Shannon Oksanen
CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY
555 Nelson Street
November 21–January 19
Shannon Oksanen is a Vancouver artist perhaps best known for her series of drawings from 1996 through 2003 of Nana Mouskouri that captured, in a minimal, awkward style, the Greek songstress’s iconic look: pageboy haircut, nerdy glasses, a face as vacuous as her phenomenally successful music. Oksanen also produced serial portraits of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre for an exhibition last year. In “Summerland,” Oksanen continues this interstitial interest in portraiture and the cinematic, with a series of softly rendered oil paintings of Elvis Presley and a bravura color film (in wide-screen format, no less) reenacting a water-skiing scene from the 1964 movie Viva Las Vegas. The artist’s four-minute homage is lusciously color-saturated and depicts two very buff and libidinal water skiers, one of whom, Nicole Blackmore, is the North American “barefoot champion” in the sport. The film and exhibition are evidently about various kinds of rivalry: between the sexes on the water skis, between an art-film remake and its mass-cultural origin, between Oksanen’s footage and the ludicrously large and loud projector (a Zenith X 2000H) that sits nearby—even between the genres of film and painting. The seven oil-on-linen portraits bear a formal resemblance to Oksanen’s earlier drawings. As with that of Mouskouri and Beauvoir, Elvis’s hair is very important. And by depicting the entertainer just emerging from his military service (two works show him in uniform), the portraits suggest the end of the sexy, raw Elvis, and the beginning of his domesticated, commodified persona. Indeed, a curious supplement to the portraits is a papier-mâché puppet of the singer, referencing perhaps his manipulation by his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. But drawing tendentious sociopolitical references from this largely formalist exhibition—as its catalogue essay does by making links with the 1965 LA Watts riots and ’60s-era politics—is a dead end. Oksanen’s strength lies in turning the iconic into a telling image—not in telling us what to imagine.
— Clint Burnham
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