Slow Down and Gawk: A Conversation with Chris Glabb

Photo credit: Marguerite Morin. 

A few days before the opening, I sat down with Métis Artist Chris Glabb at the Shenkman Center to discuss his new exhibition, Roadkill Paintings (Found Series). His new exhibition features images of roadkill sourced from social media and online communities. Using hybrid screenprint and painting techniques, Glabb reproduces the unsettling images onto our bedsheets to provocatively question our indifference with violence and the dehumanization of queer and Indigenous peoples. The artwork wittily balances unlikely pairings like violence and humour and gore and reverence to consider how inhumanity has been pacified online. In our conversation about his process, he revealed fascinating perspectives on the power dynamics inherent to image-making and the media hierarchy in the visual arts. 

Roadkill Paintings (Found Series) runs from May 12 to July 4 at the LaLande + Doyle exhibition space. You don’t want to miss it! 

R Rama: How does it feel to have your first solo show? 

Chris Glabb: I am excited for people to see it! I have no idea what the reception will be like or if people will like it. 

RR: It is kind of controversial. Artworks of dead animals in a public space. That is bold for ArtsOttawa to take on, but great that they understand what you are doing with your work. 

CG: Yes, I hope it’s a bit controversial! Someone at ArtsOttawa actually told me that the jury had a hard time approving this exhibition to be shown here, but decided the message was important enough. I think what is interesting about the images is that if you are really far away, you can’t quite make them out. So if you are far enough away and just walking by, you are not necessarily going to be traumatized by them. But if you are interested in them and come close enough to see them, that’s your own fault [Cheeky laughing].

RR: It’s also the public’s role to play in the work. Being in a public space, you may come into harm’s way. Intentionally or otherwise. 

CG: Well, that’s the thing about the Shenkman [Art] Centre. On all of my trips here, I saw roadkill. Everytime. So why is it inappropriate to put it on the wall, but you can drive past it every day? 

Photo credit: Marguerite Morin. 

RR: Also, the thing with your images is that they are poor. . . 

CG: Yes, of course! 

RR: No! Hahaha. Not to call your imagery poor, but poor resolution-wise. The artist and essayist Hito Steyerl writes about “the poor image” in her essay “In defence of the poor image” and its deterioration as it circulates. In your exhibition statement, you describe your work as abstraction, and at first, I didn’t get that. But seeing them in person, there is that abstract quality to them. 

CG: Yeah, some of them can be difficult to make out, right? I think abstraction is my first love, in a way. But I don’t know if it has the same power as images now. I am not the greatest painter, but maybe I am good at choosing and selecting what things are good. I haven’t seen very many people combine paint and print technology in the same way that I want to. 

RR: If we can go back to what you said about how abstraction does not hold the same weight as the image currently does, why do you think that is? That is such an astute observation on the enmeshment of art and digital culture. 

CG: It comes in waves. We’ll talk about abstract expressionism and what came after it – Pop. I think that it’s just in this moment we are going back, or rather, we are moving from abstraction to Pop again. Especially with these works, they’re Pop but with a real political statement, versus Pop for Pop’s sake, as the Pop artists of the 1960s worked. That’s why I describe my work as ‘Post-Pop’. It feels like a new take on Pop. 

RR: What’s interesting about Pop art and your work is the appropriation, or rather borrowing of found objects and materials. What led you to use appropriated images of roadkill, and how involved is social media or its algorithms in finding your subject? 

CG: I think that there are so many photographs out there and existing online that it would be null to take my own. I am not the greatest photographer of all time, so why not borrow from someone who is or take what I can? I also think that the question of appropriation or cultural appropriation becomes more interesting now than ever before, due to the accessibility of images online. Every image in this show came from social media. On Reddit, they [redditors] love roadkill as a subject. I source some of my images from them. Others come from Instagram. Roadkill isn’t that big on social media, but what is are other forms of violence. Not necessarily violent imagery, but words, comments, and reactions which become meshed together. 

RR: What is it that you are noticing about violence depicted by artists who have come before and now you, especially as someone who has lived in a world mediated by social media? 

CG: There have been so many artists who have made violent paintings well, but nobody is doing it from the perspective of someone who grew up on social media. It’s not just that, there is another piece: I love violence and gore, especially in the context of horror, but I am a vegan. So, I was trying to find the balance, because it is interesting to see that animals have more rights than people, in some ways. When I was in undergrad, I made one of these roadkill paintings with white gesso and screenprinted with black paint. Everyone thought it was too dark and too horrific. Seeing their response, I decided to do one on a floral pattern, and they read it as if in mourning. I was a little scared by the idea that violent imagery could be made beautiful so easily.

RR: Where do you think your fear of violence being aestheticized stems from? What was it about your peers’ reactions that made you realize, “Oh, you are now so easily able to accept this violence?”

CG: I think it comes back to how social media desensitizes us to videos of terror attacks and videos from the war on Palestine. It has become so easy to convince people that something is not what it is. Like an image of a rabbit whose head was run over by a car, it is not me being obsessed with violence, but me mourning the loss of life. At first, it was the violence that was fascinating, but by the end, it turned into a mourning series, and I really came into mourning. 

RR: What about violence fascinates you? 

CG: I don’t know. I feel like it’s very human to be interested in violence. I think it’s a reason why horror movies are so popular. I love to be scared and have adrenaline. I am not ashamed of it, nor do I think, with this series, that I am shaming people who are fascinated by violence. There is something very familiar and almost comforting, in a dark way, about the fear and anxiety that comes with witnessing something violent. I am fueled by it. I’m a procrastinator; like when there’s a time crunch, my best work is done when I’m anxious. 

RR: Do you want this kind of fear to be experienced by the audience? 

CG: I don’t know if it is possible to do both, but I don’t want to traumatize people with the work. I am not trying to offer my trauma, and say here, now it is yours. But I hope they get a little something: A little fear, or a little sadness, a little anxiety, or a sort of heavy feeling. 

RR: Do you think that your use of blankets and bed sheets – and the sweetness of their imagery, the florals and the plaid patterns – is the element that protects the viewer from the aftermath of violence they see? Like, blankets are the shield that we often believe protects us from the monsters under our beds. Was this choice in your thought process, or was it simply a matter of using found materials? 

CG: I hoped to draw a parallel between violent imagery and sex. With the bed sheets, I want to ask, “What does it mean to put a decapitated animal on a bed sheet?” Which, by the way, are used bed sheets. They are all found materials from friends or thrifted, and haven’t been washed. So they could be sheets that people have had sex on, so what does it mean to put something violent on them afterwards? 

RR: So why did you choose to attach the bed sheets to canvas frames? You are using digital imagery, which is so easily reproducible. Why did you use silkscreen as your method of reproduction? 

CG: It’s funny cause I am trying to balance digital aesthetics and physical objects. I find that an inkjet print is awesome, but the thing I hate about them is putting them behind glass. Glass obstructs the viewing. If you are trying to replicate something you found on the computer screen, it’s so “right there.” You could touch the surface of an image. Rather, with these [gestures to the Roadkill Paintings], as much as I don’t recommend it, you could touch the surface of the image. 

RR: Then, how do you feel about works that are made for screens? You could have made these, taken photographs of them, and returned them to their context on the screen by installing them on TVs or monitors. Because glass is also the screen. 

CG: This may answer your question. What I am trying to do is root the works in the history of painting. Painting is my love. I call my series Roadkill Paintings, but they are not really paintings. They are prints. I also printed them on fabric, and silkscreen is traditionally done on clothing. So I had to wrap the bedsheets around a frame to make it more like a painting. It’s a push and pull of print and paint. 

RR: The work seems like a constant push and pull of blurring digital/physical and paint/print. You clearly like settling in the middle, even with violence and aesthetics (beauty), what is it about this meeting point or tension that interests you? 

CG: I think, as marginalized people, we always have to be one or the other. As a Métis, I do identify as white and I do identify as Indigenous. Especially as I am Métis on one side and white on the other. So I think it is okay to settle into both and be somewhere in the middle. The whole idea of Métis is that you are settled in the middle and have created something new in the process. In doing this, you’re defying this essentialism of labelling minority groups as just one thing, when we are so much more.  

RR: In your exhibition statement, you address how marginalized groups are “often dehumanized under the guise of ‘traditional values’ and far-right ideologies.” How are you addressing or confronting these ideologies in this work?

CG: I think it comes down to the dehumanization of queer people and people of colour. It’s about othering and this hierarchy which exists between animals and people. It feels like marginalized people are treated more closely to the ways we treat animals, instead of the ways we treat humans. It’s the fear that your rights can be revoked at any time, that you could become an animal, in terms of this hierarchy. I find it interesting that we are made to feel that it is a privilege to be here and have the rights we do, especially in Canada, while rights are being taken away in the US. And yet people do not have as many rights as they think they do. 

RR: And to you, where does queerness come through in the work? 

CG: In any version with the deer image, where it’s two figures on top of the bed sheet. I believe, although I am not a wildlife person, that they are both female. 

RR: Even flowers are so significant to your work, not in just their sense of mourning, but in queer codes. I guess that they are a subliminal message and exist as a symbolic layer of representation. I think that is what I love most about your work, that there are so many ways to read them and the different things you can find within them. And the flower patterns are so small. There is such an intimacy when you get close to them. Was this a purposeful choice for you to make them quite small? 

CG: I was trying to play with scale, tryna play with intimacy by questioning how close versus how far you need to be from them. Like I said, the image falls apart when you are really far away, and they fall apart when you get up close. And yeah, the different ways the patterns formally come together. They would feel so small on a larger piece, and so huge on a smaller piece. And just talking materially and technically, silkscreening is much easier to do at a smaller size and much harder to do at a larger scale. So, shout out to the Nordic Lab at SAW, who helped me make some of the larger screens. 

Photo credit: Marguerite Morin. 

RR: Is there a work in this series that you love?

CG: I really love this orange one [orange print of two deer]. I think it really has an interesting push and pull of the abstraction versus the realistic. If you back away from it, the lack of contrast makes the image hazy. I think it is extremely well printed. If you get into the details of it, there are really no mistakes with the half-tones. If you look at the one beside it, you can see where the squeegee was bumped, and then there is too much ink in some parts. I don’t think these mistakes take away from the “perfectness” of the final work, but I love how well printed the orange one is. 

RR: And there are no titles or labels, right? Why did you decide that?

CG: They have always been untitled. If I were to title them, they would be called, like, “Orange on Floral” or “Untitled [Pink on Blue Floral].” I very rarely title my works with “proper” titles.

RR: So it would have been just a descriptive title, hence no need for titles. 

CG: Yeah, and I also believe that the exhibition statement is enough. 

—

Despite Roadkill Paintings (Found Series) being Glabb’s first solo exhibition, he has been non-stop working and exhibiting across Ottawa and Canada. In August, Glabb will be starting at Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn, NY, where he plans to focus on themes of images as cultural capital and fake news through his hybrid oil paint silkscreens.  

When I asked him about slowing down and possibly taking time to rest, he shared a notable insight about being an artist in the rapid reality of our digitally mediated world: “I have a real fear of slowing down in any way. So I think I need to just do it [take time to rest] and realize that nothing’s going to change.”

Glabb would like to thank ArtsOttawa and Nordic Lab for their support in making this exhibition happen. If you would like to acquire Glabb’s artwork, you can contact de Montigny Contemporary. 

Follow Chris on Instagram @chrisglabb!