Canadian_Art_2016_S_

114 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016 canadianart.ca 115

OPPOSITE: Ron Benner Trans/mission:

Vectors 2 014 Photographic/garden

installation Dimensions variable

Installation view at Great Tang

All-Day Mall, Xi’an, China

PHOTO STONE PHOTOGRAPHY

Ron Benner In Digestion

(detail) 1992–95 Mixed media

Dimensions variable

COLLECTION MUSEUM LONDON

among the foliage. Benner is unconcerned by the damage. He’ll fix it in

due time, as he will tend the garden. The project is ongoing: how have

plants and crops been exploited and used throughout the world? How has

colonialism snatched the bounty of indigenous cultures without compen-

sating or acknowledging the source?

Benner didn’t always work this way. As a young artist he was influenced

by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton. There were two distinct turning

points: his travels in Latin America and when he and his sculptor brother,

Tom Benner, had a two-person show in 1976 at the Art Gallery of Ontario,

and a prominent London-based sculptor wrote in the comment page:

“Who the fuck are the Benners?” Benner recalls, “That’s when I stopped

being the kind of artist where it’s all made up, fictional. I decided to look

into my own life and travel experiences. From then on I stopped being a

certain kind of artist and became more of a chronicler, a documenter of

what I was seeing.” It wasn’t until 1987 that he started to be collected by

public institutions. “At that time, not many people were combining

photos with material objects. There was no commercial market for these

pieces so I could do whatever I wanted. I started working out in the public

sphere, on clay cliffs, in streets and supermarkets.”

Neither artist has had a sustaining relationship with a commercial

gallery. They work at home and abroad with museums, curators, libraries,

universities, public spaces—and the network of artist-run centres.

Hassan and I stand in front of her wall piece in the Ivey Business School

at Western University. How appropriate to the site: a Canadian $20 bill has

been blown up manyfold and implanted in one corner with a neon-green

outline of a maple leaf. A playful gesture, yet unabashedly political. The

title of the work, Could we ever know each other...? (2 013), comes from a

translated quotation by writer Gabrielle Roy. Haida artist Bill Reid supplied

the bill’s image: his sculpture The Spirit of Haida Gwaii ( 1991 ) shows mythical

figures such as Raven and Wolf crowded into a boat. Hassan points out

that the bill is being taken out of circulation, and the Haida art replaced

with an image from Vimy Ridge. One culture obliterates another, rescued

here by the insistence of the artist.

Benner and Hassan are about to head off to Qatar and then on to

Istanbul to attend a conference on Islamic art and text. Do they ever get

tired of travel? Benner shakes his head, but Hassan admits, “Once I’ve

been home awhile it’s hard to get moving.” The artists are on the road at

least three months each year, heading south through the Americas or

across oceans and continents to Africa, the Middle East or Asia, in a life-

time’s search for how edible plants, art and language scatter through the

world like escaped seeds, and how they might recreate or evoke these

wild journeys in their work. ■

Hassan-Benner_ sp16_14TSLR.indd 115 02/03/16 10:19 AM