It would be easy to presume that the many animals in Travis Shilling’s powerful new show at the Gladstone Hotel are related to his Aboriginal heritage but they’re not, at least not directly. The majority of the 21 works sprawling over the hotel’s third and fourth floors depict a flooded world where humans and animals endure atop icebergs or in boats. At its core the work is about survival and adaptation says Shilling, who walked me through the show Friday afternoon.
“I’m not trying to convey a post-apocalyptic scenario,” he stresses, “this feels like right now to me. When people talk about the end of the world it’s like they think it’s going to happen in one day, but it’s going to happen over a long period of time and they’re going to get used to it, they’re going to adapt.”
There’s a surrealist streak in the work — polar bears fitted with windows that glow from within and animals that are islands around which humans steer a lonely course. With a few exceptions, Shilling’s palette is mostly muddy and dark, a tonal range he says reflects his frame of mind when he’s in the city.
The artist was born in Rama, Ontario, on the shores of Lake Couchiching, where he still maintains a studio. “When I paint there, I use brighter colours, people come to the studio and sit for me, it’s a different way of working. When I come back to the Toronto studio, this happens, the muddled palette, the strange worlds. I have no frame of reference when I’m here so it’s all made up, imagined. I’m not painting consciously, like thinking, okay, this is going to be a coyote or a fox, they kind of identify themselves.”
Shilling points to the painting, left, where a massive bear emerges from the flooded landscape like an iceberg: “I wasn’t necessarily trying to paint a bear,” he says. “I was creating a shape that was an island and it became a bear. In the paintings the animals have come out of hiding and we’re more aware of them.”
“These are all very quick, one-sitting paintings,” he adds. “It feels a bit like a race with myself, with my ideas.”
Although he spent some time at Toronto School of Art when he was 17, Shilling is essentially self-taught. His work may depict a desolate world “but I’m really just trying to figure out where the light’s coming from,” he says.
The genesis of Shillings flood paintings came from TV news coverage of a flood in the US. Movingly, the camera captured a deer following a path until it is cut off by the rising water; confused the animal turns in circles then resumes its course moving on into the water. “It was the only thing he knew,” observes Shilling. “I felt a bit devastated by the water, by what was happening to the town and especially by the plight of the deer.”
“This show is almost like a mural that’s been sliced into sections,” he concludes. “Each painting is a snapshot from the larger work. The iceberg paintings are my idea that no matter what happens to the planet or the climate, we’ll survive and continue to be a community somehow. Whatever form that takes.”
WHERE/WHEN: Travis Shilling, How To Drown A Fish at the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen Street West, 416.531.4635) until March 26; Free.
Artwork courtesy of Travis Shilling, photo of the artist by Christopher Jones
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This was beautifully written. Travis your work is stunning and i look forward to seeing this soon.
Great article, great work! Inspiring and terrifying all at once!!
Quick note: Isn’t the “A” in Aboriginal capitalized?
David, thanks for the head’s up, you’re absolutely right about the capitalization.
Catherine Allman turned me onto your work and it’s the most stunning I’ve seen in a long time. If I had a million dollars I’d decorate my house wall to wall. Love what it says, what it is.