patchwork of basic shapes and hues – the building blocks of artistic creation, squiggles and flowing streams of paint – float beside interstellar worlds next to lakes and mountains glowing golden at the end of a summer's day. We are witness to the mad, whimsical, dizzying vision of wondrous simultaneity, the perpetual churn of creation and dissolution.
And, best of all, everyone is invited to witness these wonders – for Meghan Hildebrand's vision is open and inclusive. Her works remind us that every second is imbued with the miraculous. Overflowing with boundless good cheer and graceful fluidity, her paintings are raucous, explosive attempts to reawaken a species increasingly herded into states of data-driven apathy and discontent. She invites us to see through history to the timeless mysteries of being, and to energetically celebrate the never-ending canvas of creation upon which our fleeting forms appear and disappear.