#sallymckay

Traces. Ran from February 5 – February 28, 2015, Hamilton Artists Inc., Hamilton, Ontario. 

By Sally McKay

Stephanie Vegh, Jane Eyre/The Female Short-Eared Owl. Ink and watercolour on book pages, 41 x 33 cm (framed dimensions), 2012.

Some art stays with you, niggling at your thoughts long after the exhibition is over. Such is the case with Stephanie Vegh’s mixed media series, Eyrie, which I saw as part of group show, Traces, at Hamilton Artists Inc in 2015. The piece was a mash-up of an 18th century illustrated ornithological guide with excerpts from Jane Eyre. Written descriptions of characters in the novel were adeptly inserted into the descriptions of specific birds in such a way that the text flowed seamlessly from one source to the other. Vegh also made interventions into the illustrations, adding her own delicate watercolour depictions of the birds to the pre-existing engravings. The work had a rich conceptual framework referencing contemporary relationships to historical texts, and bringing into question the scientific practice of categorization by listing visible signs of species identity. The work was subtly political as it juxtaposed this authoritative scientific practice of naming against a literary practice of characterization through description of visual characteristics, teasing social conventions of race and class identification within an historical context.

At the same time, the series was also visually affective and emotionally poignant. The mark-making was precise and restrained: both in the images of birds and in the laborious hand-rendering of inserted serif font. This hand-crafted detail created an intimate atmosphere of care and appreciation for the hybrid creatures — half-bird, half-human — that emerged. Vegh’s attentive gestures produce another site of hybridity: that strange and potent zone that exists between fact and fiction. How are facts produced in such a way that they take on empirical solidity for society at large? How much of that process involves the kinds of affective and emotional appeals that literary and artistic renderings can produce? These questions, historically situated in Eyrie, are deeply relevant to today’s shifting and controversial media landscape. In a time when polemics seemingly prevail, Vegh’s nuanced, historical approach to caricature and characterization lingers in my mind.