Burnt-out candles crowded around the edge of a dirty sink, overflowing with used bath bombs. Beauty creams and face masks litter the shelves and floor, surrounded by piles of crumpled, stained laundry. Empty wrappers flit about the floorboards.
It’s not your student accommodation’s shared bathroom: it’s art. Après le Bain, meaning “after the bath” in French, is a decadent oil painting exhibit on display at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre’s State of Flux Gallery from Jan. 17 to March 21. Artist and professor Riisa Gundesen plays with viewer’s perceptions of femininity, mental illness, and the physical body through a collage of self-portraiture and viscerally stunning still life.
At its heart, the exhibit teeters wildly between offering comfort and discomfort, pleasure, and overstimulation—insistent upon capturing viewers’ attention, but ambivalent what they make of the mess.
“In art, historically, we think of the nude as prescribed, as available,” Gundesen said in an interview with The Journal. In the gallery, feminine forms fill the walls in their underwear, applying nail polish or lying splayed-out on the ground, surrounded by clutter.
“These invasive objects like garbage [and] detritus kind of invading the figure and [an] abstraction of paint and wax [cause] breaches in the boundary of the figure,” she said. “They bring it to this place of sort of like danger, the uncontained body.”
Après le Bain is a collage of oil paintings Gundesen began as early as 2020, containing larger pieces completed during an artist’s residency in Edmonton.
“I think broadly I’ve been interested in for a long time in the idea of the figure, the self-portrait, and an intersection with the kind of unsettling. The abject,” Gundesen said. Each of the figures was modeled after herself, and the spaces in the work take after Gundesen’s home spaces.
“There [are] elements that hint at a personal narrative,” Gundesen said. “But most of it is … they [the viewer] don’t need to know me.”
Indeed, many aspects of the scene feel universal. Quo Beauty bars of soap line the back of one discoloured figure. Neti pots perch atop the toilet tank and bedside table, sharing space with cloth COVID-19 masks and Apple watches, rendered in dreamy detail.
“I’m interested in this difference in experience. There’s a level of familiarity and clarity that comes if you are familiar with them,” Gundesen said, referencing distinct objects in the work, noting some products likely stand out more to femme-presenting people.
As I viewed the exhibit with my masculine-presenting friend, swapping interpretations of the work, I pointed at an object near the edge of the bed. “What do you think that is?” I asked, to which he replied he wasn’t sure. Maybe it was a ghostly form.
But I recognized it right away: a tampon wrapper, one of the brands they carry at the on-campus drugstore. Nearby, underwear stained with menstrual blood dangled off a ventilation grate near the ground, the kind Kingston’s century-old houses still feature.
In my friend’s case, unfamiliarity with certain objects in Après le Bain “introduces a further abstraction,” Gundesen said. “[They] become mysterious things that you’re like, ‘What kind of weird garbage or object or potion is this?’” she joked.
The piece is layered with allusions to other works of art from Degas to Millais, almost existing in conversation with other great works. But its greatest strength is its reflexivity, prompting viewers to confront their own reactions to what they see.
“You can’t just look at the figure and kind of quietly enjoy it,” Gundesen said, referencing the unsettling colours and poses applied to the piece’s subjects. “There’s an awareness that’s caused of your own body there.”
Après le Bain transforms the tiny State of Flux gallery into something extraordinary, knocking down the walls and peering into private rooms beyond, and into viewers’ own lives. It really needs to be seen to be understood, and to be experienced in the body at Gundesen intended. I certainly walked out differently than I came in.
Though, truth be told, I’ll probably leave my laundry on the floor for another week.
Tags
Après le Bain, exhibition, Gallery, Modern Fuel, oil painting, Riisa Gundesen, self-portrait, still life, Visual art
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