Calla Thompson at Project 4, Washington, D.C.

by R. Stevie Jones

As one of Calla Thompson’s figures gazes out from the domestic oval shape that frames it, its stance, style, and surroundings cause interpretation to curiously flip between safe and baleful.  The ovals seem for moments to soften the intimidating look of the figures’ black garb and balaclava.  When later one of these characters is found laughing hysterically while being circled by vultures or threatened by a swarm of darts within these drab colored voids, the question as to what type of reality Thompson is constructing repeatedly presents itself.  

     The starkness of Thompson’s backgrounds creates an air of dryness, leaving her characters to exist in eerily silent and lonely visual and cultural deserts.  The actions implied and the emotions expressed are singular, isolated events, which bear an abstracted relevance to our everyday experiences.  Therefore our interpretations of these small moments occurring in unrecognizable spaces take time to develop.  Are the masked figures robbers, psychopaths or just harmless lost figures with a dark sense of humor?  What does seem certain is that they are outcasts – whether by choice or by force.
     As viewers observe and consider Thompson’s work, they come to read her pieces as fragmented and abstracted cultural critiques.  In her 2008 digital collage series, Mark, Thompson describes the works as depicting “not totalitarian power or repressive regimes, but rather small actions that beget or lose small amounts of power.”  These minimal and poetic episodes, which contain looming threats and signs of subjugation, portray subtle “power shifts”, as Thompson describes them.  These “shifts” present themselves as struggles, between either a character and something/someone depicted within the reality Thompson has created, or a character and the viewer.  Confrontations between figures within and outside of the piece appear throughout Thompson’s work at different levels of intensity.  

     Though we may vaguely recognize elements of her fabricated milieu, clues to both the personae of Thompson’s characters and their environment are sparse and disparate.  The protagonists situate themselves ambiguously and give us only bits of information about the significance of their actions as a whole.  Objects such as the swarm of darts approaching from nowhere, the Greek column, and the leafy laurel wreath do not work together or individually to lead us to any absolute conclusions about the characters or the setting they exist within.  However, we begin to recognize elements of this reality when, in an attempt to approach some sort of resolution to these strange scenes, we relate these isolated actions and emotions to our own reality.  We find these objects and phenomena implying success amongst danger, confidence surrounded by vulnerability and disregard confused with embarrassment.

     While most of the images Thompson uses to create her works are appropriated, she also uses photographs of herself for these characters.  Though she uses herself as a model, wandering through this blank environment, encountering and reacting to various situations, the works never read as self-portraiture.  The characters are never asserting themselves as real people with specific traits or tendencies.  Instead, they exhibit a fictional existence, anonymity and disguise.  

     It is not clear whether we as viewers are passively watching these characters explore an unfamiliar domain, or if we are voyeuristically surveying them as they sneak around their own territory.  This sense of surveillance and exploitation pervades both Thompson’s Mark series, as well as another of her collage series, Bleak and Bleaker.  Influenced by Michele Foucault, Thompson has created an environment that is reminiscent of the theorist’s description of Western European protocol during a plague.  In the chapter of Discipline and Punishment entitled Panopticism, Foucault describes an order published at the end of the 17th century stating that when a plague appears the entire town should be quarantined, all stray animals must be killed and each street and each divided section of town will be under constant surveillance by governmental officials. Every door to every home shall be locked from the outside by an attendant stationed exclusively in that town’s section.   The only residents who were to be found outside the homes were called “crows” and were left to handle the dead and then eventually die themselves. Further, Foucault’s later description of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon design, which enables guards to view prisoners while the prisoners are not sure if they are being watched or not, is also certainly evoked in Thompson’s work.  A heavy sense of isolation, desertedness and yet a constant and omnipresent gaze is palpable in her collages.

     While Thompson’s desolate environments are rich in content, they are stylistically most inspired by the spare northern landscapes of her homeland, Canada.  It was these same landscapes that drove the works of the notable Canadian painters the Group of Seven.  In Self Portrait as a Canadian, Thompson pays homage’s to these iconic artists, appropriating the bent pine in the background from A.J. Casson’s 1957 White Pine.  This type of setting was also found in her earlier works such as the large-scale installation Flag, where in 2006, Thompson attached adhesive vinyl figures to the risers of the limestone steps of the Baltimore Museum of Art.  Here Thompson says that she used the flag as icon among a group of supine figures positioned to suggest either struggle or celebration.  In this more overt dialogue about social boundaries and political ownership, Thompson explains that she was reacting to the Iraq War.  

     The artist’s contemplations on nationalism and conquest, like much of her work, consist of more questions than statements.  Self Portrait as a Canadian is the only work by Thompson that does read as actual self-portraiture and is, in part, a sincere statement of national pride, but is also a highly staged, disguised self-representation much like the self-portraiture of Claude Cahun.  Thompson claims to expose her identity, though guards it ardently.  Rather than providing a candid glimpse of Thompson in this piece, the artist appears to be posing as the official portrait of the reoccurring characters from the Mark series.  The archetypical cold and eerie setting along with the drama of Thompson’s posture and expression has this portrait exuding a pictorial strength found often in graphic novels or comic books.  As she once again embraces moral ambiguity, we wonder if this Canadian is the villain or the hero.  
     Like this confrontational Self Portrait, wall installations such as Buck also incite questions of dominance between depicted characters and viewer.  Thompson has described viewers as having been uncomfortable when faced with these figures. Mono-printed on newsprint, these figures are installed on the wall so that they stand taller than the viewer.  The irony of people being intimidated by these cut-out figures on such an ephemeral material is surprising, and a bit humorous to the artist, who is clearly equally compelled and amused by the content of her work.  Influences of graphic artists Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware can be seen in the droll sense of humor Thompson expresses throughout her work with anti-heroic characters and ill-omened circumstances.

     It is Thompson’s Bleak and Bleaker series that may reveal the anti-heroic best.   The pitiful, faceless figures seem on the verge of defeating something unseen, but instead end up defeated.  Obscured implications of violence that appear in works from this series reference the fragmented and mutilated figures in Dada collage.   Like the German Dadaists who worked in response to major cultural changes and the tragedies of war such as Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch, Thompson represents her character acting within a complicated and tragic set of conditions.

     Navigating through whatever the situation is that has left them in such a bad place, Thompson’s Bleak and Bleaker characters do not take part in any social interaction and seem to be exclusively focused on self-exploration.  The tools and materials they interact with come from an intimate space in their immediate surroundings, or possibly from a culture existing very, very far away – one that they have possibly been cast out from.  Their blank and dry surroundings have been reduced to the complete nothingness of white voids.  Now, truly, these characters can be envisioned within Bentham’s Panopticon design.  Certainly they may be a prisoner or social reject in solitude, either being disciplined by a superior power or a victim of self-imposed discipline.  
     Although the departure point for all of Thompson’s work is photographic, she considers many of her finished pieces to exist somewhere on a continuum between photography and drawing.  For Thompson, both techniques involve an open process of freely assembling imagery and materials, and drawing in elements to a greater or lesser extent.  Despite these constants in her approach, the finished quality of Thompson’s more drawn works differs markedly from that of her more photographic works.  In some of her larger drawings, such as Untitled (bird), (hatchet), (gloves) and (compass) which depict a series of simultaneous actions involving figures struggling for ground in open space, she relaxes her photographic references (and narratives) quite a bit.  By contrast, works like those in the Mark and Bleak and Bleaker series, in which most of the collaged elements are done digitally, appear much tighter and more ordered.  Whether applied to drawing or photography, Thompson’s technique bears a similarity to Dada collage works, though with a much slicker and more digital approach.  Thompson’s clean lines and carefully drawn details executed in a photorealistic style also call to mind the Photorealistic painters of the 1960’s and 1970’s, such as Richard Estes and the Canadian painter, Alex Colville, as well as the photocollages and figurative drawings of David Hockney. Both Coleville’s work and Hockney’s seem to be referred to both in Thompson’s technique and in the awkward psychological spaces that these artists represent.

     Viewers may be unsure of what criticisms Thompson is making, and that’s because she is not making statements herself, but rather shifting the power into the viewers’ eyes and minds and asking how we see the picture.  The many conflicts she depicts and implies at all levels, from subtle to direct, can be picked through and read into infinitely, resonating with the complexities of the cultural and political issues we experience every day.  Thompson’s embracing of ambiguities and discord is perhaps what gives this work its honesty.  The striking quality of her characters and their actions may be what initially draws us into her images. But through this honesty and resonance her viewers become intrigued by each of the clues Thompson provides us and compelled to learn more about the reality she has constructed and, consequently, our own reality.