Feeling Further

By Violet Drake
Rogue Gallery, Eastern Edge | November 8 – December 14, 2024

Reviewed by Rhea Rollman

If there is one political lesson that’s repeatedly asserted itself over the past year, it’s a reminder that all of our liberation struggles are intertwined. And given that art is always political, this is as true in the gallery and on the canvas as it is in the streets.

Violet Drake’s new solo exhibition Feeling Further manifests this, emerging at the oblique intersection of trans liberation and climate justice. It offers a thought-provoking “rural transsexual narrative” conveyed through a striking collection of prints, poetry and sculpture. The message here is neither proscriptive nor prescriptive; Drake’s liberatory vision is conveyed through the conjuration of fantastical landscapes and imagery that prefigure a world of freedom and expression.

Drake has an ability to see worlds of potential within the everyday. Her art technique is to extrapolate meaning and complexity from close-up reworkings of this content – from beach rocks and sand to selfies taken on a bus – manipulating the matter surrounding our everyday, drawing out its innate albeit hidden complexity.

There’s sorcery in this work, exemplified by “Brinentrance,” a mixed media collage and digital photography piece incorporating found material situated on the floor in the centre of the exhibition space. That’s the clinical description; in reality it’s a portal, a deep tidal pool beckoning the viewer to jump in. It calls to mind a magickal circle, formed of seashells and beach rocks, sticks and tidewrack collected from the shore near her home in Lawn. She fancied herself a bit of a sea witch in putting the piece together, she confesses. Viewers inevitably find themselves gathered in a circle around the piece, silently resisting the urge to hold hands and leap in.

Drake feels there’s a coldness to her work, but art is in the eye of the beholder and I find a certain warmth in the pieces. The Til Death series, paradoxically, evokes a sense of life. The bright whites of her close-ups of beach scenes – mixed media prints combining environmental photography and digital collage – resemble a frozen landscape, but there is life bursting through the harsh surface. The sharp angles of the opening image “Crooked” eventually give way to the fleshy curves of “Sedimentary” at the end of the series; a transition that pairs perfectly with the dark, wet chasm of “Brinentrance” in the centre of the gallery space. Her series of manipulated digital images Abyssal Incline – rooted in self-portraiture – exist somewhere between lab x-rays and cosmic images taken from a space telescope. The deep greens, purples and violets juxtaposed against a dark background feel warm and compelling to me, while other viewers experience them as space-cold and icy. The ability to generate such contrast is a sign of good art.

What makes this exhibit work so well is the sense of transition it narrates. The crooked angles-to-soft curves of Til Death; the unexpected warmth of Abyssal Incline with its dual evocation of the cosmic and the clinical; the deep mysteries of “Brinentrance”’s magickal portal in the centre of the room; they all tell a story of duality and contradictions, of manipulating the harsh crooked angles and glaring colours of the everyday in pursuit of softer, warmer possibilities. The man-made detritus comprising Drake’s found material sculptures are consigned to the outer corners of the space; taken together, it all speaks to a transition rooted in life, in growth, seeking a warmth and deeper truth beyond the superficiality and harsh surfaces of the everyday. The mixed media prints and sculptures at the end of the Til Death series link it all together, reflections on what we build with the everyday flotsam and jetsam the world provides us. “I’m ready to come along this time,” reads one of the prints, and it speaks to the feeling the exhibit produces: a deep sense of feeling and meaning bubbling up from the surfaces that constrain us.

Rhea Rollmann is an award-winning journalist, writer and audio producer based in St. John’s, NL, and is the author of A Queer History of Newfoundland (Engen Books, 2023).

November 2024