ArtWORK > Mini-retrospective

Installation view of the series HAPPENING from the mini-retrospective:
Doreen Wittenbols
Performative Painting: LOOK PAINT REPEAT + International Passport Paintings
June 1 - September 2, 2024
Gallery 235
Harbourfront centre, Toronto, CANADA

Happening

The Happening series continues my exploration of the outmoded volume Woman’s Own Book of Flower Arrangements, published in 1966. In Paintings for Our Mothers (2021), I transformed eleven copies of the book into a text-based sculptural artwork, deconstructing and subverting society’s false narratives on the status of women and the state of nature.

In this new translation of artworks, I made a series of memento mori paintings, focusing this time on the inner pages of the book. I equate the book’s dreary black and white photographs of dated flower arrangements and its “do and don’t” text instructions with the darkness happening in our current world. We seem to be moving backwards in time with the prevailing mobilization against women and LGBTQIA+ rights.

Happening aims to resensitize us to these disturbing societal reversals while simultaneously creating an image of “pleasant-as-possible” melancholy and the hope that this too shall pass. These works reexamine how flowers have been used as social tools in a “feminine” dialectic—as a gift, memorial, status symbol, souvenir, or marker of time’s passage; they are a contemporary take on the memento mori or vanitas genre.

Eleven diminutive still life paintings hang atop a large-scale wall mural, all of which incorporate floral motifs. At the center of this multifaceted composition, a faint pencil drawing suggests the mysterious absence of a twelfth painting. These works appear in the context of a sculptural installation evoking a kitchen environment packed with altered everyday objects: mirrors, vintage chalkboard flower labels, a tablecloth.

These paintings and sculptures share a visual language. Each composition is set against a starkly gridded tablecloth, evoking the fate of the invisible woman in an ageist society, snapped back into the old negating grid.

The small painting series is titled according to page numbers in the book, also relating to different ages of women. Each one depicts a colorful flower lying across an open page of Woman’s Own showing a black and white flower arrangement. Then there’s the wall drawing at the heart of the painting series. This skeletal pencil sketch, showing the outline of yet another arrangement, reminds me of a coffin bouquet viewed from above.

But hope springs eternal: some of the flower stems extend off the edge of the panel, and one of the paintings has the bulb still attached to its stem. This compositional choice raises the question as to whether the flowers were cut off at all (like the flowers in the book) or are still alive, moving forward, growing, and connected; good things might still be happening off-grid. There is no silent acquiescence, no status quo: where there is fresh growth, things can still be reversed; where there are murmurs of life, things are happening!

-Doreen Wittenbols

Photo: LF Documentation