Stephanie Temma Hier at Franz Kaka
by :
Tatum Dooley
Published in May, 2020 in the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Issue 3 of Cornelia was virtual only.
Stephanie Temma Heir, Spring now comes unheralded, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Franz Kaka.
Last year, I wandered in circles around Vija Clemins:To Fix the Image in Memory at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Clemins’s repetitious drawings of waves lulled me into a meditative space, articulating the vastness of the world. Like the drawings, the frames had slight variations among them, reflecting their origins in different collections. My attention splintered, and I looked only at the frames: the choices of material and color gave unusual insight into their owners’ aesthetics.
The semiotic power of frames is strong enough that it can transmute anything the frame holds within its borders into art. The frame tells the viewer what is important, to look within its four walls and to ignore the rest. Frames, then, have the potential to contextualize, but they also have the power to distract, something that Stephanie Temma Hier knows a lot about. In Hier’s exhibition at Franz Kaka in Toronto, Spring Now Comes Unheralded, content, color, or texture signals a visual and conceptual union between each ceramic frame and its painting. What does a bell pepper have to do with a fisherman’s wharf? A shock of yellow raincoat mirrors the hue of the unripe fruit.
Stephanie Temma Heir, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Franz Kaka.
As with those surrounding Clemins’s drawings, Hier’s attention-grabbing frames distract me. The three-dimensional elements catch the viewer’s attention before the painting can be acknowledged. Hier’s work subverts the typical role of a frame, which is to define a work of art from the space around it; here the frame itself becomes the focal point. The sculptural frames render the canvas flat in comparison. The contrast between the extravagant three-dimensional sculpture and the cold compositions of the paintings gives me whiplash; the polarity between the two defines a vast gap that defies understanding beyond mere visual punning. The false sense of homeliness given by the frames’ found-at-a-garage-sale quality is betrayed by the paintings, which are frosty and removed. They feel like afterthoughts, generic images of random aspects of food production found on the internet (a garden bed of cabbages, a packed chicken coop, hands eating crawfish) made slightly more interesting by unusual crops. Hier’s flip of the typical hierarchy between painting and frame is visually complex but frequently disorienting.
Stephanie Temma Heir, An oyster may be crossed in love, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Franz Kaka.
Meta-commentaries on production and consumption resonate throughout: Hier consistently finds her way back to food, or food-adjacent, references. A painting of a fisherman’s net is framed with a piece of sea-foam rock embedded with a stretch of wire fishing net in An oyster may be crossed in love (2020). Menacing ceramic bubbles float around an image of a boy drinking water, head tilted back, in But a childish toy (2020). Mushrooms in an array of textures encompass a painting of chickens in the titular work, Spring now comes unheralded (2020).
Frames usually exist on the periphery of our vision, meant to accent the work rather than distract from it. In this way, they are not unlike other material frequently relegated to the periphery of visual life: ceramic works, kitsch keepsakes, stock photography. In elevating visual artifacts that are typically mentally disregarded, Hier asserts that they are, in fact, the central preoccupations of our visual lives. A frame is a frame, except when it’s not.
Tatum Dooley is a freelance writer and curator living in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Bordercrossings, Canadian Art, Garage, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Walrus. .
Franz Kaka
B1 - 87 Wade Ave (Basement)
Toronto, ON
