SHANNON BOOL: THE EASTERN CARPET IN THE WESTERN WORLD REVISITED

Shannon Bool’s first solo exhibition in Calgary takes its title from a show originally staged at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1983 (The Eastern Carpet in the Western World); and her presentation focuses on a group of artworks that all refer to the complex relationship between Oriental carpets and Western art. These includes a series of carpets, tapestries and photograms (camera-less pictures made using photographic materials), and a video. In her oeuvre Shannon Bool often blurs the boundaries between art and crafts, that is to say between art and material history. Her work ‘re-activates’ archival and found imagery that takes new form and meaning once it is re-elaborated by the artist, often combining digital technology and ancient fabrication techniques.

In 2015, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver commissioned Bool with a site-specific installation for the Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Canada Line, entitled The Flight of the Medici Mamluk. For this piece Bool had worked with a filmmaker to document a 16 th century Egyptian Medici Mamluk carpet, recently rediscovered stored in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence (Italy). The video Forensics for Mamluk (HD, 8’), on display at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery this Fall, was produced by the artist during a fellowship at Villa Romana in Florence.

In the other artworks presented in Calgary, Bool collages and/or manipulates interrelated imagery originating in Western art history and material culture. Her tapestries, like the photograms, combine documentation of design and photography in the 1920’s, with uncanny material interventions, which bring together the unconscious, psychoanalysis, consumerism, politics of the body and feminist theory, desire, décor, modernism and utopia.

The Madonna Extraction Carpets series comes directly from the tradition of Northern Renaissance painting. The artist about this project: “The Flemish painters were much more invested in surface values (rendering objects, surfaces, textiles) than the correct perspective that you could find in Italian painting. While the Italian Renaissance paintings functioned like a stage, where a narrative could clearly take place, the Flemish Paintings tilt forward strangely. Erwin Panofsky, called this phenomenon ‘Schrägraum’ or ‘Crooked Room’. I narrowed down my research to few Flemish paintings of the Madonna on an Altar, where an oriental carpet functions as the entry point to the image. I extracted the carpets from the paintings digitally, but with the tilted perspective remaining.” The resulting images have then been hand-woven again into a carpet in Anatolia, using strictly traditional techniques. By returning the Oriental carpets originally depicted in Western Paintings back into the Oriental carpet tradition (where they are rewoven with their skewed Western reading) the artist poetically reflects on the history of these objects and their representation.