Visit some imaginary friends

When visitors walk into Image/inary Friends, now showing at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery (at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver), they smile with delight and sometimes even laugh out loud. Featuring suspended sculpture and wall pieces by Bill Friesen, Marci Katz and Joe Rosenblatt, this multi-media, multi-dimensional exhibition draws in the viewer with its bright colors and circus-like imagery. Yet, as you examine the work more carefully, under the whimsical esthetic and childhood references, a grimmer thread emerges, which weaves its way through the work of each artist.

The exhibit is the creation of three friends living on Vancouver Island, who collectively call themselves the Eastside Group. The title of the exhibit is taken from its one collaborative piece, an insect-like sculpture to which all three artists contributed. The exhibit incorporates the different approaches, styles and media of its participants.

The primary colors and intriguing shapes of Friesen's circus sculptures create a kaleidoscope of color and action as soon as you walk in the room. Abstracted jugglers and tightrope walkers perform their daily circus dance. "Through the Hoop" suggests frolicking tigers, recognizable only by their painted stripes. Black and white triangles beside a big red circle call to mind the flaming hoops through which circus animals traditionally leapt.

"I try to turn pieces of painted steel into work that seems lighter than air," the artist tells the viewer in an artist's statement.

Friesen's masks, on the other hand, are grounded and cynical.

"My work can be dark and angry, or whimsical and humorous. Recently, I have been experimenting with masks, drawing on inner emotional reality and corporate industrial myths," he explains, adding that the masks are two-faced, questioning the double meanings of most of the beliefs and values held by European culture.

Rosenblatt's work is fun and slightly grim, simultaneously weighty and humorous. In "Faye's Friends," we see mixed-media drawings of a cat with birds and mice, but the cat is not happy; the birds and mice are overpowering it.

"My aim is to make people laugh at danger, the world and themselves, not as a way of escaping the frightful reality of life but rather as a way of confronting it directly," Rosenblatt tells us. "If concern over the human condition is difficult to find in my art, it is because of the comic elements, and because my subjects, [cats, birds, snakes, avaricious plants, insects, amphibians and bats] wear masks." Rosenblatt's style is reminiscent of New Yorker cartoons.

Rosenblatt doesn't distinguish between his poetry and his visual art. He sees himself as a kind of literary and visual borscht belt comedian who, through animals, "tries to reach humankind's most primordial vein," he told the Bulletin. There is certainly nothing romanticized about his depiction of the animal world.

Katz's work also has a bitter-sweet quality. In her two-dimensional pieces, she does underlay drawings in ink that may include dream imagery, maps, family trees, text and other personal history. Over this primary layer she applies charcoal and pastel, allowing parts of the underlay to show through. Her drawings are beautiful and her technique is exquisite. But each one of her works has a twist to it that leaves us confused and uncomfortable.

We see a bride moving solemnly towards the cage-like doorway of her new home. The accompanying sculptural assemblage includes a wedding bell of tarnished silver, old typewriter keys, useless out of context, and an empty cookie-cutter.

"Haunted Houses" shows child-like stick figures in front of a house, with a poem that disturbingly starts out: "Love is as deep as a freshly killed bird." In "The Runaway," two generations of women are set on top of a map with place names from the Canadian prairies. "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries" is a charcoal sketch of a little girl clutching her doll. Colored cherries drop into a bowl off a clothesline that runs from the girl's head to the frame of the picture.

"I find we put aside uncomfortable things," she said in an interview. "I try to dredge them up because if you do that, you can grow from it. I draw them, not to be grim, but to honor them.... The mobiles are made of things people discard – metaphors for parts of our life we'd like to forget. I take neglected things and make something light and elegant and whimsical. It is possible to take the things that have happened to you and construct something elegant which is informed by the pain. If you deny the pain, you're in trouble. That's Jewish and it's universal."

Image/inary Friends is well worth seeing at all its levels. It's possible to laugh and enjoy it and, at the same time, to notice the sadness and hurt that the artists have so honestly shared with us. That, as in real life, lies so close to the laughter.

Image/inary Friends will be at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery until July 24. Later, it will move on to Douglas College, the University of Victoria and the Fran Willis Gallery in Victoria.

Sima Elizabeth Shefrin is an artist, banner maker and community arts co-ordinator living in Vancouver.