Ah, the incestuous local arts scene. Sometimes it seems like one giant game of six degrees of separation. Indie rockers hook up with experimental video directors, fashion designers take their cue from avant-garde painters. The walls between modes of artistic expression aren’t just tumbling down; they’re being gleefully dismantled throughout this town.
So it comes as no surprise that two bright lights of the local music scene, piano songstress Sarah Slean and Louise Upperton, art director for red-hot indie label Arts & Crafts, have joined forces for their first major art exhibit, Bleak House, opening tomorrow at SPIN Gallery.
Longtime friends who met through their music industry connections, neither Slean nor Upperton are neophyte artists-Slean’s colourful paintings have appeared in her CD liner notes, and Upperton has placed her distinctive stamp on all of Arts & Crafts’ albums and promotional artwork-but simply hadn’t found the time for a proper exhibit. Both had amassed an extensive body of work, and realized their similar styles would lend well to a joint show.
Uncannily alike (the two even resemble sisters with their dark hair, light eyes, and similar vocal inflections), the pair shares a penchant for the dark, twisted, and Victorian. In their work, what appears pretty and prim at first glance takes on a more sinister tone upon further inspection-in Slean’s painting The Sweepers and the Maestro, a chorus of grim Victorian ladies stand over a figure slumped face-down on the floor of a ballroom, while Upperton’s large canvas Ladies of the Industrial Revolution features ballerinas with eerie masks for heads and splashes of what appears to be blood.
The exhibit marks a farewell of sorts for Slean, who’s moving to Paris for a few months to tour Europe, do promotion for the French release of her album Day One, and recharge her artistic batteries. She swears she’s coming back home, though-and in fact is hoping to return to U of T to finish the classical music degree she left behind years ago when she signed a record contract.
Though she’ll be back in town for the Bleak House launch tomorrow night (sorry, it’s sold out), we caught up with Slean in a late-night telephone chat from a hotel room in la belle ville last week as she prepared to set up shop there. Turns out the prospect of having her lifelong dream come true was a bit much for our heroine, who started the day off with a bit of a spill…
Tabassum Siddiqui: Heard you had a little accident this morning-what happened?
Sarah Slean: I have nice little neat blue stitches in my forehead. I bailed on the sidewalk-it was very elegant. (laughs) I had just gone for a jog, and had gone into a little grocery store, and I was like, ‘This couldn’t be any better!’ and I kind of broke out into a skip. So I’m skipping along the street, looked at the time, thought I was going to be late, started running, and BAM! I bled all over Paris.
TS: Talk about giving of yourself… (laughs)
SS: (laughs) The doctor who was sewing me up was like [adopts French accent], “You have to give Paris your skin and blood before you’re allowed to come here.”
TS: How long do you plan to spend in the City of Lights?
SS: Six months, but the person I was having dinner with today said, ‘You’re not going back.’ I dunno, I love Toronto, too. I really do. People bash it all the time, but I’m like, “What’s to bash?”
TS: You’re not new to art, but this is your first art exhibit. What took you so long?
SS: I remember seeing Louise’s stuff for the first time and being really wowed by it-it was a whole world that reminded me a bit of Tim Burton and Tom Waits kind of landscapes, the beautiful Trent Reznor videos and all that stuff rolled into one. And we were like, “We should do this for real, in an art gallery, and we should do this together.”
TS: Did it make sense to do something together because you share a very similar aesthetic?
SS: We have a lot of the same influences, but it manifests itself differently. We like to call [our art] ‘tenderly psychotic’-there’s something wrong, but it’s also deliciously wrong. (laughs)
TS: What is it about that dark, Goth-y sort of imagery that appeals to people?
SS: It’s what we repress inside of ourselves, you know? We’re trained to be moral beings, and we function best as moral beings amongst each other in society-I mean, you can’t have psychos on the loose-but there’s a violent, primitive urge. That’s why we love these horrifying video games, and we love to see death in the movies. I think it’s just sort of our ‘id.’
TS: I love that the show is titled Bleak House…
SS: I knew you’d appreciate that, literary girl! There’s that whole grim Dickensian aspect to it…
TS: Your paintings in the show feature mixed media-cut-outs, different textures and such.
SS: I’d never worked that way before, ever. When I painted, it was very traditionally-you take out your pigments, and you have a blank canvas, and you go. But when I was in the cabin, I really went back to that infant mind, where I was drawn to these children’s books. It took me three or four weeks to finally come to a place where everything was unclenched, and when your mind is that still, you go back to what the Buddhists call “the beginner’s mind.” And it was like childhood came back-my fascination with pictures, and scissors and glue, and crayons…just doing whatever. It didn’t have to make sense, or be perfect, or realistic-I was just playing.
TS: Do you see yourself doing more in the visual art realm?
SS: My first love was always music and it will always be, but I need art to sort of take a vacation from ‘music island’ sometimes. They’re never really separate, but it’s a balance between the senses-you have to give your ears a break or eyes a break, you know?
TS: Sometimes people have this need to compartmentalize artists into specific categories: “She’s a singer,” “She’s a painter,” and so on. As someone who dabbles in all the arts, do you find yourself running up against that?
SS: I’m in love with everything. I’m in a perpetual state of infatuation. So to exclude something because I need to write one occupation on my passport is not fair. I guess I could be under the general umbrella of ‘artist,’ but I’m excited by all of it. I make music, but most of my heroes were writers. And a lot of my heroes, their exemplary lives have inspired me, not just their art.
TS: A portion of proceeds from the sale of the artwork from the exhibit is going to go to the Royal Conservatory of Music-that must be a cause near and dear to your heart.
SS: I love this part! This is the greatest thing ever. I spent so many years at the conservatory and trembled on so many of their piano benches. I think back, and a lot of it was scary, but a lot of it I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
And I’m so grateful to that organization for being there, because it gave me music. And to me, that’s been the difference between being able to fly and not-that’s what it feels like. If people aren’t given music or given the chance to have music, that’s a tragedy, and that’s what’s happening. So these people are doing whatever they can to get kids interested in music.
TS: That you and Louise, both known for your connection to the music industry, are doing a visual art show really highlights the interesting artistic cross-pollination that’s currently happening on the local cultural scene.
SS: I feel like Toronto right now is on fire. I really do. And not just Toronto, but the Canadian scene in general. Canadian art is really starting to get momentum-all of the arts-and really starting to regard itself as worthwhile.
TS: But why now, at this moment?
SS: You know what? I don’t know. But it feels that way. A lot of the French journalists I’ve been talking to, they’ve been saying, “What’s going on in Canada right now? How come all of this is happening? What’s in the water over there? Hawksley Workman, Metric, Feist…” And I’m like, “You guys rock for knowing all these names!’ They know The Arcade Fire, they know The Dears… I dunno what’s going on-maybe we’re just finally figuring out how to attract attention!
TS: I understand you’re headed back to U of T when you come home.
SS: I gotta get my degree. There’s just so much more than I need to know from them. I took a third-year orchestration class a couple years ago-I was just chipping away at my degree a bit here, a bit there, and the orchestration class was just so much of the knowledge that I craved that I was like, ‘Oh, man, if it gets better, I have to have the rest of this!’
TS: So, how are you going to spend your time in Paris?
SS: Oh, I have so many stories-you can’t fall down and bleed on a Parisian street and not write about it! I’m going to lap it up-every last drop.
Bleak House runs Feb. 3 (launch is sold out) to Feb. 19 at SPIN Gallery (1100 Queen St. W., 2nd fl.), open Wed-Sat. (noon to 6 pm) and Sunday (1-5 pm). Free.
