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January 30, 2004
Playing the game of life
Saul Miller’s show at the Zack Gallery clever and fun.
SIMA ELIZABETH SHEFRIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
Nobody could accuse Saul Miller of lacking a sense of humor. Visitors
to his exhibit, Love of the Game, now showing at the Sidney and
Gertrude Zack Gallery at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater
Vancouver, inevitably go around with a smile, if they’re not
laughing out loud. But Miller, an artist and sports psychologist,
is not just entertaining us. As he explains in his artist’s
statement, he sees sports “as a remarkable form of human expression.”
The work is clever, funny and full of jokes from the worlds of both
art and sports. The purple and green flying basketball player of
“The Boy Can Fly” is a clear reference to Marc Chagall.
“Whistler's Daughter,” with her broken leg and sadly abandoned
skis, manages to pull in both the famous painting by James Abbott
McNeill Whistler and the equally famous ski resort.
Although the images are funny and sometimes question the world of
professional sport, Miller, who has worked closely with the world’s
top athletes for 25 years, is in no way disrespectful of the athletes.
“I work with these people,” he told the Bulletin.
“I respect them. They have to go out and perform under enormous
pressure.”
The show provides a perspective on the world of athletes and, as
the artist puts it in his statement, “takes a whimsical look
at people playing and performing in the game of life.”
Miller divides his work into four categories; the athlete as icon,
the circus, the ordinary recreational athlete and the bagel series.
Using the iconography of Christian saints, Miller pokes fun at the
popular concept of the athlete as superhero. A huge football player
wearing the insignia of the New Orleans Saints gently gathers birds
around him in the manner of St. Francis of Assisi. Across the room,
“Rocket Rabinovitch,” prayer book in hand and face a little
battered from a rough game, dismantles several stereotypes at once.
Miller likes to portray the athletes in motion. In “Ball Waiting,”
the player kicks the soccer ball in fast and complicated curves,
while the goalie shoots up, straight as an arrow, to catch the ball.
In “Le Wraparound,” the hockey player becomes a blur as
he swooshes around behind the net whisking in the puck while the
confused goalie doesn’t know which way to turn.
Sometimes Miller’s humor comes from contrast, as his depiction
of a hockey fight in the shape of a yin yang symbol, which represents
balanced harmony in the universe. In “Butterfly Goalie,”
even the title is a contradiction in terms. Normally a fragile delicate
creature, the bulky butterfly goalie is literally pinned to the
painting. In “The Wave,” a lone spectator falls off the
top of a tsunami wave made up of the crowd. And in the bagel series,
brightly painted actual bagels represent five somewhat bumpy Olympic
rings.
The golf series is particularly witty. Titles pun the errors of
the players in “Slice of Life,” “Birdies Gone”
and “Desert Wanderer.” In “Moment of Truth,”
we view the world from the perspective of the poor golf ball about
to take off for unknown destinations.
The golf paintings are full of rounded figures and rounded landscapes.
In fact, the players look very much like golf balls. This effect
is enhanced by the fact that they are almost all dressed in round,
white shirts. (An exception is the golfer in “A Tiger in the
Woods,” who appropriately enough, wears yellow with a black
stripe-y outline).
My favorite pieces in the show though were the more serious ones.
“Hockey Sticks,” done in oil stick on paper, is a quieter
drawing of a number of hockey sticks, framed with hockey sticks,
with several more growing out of the frame. Beside it hangs a picture
of a vulnerable looking child, “Little Bud.”
At the opening reception on Jan. 15, Miller told a smiling crowd
that he tries to have a good time with his artwork. He pointed out
that we all have an artistic side, which he encouraged us to take
time to express in our busy lives. About his own work, he says,
“If things make you smile, that’s the intention and, if
they don’t, have a couple of glasses of wine.”
Love of the Game runs until Feb. 15. Miller reads excerpts from
his latest book, Hockey Tough: A Winning Mental Game, on
Jan. 29 at 7:30 p.m. At that event, he will discuss how the techniques
of “right focus, right feeling and right attitude,” which
have helped NHLers and world-class athletes to excel, can be applied
to daily life.
Sima Elizabeth Shefrin is a visual artist and community
arts co-ordinator. Her show Sewing Memories can be seen at the Vancouver
East Cultural Centre until Feb. 25.
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