Investigative Reports with Vera Greenwood
High Ground : Vera Greenwood
Ottawa Art Gallery
High Ground is like an episode of Investigate Reports on A&E, with Greenwood standing in for Bill Curtis. Like him, she has constructed a narrative from "physical evidence"—the 2" x 4" her grandfather used to beat a horse to death in front of her 5 year old father; lengthy multiple medical records of her father's years in the Canadian Navy; the gloves her granddad used to try and strangle her Dad in 1922, a blood stained sheet crushed into a chipped fake-gold leaf frame. Along with this, Greenwood throws in a wide assortment of period furnishings including a box TV set, a Brownie uniform, a meat-safe like GM fridge, lines of faded laundry, magazines, a swing and family photographs.
Set in the fifties, the décor has an English Canadian white trash aesthetic splattered all over it like gunfire—the faded flowery sheets, sagging seats in the colour-less furniture, filthy fake-wood picture frames. It's all laid out in glass cases, hung on the walls, put on tables, in spaces set up to look like the rooms of a home.
Not long after entering, I felt like I had entered the archetypal landscape of crimes against humanity - the childhood family home. This one sits in for all the other homes we don't want to talk about in depth or examine too closely—namely, our own. (It even includes a door with a piece of paper stuck on it saying, "Emergency Exit", that seemed to lead absolutely nowhere.). Propagated from the bones, bloodlettings and secrets still flourishing in our closets, this is the stuff of legend, mythology, the classics, and Bill Shakespeare.
The crimes Greenwood tries to unearth star her father, her grandfather, and in a way, even herself, as both victim and perpetrator—as the artist controlling the narrative, she can show or tell whatever she likes about anyone.
Throughout the exhibit, a flood of index cards teeming with typewritten stories, anchored with scotch tape, wash over the walls. By the second gallery, I was wishing she'd created web site, written a book, made a movie, shot a video—anything but this (Vera! Oh Vera!). How my legs ached from standing in one position to read say ten index cards! And yet they felt very much like cues (as in the theatre) or clues. They include stories about fetuses that miscarried and were examined on the family's breadboard to her father's 59th birthday and Greenwood's gift to him of a book of Diane Arbus' photography ("It remains the most inappropriate gift I ever gave anyone," she writes."). Violence, compulsion, her father's dysfunctional behaviour and its roots makeup the predominant themes.
Tracing her roots back to her grandfather's departure from Bradford, England, in the early 1900s, she wends her way through her father's life (born in Western Canada) and herself, the youngest of six children.
Seldom do we see a woman artist trace her past through her father's side so intensely. Not only is it a narrative that's become undervalued, it's a relationship (father-daughter) much misunderstood haunting many women for much of their lives.
"The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea," writes Agatha Christie, "which has been impressed on them in very tender years." The shattering violence inflicted by the grandfather and its kaleidoscopic affects on the father, in a chilling irony becomes Greenwood's legacy. Her childhood resounds with its ripple affects, and High Ground is the primary evidence of her obsession to understand and come to terms with it.
"Some of the stories in the first gallery are quite plausible," says Greenwood. Bill Curtis' mask melts from Greenwood's face, showing cracks, eventually falling away completely. In this metamorphosis somewhere between fiction and truth, she becomes a perpetrator in creating a new family history with its own ideology, just like the one her ancestors created, for who's to say this version is true? And who is being silenced or excluded by this version?
Her play with reality becomes obvious in the first gallery. An aerial photograph showing some houses serves as a backdrop. In front of it, objects connected with a fire that apparently burned one of them to the ground are displayed. They include a "spectator's button", a shard of cracked windowpane, and human bones. From here on Greenwood's credibility in revealing her family's narrative teeters close to becoming undermined altogether. We cannot know which of the details; stories and artifacts are "real". "It's about encountering another's reality," Greenwood notes, "and the subjectivity of everybody. And Dad's mental illness. Those stories were real to him. I'm not saying any of them were false."
Herein lies the double-edged sword, how do we know to what degree Greenwood's perception is "real"?
Fittingly, not far into the show, the only way to really see the rest of it is by flashlight. Set up on a box with a huge sign (although apparently, some people have missed this altogether), the flashlights and the way I looked at the rest of the show became yet another metaphor. As viewers, we can choose what we choose to illuminate, just as in real life, people leave their homes with different memories, different "versions" of the truth. Family members spend lifetimes, sometimes generations, stumbling around in the dark, trying to find something, like "the Truth." The chasms gaping between the different versions sometimes are never bridged.
Most if not all of the artifacts on tables have numbers next to them but no corresponding label with any additional information. Thinking they were random, I stopped following them after a while, believing them to be red herrings (although apparently as Greenwood explained to me, there is a chronological order.). Oddly imposing a chronological order on family history, one inevitably replete with loose threads, goes completely counter to the way time lines are determined in families. The traumatic event(s) or period can completely restructure an individual's sense of time.
Whatever you make of the show, Greenwood has been extraordinarily brave to reveal so much of her family's past in such intimate detail and depth. In contemporary Western culture, the family stories we're habitually assaulted with are those fragments exploding like grenades on Oprah, Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, Montel, and Sally Jessie Raphael. The selling of family dysfunction, almost the only kind of family story we see on real-life based TV, rests primarily on marketing a particular myth: that resolution can come from publicly airing the most dysfunctional intimate parts of our lives on TV in a few minutes, or at most 48 minutes, plus commercials.
High Ground sighs with a deep yearning for answers but even more, it's about Greenwood's quest for redemption. The analogies to TV end here. Greenwood is exposed as just another person trying to figure herself and her family out—except that she's doing it in public.
Ultimately, perhaps she too will have to accept what we all do—that ultimately life is a long series of loose ends. Each answer leads back to the beginning...another question.
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 1999
Set in the fifties, the décor has an English Canadian white trash aesthetic splattered all over it like gunfire—the faded flowery sheets, sagging seats in the colour-less furniture, filthy fake-wood picture frames. It's all laid out in glass cases, hung on the walls, put on tables, in spaces set up to look like the rooms of a home.
Not long after entering, I felt like I had entered the archetypal landscape of crimes against humanity - the childhood family home. This one sits in for all the other homes we don't want to talk about in depth or examine too closely—namely, our own. (It even includes a door with a piece of paper stuck on it saying, "Emergency Exit", that seemed to lead absolutely nowhere.). Propagated from the bones, bloodlettings and secrets still flourishing in our closets, this is the stuff of legend, mythology, the classics, and Bill Shakespeare.
The crimes Greenwood tries to unearth star her father, her grandfather, and in a way, even herself, as both victim and perpetrator—as the artist controlling the narrative, she can show or tell whatever she likes about anyone.
Throughout the exhibit, a flood of index cards teeming with typewritten stories, anchored with scotch tape, wash over the walls. By the second gallery, I was wishing she'd created web site, written a book, made a movie, shot a video—anything but this (Vera! Oh Vera!). How my legs ached from standing in one position to read say ten index cards! And yet they felt very much like cues (as in the theatre) or clues. They include stories about fetuses that miscarried and were examined on the family's breadboard to her father's 59th birthday and Greenwood's gift to him of a book of Diane Arbus' photography ("It remains the most inappropriate gift I ever gave anyone," she writes."). Violence, compulsion, her father's dysfunctional behaviour and its roots makeup the predominant themes.
Tracing her roots back to her grandfather's departure from Bradford, England, in the early 1900s, she wends her way through her father's life (born in Western Canada) and herself, the youngest of six children.
Seldom do we see a woman artist trace her past through her father's side so intensely. Not only is it a narrative that's become undervalued, it's a relationship (father-daughter) much misunderstood haunting many women for much of their lives.
"The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea," writes Agatha Christie, "which has been impressed on them in very tender years." The shattering violence inflicted by the grandfather and its kaleidoscopic affects on the father, in a chilling irony becomes Greenwood's legacy. Her childhood resounds with its ripple affects, and High Ground is the primary evidence of her obsession to understand and come to terms with it.
"Some of the stories in the first gallery are quite plausible," says Greenwood. Bill Curtis' mask melts from Greenwood's face, showing cracks, eventually falling away completely. In this metamorphosis somewhere between fiction and truth, she becomes a perpetrator in creating a new family history with its own ideology, just like the one her ancestors created, for who's to say this version is true? And who is being silenced or excluded by this version?
Her play with reality becomes obvious in the first gallery. An aerial photograph showing some houses serves as a backdrop. In front of it, objects connected with a fire that apparently burned one of them to the ground are displayed. They include a "spectator's button", a shard of cracked windowpane, and human bones. From here on Greenwood's credibility in revealing her family's narrative teeters close to becoming undermined altogether. We cannot know which of the details; stories and artifacts are "real". "It's about encountering another's reality," Greenwood notes, "and the subjectivity of everybody. And Dad's mental illness. Those stories were real to him. I'm not saying any of them were false."
Herein lies the double-edged sword, how do we know to what degree Greenwood's perception is "real"?
Fittingly, not far into the show, the only way to really see the rest of it is by flashlight. Set up on a box with a huge sign (although apparently, some people have missed this altogether), the flashlights and the way I looked at the rest of the show became yet another metaphor. As viewers, we can choose what we choose to illuminate, just as in real life, people leave their homes with different memories, different "versions" of the truth. Family members spend lifetimes, sometimes generations, stumbling around in the dark, trying to find something, like "the Truth." The chasms gaping between the different versions sometimes are never bridged.
Most if not all of the artifacts on tables have numbers next to them but no corresponding label with any additional information. Thinking they were random, I stopped following them after a while, believing them to be red herrings (although apparently as Greenwood explained to me, there is a chronological order.). Oddly imposing a chronological order on family history, one inevitably replete with loose threads, goes completely counter to the way time lines are determined in families. The traumatic event(s) or period can completely restructure an individual's sense of time.
Whatever you make of the show, Greenwood has been extraordinarily brave to reveal so much of her family's past in such intimate detail and depth. In contemporary Western culture, the family stories we're habitually assaulted with are those fragments exploding like grenades on Oprah, Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, Montel, and Sally Jessie Raphael. The selling of family dysfunction, almost the only kind of family story we see on real-life based TV, rests primarily on marketing a particular myth: that resolution can come from publicly airing the most dysfunctional intimate parts of our lives on TV in a few minutes, or at most 48 minutes, plus commercials.
High Ground sighs with a deep yearning for answers but even more, it's about Greenwood's quest for redemption. The analogies to TV end here. Greenwood is exposed as just another person trying to figure herself and her family out—except that she's doing it in public.
Ultimately, perhaps she too will have to accept what we all do—that ultimately life is a long series of loose ends. Each answer leads back to the beginning...another question.
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 1999
