Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
Couzyn van Heuvelen may have lived most of his life in the southern part of Canada, but he didn’t start off there. His origins lie much further north, in the territory of Nunavut. He’s of Inuit descent, and his work draws heavily on that culture. His recent exhibition “Camp,” as the title suggests, was a sculptural transposition of culture via the tools and technologies that might still be found in a typical Inuit hunting and fishing camp. Though van Heuvelen sticks close to the visual reality of things, and fidelity is paramount, scale is something else altogether.
In Scraping Sealskin (2023), for instance, van Heuvelen has transposed the gritty reality of fat and flesh into the far more amenable realm of textiles, so that the work initially appears as a kind of bed or rug. But that brief visual flirtation quickly subsides, primarily because the scale of the piece has nothing to do with any kind of one-to-one representation. A similarly oversize sculptural fleshing knife adds to the shift, as it seemingly parts layers of felted wool fat away from a skin of rug-backing material.
In keeping with textile representation of flesh, a companion work, Stretching Sealskin (2023), leaned against a nearby wall. Also made of wool, this skin pulled tight within an enormous rectangular wooden frame re-imagines the real thing right down to the holes out of which seal eyes would have peered. As with Scraping Sealskin, the scale shift functions at levels other than the aesthetic, the enormity pointedly reminding us of the fact that these acts and objects have absolutely everything to do with survival in a difficult environment.
Less to do with issues of scale, and everything to do with surviving, Nets (2019) simultaneously manages to factor in van Heuvelen’s choice of materials as something worth considering—basic chain-link fencing and posts, some small, commercially available floats, and a pair of concrete pads (again, commercially available) to support the construction. A number of cast aluminum fish are caught up in the net simulacrum. Here, the shape of survival is clearly expressed in economic terms: a northern culture dependent on (southern) products, a culture increasingly shaped and demarcated by imported, transactional technologies and commodities that have little relevance to what it is to survive as Inuit.
So, a chain-link fence stands in place of a functional fish net, the absurdity of its uselessness highlighting the gap, the discrepancy, between true need and economic transaction. The late philosopher Gregory Bateson conceptualized “the difference that makes a difference,” and van Heuvelen’s Nets occupies that liminal space. The cast aluminum fish attempt to traverse it, but even these aesthetic creatures get caught up in the business. Where small floats traverse the chain-link, ostensibly holding everything up, we might just as easily imagine razor wire. Support can so easily transmute into avaricious denial, into the so-called “business of the deal.”
Mattaq (2024), intentionally or not (and probably the latter), seemed less caught up in the transactional undertow. Resting on the floor, it consists of seven small, two-toned cubes scattered loosely about on a large piece of cardboard that remotely resembles a plinth. A didactic panel explained that the title and the objects refer to the pieces of whale skin and fat that are considered an Inuit delicacy to be shared and consumed in “gatherings and celebrations.” van Heuvelen has recast these morsels, again at a larger scale, and using soap.
The connection between soap and fat is nothing new. What is relationally different here is the work’s abstraction. Mattaq, which doesn’t cling tenaciously to contextual representation, stood apart from every other work in the show. The newest of the sculptures, it might denote a new direction, for these scattered cubes have a powerful Minimalism, shades of Carl Andre’s bricks, hues of Robert Morris’s cubes. The only thing missing is the rigidity of the grid, its absence the difference that makes the difference. Something untidily human this way comes.
