Featured image: W.H. Walker (1907) Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

My work on the first theme doesn’t split nicely into the first and second parts. It was a continuous process of creativity, and reading, that spanned a period coinciding with the conclusion of my sabbatical and my return to the office.

This post consolidates the exploratory exercises, assigned research and various digressions that spawned off from that. Part 2 consolidates the concluding work.

Table of Contents

Summary and Reflection

I remind myself that I am a painter — and I am. But this period of looking at Art has made my definitions fuzzy. Amorphous perhaps. Consuming other practices under the umbrella that I consider my own.

Identity

For my first Theme, I’ve chosen Identity and the Body. I’ve always been interested in visual representations of Identity, and ideas around how to represent transitional states between identities have been swirling in my mind for some time. I’m not entirely unfamiliar with Butler, though I’ve struggled to read their work. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, it is entirely impossible to be deaf to the ongoing discourse around Gender and Performance; At least as someone who is chronically online.

Further, I’m also upper management in a very corporate environment. Fans of shows like Succession and Mad Men might see parallels in my daily office life, though industries and specifics are different. I wear many hats and switch them to fit the environment I’m in. Following Butler, and then CJ the X’s philosophical digressions into fashion and social grouping, I’ve started to think of my daily be-suited office identity as performing a form of Gender, which is rather amusing to me. I think this directly leads into the path of Alter Ego and my explorations of the King Corporate character (below).

Craft

I’ve always been drawn to textiles, probably due to my mother’s influence as a weaver and spinner. Textiles have always struck me as cousins to what I do, and sometimes, my brain blurs the boundaries between paint and dyed fabric—not that I’ve done much with textiles until this point. Past units with the OCA have seen me leverage thread to contemplate line, connection, and boundary, but I haven’t strayed beyond that.

Visiting the Venice Biennale of Art this past year, and contemplating the Canadian Pavillion where Kapwangi Kiwanga installed Trinket, was highly impactful. I started noticing how beadwork was used in diasporic communities, in North American Indigenous work, and traditions across the Global South. Material symbolism has held a lot of interest to me, and beads are heavy with it.

These combined to inform my exploration of Craft and created a reinforcing cycle as I contemplated costume and performance concerning King Corporate. Personally, it was incredibly empowering learning how to sew, and create wearable items — if very quirky wearables. I’ve since picked up a few basic patterns and intend to continue this path. What if I created the entire costume, instead of borrowing/building upon one of my office suits? What a personal accomplishment that would be!

I do find it very amusing that my particular choices of activities here were still very male-coded: I’m working on a suit, creating a crown and a suit of armour. Not intentional, but perhaps all part of the implicit gender performance we all get trained into.

Personal Research – Venice Biennale of Art 2024

Beyond the Canadian pavilion, Stanieri Ovunque’s Foreigners Everywhere felt like an incredible cross-section and introduction to a vast array of practices and traditions. I feel very privileged to have experienced it, and I’m still teasing out how the experience is affecting what I do and wish to do. Leafing through the catalogue, now, allows me to begin unpacking the sheer overwhelming experience of the Biennale and start settling my thoughts.

As I move through IdeaLab, beyond this initial theme, I know I’ll be returning to this catalogue over and over.

Reading and Research Roundup

I read a lot during this theme, thanks partly due to my sabbatical from my day job which afforded me more time than I normally would have. This allowed me to read a bit more widely than the course syllabus assigns.

Regarding Butler, as a queer man in a corporate environment, I’m deeply familiar with performativity and its necessity. I actively construct an identity for myself at work, that marks me as both “one of the boys” but also intentionally “other”. The reading of Butler, and subsequent watching of CJ the X’s philosophy channel, has altered the lens from which I view these corporate performances. As CJ the X might say “they are doing a gender” via suits, ties, and expensive watches.

Sillman’s essay on AbEx is one I don’t have much reaction to. Perhaps I’m far too removed from the abstract, and certainly my mind trends towards very concrete things. To quote the essay “We didn’t really know much about art, but we knew what we liked” and I certainly don’t know much about AbEx — though I can rattle off the names of its famous guild members. It feels like this is something that will rattle about in my mind for a while, and that I’ll come back to in a year with some better clarity. Perhaps, as a beginning to that, I come out of this essay thinking about the fall of Rome: Rome had to fall, for the Renaissance to occur. Not that I necessarily think we’ve reached another Renaissance (nor that we haven’t), but rather things need to pass and sometimes that passage needs to be via being torn down.

Tuymans seems very reductive. It seems too much like ‘being cute’. My response to his essay was to recall Magritte. Early on, while I was teaching myself to draw, I came across an argument (that I can’t find now) that boiled down to this: no matter what you draw, someone has already drawn it, but only you can draw in this specific way.

So, to Tuymans’ agonizing about authentic forgery: so what? Create as you want to create.

René Magritte (1929) The Treachery of Images. [Oil on canvas] 60.33 x 81.12cm.


Project Readings

Looking at Artists

I’ve consolidated my research in another post, found here

Exercises

Craft and Performing Gender

version 1
version 2 WIP
fit test

Alter Ego: Exploring King Corporate

Martin Young (2024) Self Portrait from the Gray Place. [Oil on Panel] 40.64 x 30.48cm.

Sketchbooking

Love to Love You Baby

Graphite, hand-made pastels, raw pigments on paper

Painting, for me, is usually very meditative. I go into a flow state and I don’t end up with many solid memories of the process. As such, I don’t really have a “joy” in the process of creating — it is rather a concluding thing that occurs after or an initiating thing that gets me to go paint.

For this exercise, I decided to create an environment that brought joy and let my body react to that. Spotify provided a high-energy playlist, and largely closed my eyes, and let my hands decide how to interpret beats as my feet carried me around the painting surface. This work is, essentially, a recording of a dance I suppose.

I like the spontaneity which is not a normal part of my painting at all. ever. I like some of the line movements. I can see how these things might become brush movements, and impasto.

Group Tutorial

Images Submitted for Group Crit.

I jumped into crit very early, only 2 weeks into the unit. I wanted to get a feel for how crit worked, and perhaps I was a bit early in doing so w.r.t. the costume element. Perhaps it was more finished, it would have been more respectful of other’s time? Maybe? A lot of uncertainty here, though I did appreciate the feedback I received (noted below).

Martin Young (2024) (Work in Progress) Costume element for King Corporate: ‘Helm, Version 1’. [Silk neckties, cotton dress shirts, glass beads, plaster, paper, guache]
Martin Young (2024) Self Portrait from the Gray Place. [Oil on Panel] 40.64 x 30.48cm.

The first crit session was interesting and useful. The group was very small, which allowed for more time to observe and respond.

Helm

  • My use of ties for the crown worked, as responders commented on the ‘regality’ of a crown being reinforced with the corporate symbol of neckties.
  • The mask was pointed out as ‘hiding’ which aligns with my intention that in a corporate environment, you are your role, not yourself. Which leads to the contradictions and dichotomies of this character. Allusions to Venetian masquerade were raised as well.
  • The beard and mask are currently unfinished, but the responses were interesting. The mask was pointed out as the ‘right side of rough’, and perhaps I should lean into that instead of working to a smoother/more refined outcome. The beard mockup’s radically different materials were highlighted as a positive — my original intention was to echo the crown down and play on the queer interpretation of a beard but perhaps I go in a different direction. Can I keep the playfulness of the mockup while still moving into the textile? Perhaps fleece?
  • In general, the mixed levels of refinement were seen as reinforcing a sense of ‘play’ here, which I shouldn’t discount even if it is counter to my original thinking in terms of the material quality of the outcome.

Self Portrait

  • Ambiguity of expression was raised: “Strength or sorrow” which works very well with my intention. I think I landed well there.
  • Varying painterly effects were also raised, from a technical standpoint, and were mentioned as positive.
  • The green and purple in the face were identified as ‘toxic’ and hard to place. I like this, though it wasn’t specifically an outcome I intended (re: Toxicity) as I was considering this to be light cast from the gray place — laptops, monitors, whatever. It chimes. Perhaps I need to take a bit more care about echoing the colour into other background elements to convey the narrative, or town down the chroma.

Artists Mentioned

  • Richard Diebenkorn, Hew Locker, Mike Nelson, Gillian Wearing, Stills Money

Supplementary Material

Studio Practice – Figure

Martin Young (2025) Figure Study. [Oil on paper] 28 x 20cm.
Martin Young (2024) Study of DDraig, 15minutes. [Oil on Paper] 28 x 20cm.