Additional Images

Provenance:

Yarlow Salzman Gallery, Toronto, ON;
Loretta Yarlow and Gregory Salzman, Toronto, ON;
Waddington's Auctioneers and Appraisers, 28 May 2018, lot 84, as Dropped from the Calendar/Experience and Self-Consciousness;
Private Collection, Quebec;
By descent to the present Private Collection, Quebec

Literature:

Jerry McGrath, "Carol Wainio, Yarlow Salzman Gallery, Toronto, September 8 to 29, Sylvia Safdie, Evelyn Aimis Gallery, Toronto, September 8 to 27," Vanguard, Dec 1984-Jan 1985, 32-33, p. 32 repro., as Dropped from the Calendar: (Experience and Self-Consciousness).
David Burnett, Perspective 85: Carol Wainio and Robert Weins. Exh. cat. (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1985), no. 6, as Dropped from the Calendar: (Experience and Self-Consciousness).

Exhibited:

Carol Wainio, Yarlow Salzman Gallery, Toronto, ON, 8-29 Sep 1984.
Perspective 85: Carol Wainio and Robert Weins, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON, 2 May-14 Jul 1985, no. 6, as Dropped from the Calendar: (Experience and Self-Consciousness).

Note:

In his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” German philosopher, cultural critic and essayist Walter Benjamin wrote that “the man who loses his capacity for experiencing feels as though he has been dropped from the calendar.” Modern Westerners are but “poor souls that wander restlessly but have no history.” Wainio uses this idea as the springboard.

At first glance, Dropped from the Calendar (Experience and Self-Consciousness) appears abstract, but soon figures make themselves apparent. Tall, boldly-coloured pillars resembling caryatids or atlantes are woven together, forming the structure of the painting. Looping around them are similarly sized brushstrokes which form walkways for the smaller figures on promenade, dressed in their historical best. Are these archetypes of the past dissolving? Or are we simply part of a continuum? Wainio asks the viewer to meditate on these ideas, concepts which in her words, “leave us constantly wakeful, yet under a deep sleeping spell.”

Dropped from the Calendar (Experience and Self-Consciousness) is an essential work from a key moment in the recent history of Canadian art, when the dominance of modernism was countered by postmodernist critique and ushered us into our current moment. First exhibited at Toronto’s Yarlow/Salzman Gallery, which also showed Lynne Cohen and Landon Mackenzie, its major public debut was in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s first Perspective exhibition in 1985. As the Group of Seven did more than fifty years earlier, a younger generation of artists in the 1970s and 1980s questioned the status quo of their era. Instead of abstraction that was purely visual or figurative art that was purely narrative, artists like Wainio challenged old assumptions by playing in the gap between. Dropped from the Calendar (Experience and Self-Consciousness) represents the best of this moment, when artists challenged their past, had something new to say, and did so with bold new visual language that continues to attract attention.

References:
Paul Petro Contemporary Art. Dropped From The Calendar, Carol Wainio Paul Petro Contemporary Art. March 27, 2023.