GERTRUDE KEARNS at Fort York Visitor Centre (250 Fort York Boulevard), to June 14. $8.99, stu/srs $5.50. 416-392-6907. Rating: NNNN
Canadian artists have a long and illustrious history working with the military. As the AGO’s recent blockbuster demonstrated, Alex Colville got his start as a war artist during World War II.
Gertrude Kearns, who’s documented the military both officially and unofficially, was embedded with Canadian Forces in Afghanistan in 2005-06. In The Art Of Command: Portraits And Posters From Canada’s Afghan Mission, nearly 60 of her paintings and posters examine the delicate, often fraught dynamics of leadership and warfare using stark imagery and text taken from exhaustive conversations and interviews.
Her proximity to the army and her official status haven’t kept Kearns from delving into deeply uncomfortable territory in the past, including a graphic, painterly account of the incident in 1993 when soldiers assigned to humanitarian efforts in Somalia tortured and murdered a Somali youth who wandered onto a Canadian base.
She’s thus an odd but apt choice for military portraiture. Her subjects reveal all their contradictory facets: terse, proud, defiant, confrontational and sometimes frankly traumatized. The result is a portrait of brass and soldiers that is grim but that much stronger for its no-holds-barred honesty. In the concrete-bunker-style hallways of Fort York’s sleek new visitor centre, the overall effect is both spartan and claustrophobic – just as you imagine barracks life.
Many of the portraits use text to highlight the multi-layered thinking and logistics involved in warfare and military psychology. The poster Hope Of War contains the quote “I loved killing the enemy” as well as the adage “Combat soldiers need combat leaders.”
Kearns resists glamorizing warfare and directly addresses some of its costs. Her poster Saved, For What?, a ghastly depiction of a triple amputee, questions the wisdom of saving soldiers wounded past all functionality.
It highlights the dilemmas of command, of constantly weighing the possible against the probable and trying to emerge with a positive outcome. As these works show, that’s not always easy.
War is still hell.
art@nowtoronto.com
