Vessels: Carriers of Meaning – Fabric of Space

The work of Monika Aebischer, Cynthia Porter, and Heidi Berger.

The appeal is immediate, the colours are explosive, and the spectacle is (nearly) indescribable. The exhibit is a celebration of three artist’s spectacular interpretation of vessels, in both the most literal sense as well as the symbolic. Imagery, colours, composition, and intensity separate the styles, yet the central theme and inner meaning can not help but be intrinsic to all three artists.

Monika Aebischer’s distinctive medium demands interest and a closer inspection. Various sizes of wooden canvases, coated with resin (also used on dashboards of BMW’s), trap the silver metal leaf base and the vibrance of acrylic in a pristine capsule. Aebischer combines flat line drawing with the depth and sheen of the resin coating to draw the viewer’s eye to every nuance of the work. She compliments the primitive-style line drawing with small detailed patterns, leaf prints, elements of collage, and repeated symbols. Most notable of the works is the brilliant use of colour. Crimson becomes the colour of choice in many of the backgrounds, often allowing hints of gold, silver leaf, and or turquoise to glimmer through. Aebischer considers her work to be “representing universal human experiences” through the use of “the body as a corporeal vessel, mark-making, ephemeral, ritual, and honouring.”

Cynthia Porter displays vessels in a more literal sense. Her canvases are filled with bowls, goblets, jugs, vases, and an assortment of ships. Her loose, yet deliberate style is reminiscent of handmade pottery and well-loved, well-used dishes, complete with signs of use and imperfection. However, the final product is nothing short of perfection. She combines vivid hues, collage, and encaustic to produce various sized canvases that celebrate simplistic form, the quality of line and colour, and art which emphasizes elements of movement, playfulness, excitement, and partial abstraction. Porter references “primitive vessel shapes providing the vehicle for considering figure and ground, line and texture, substance and atmosphere, assertion and reticence rather than expressing an ideology or a particular message.”

Heidi Berger maintains the literal reference to vessels, but suppresses the inherent presence of containers by incorporating more prevalent subject matter into the frame. Inspired by 18th and 19th century paintings, she works on large canvases with dark backgrounds. This base allows her the means to produce explosive foreground images with brilliant flowers, figures, fruit, and fauna. Acrylic and collage mediums create realistic lighting situations with playful splashes, juxtaposed against a more subdued atmosphere. With reminiscent subject matter, Berger works towards bringing together “a life existed connected with a life existing.”

Like a vessel, a canvas is an empty carrier, waiting for its content and meaning to be applied. Aebischer, Porter, and Berger have taken advantage of the canvas’s naked vulnerability and through imagination, experience, and talent have inoculated it with a life time of symbolism, fantasy, fertility, beauty, reflection, spirituality, and energy. The works burst with the power of presence, and beg to be hung free of the confinement of a frame.

Sophie Ryan