Sally Thurlow: Canoe Dreamings by Jonathan Bordo & Linda Jansma
oblong, 8vo. pp. 67. illustrated. biographies. paperback (near fine). Oshawa: Robert McLaughlin Gallery, [2006].
ISBN-10:092150067X / ISBN-13: 978092150067X
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Sally Thurlow’s Canoe Dreamings presents us with works that transform, quite literally. That is, her sculptures bridge the natural gap between the recognizable and the unexpected. An appropriately associative way of looking at what she has accomplished is to think of her particular medium of transport: the canoe which is not a canoe. Thurlow confronts the viewer with these familiar vessels and immediately pushes them into metonymic and metaphoric possibilities by the extent to which they are not canoes. But regardless of the artist’s promptings to understand this work as mythic or loaded with meaning, the works themselves are delightful to apprehend in the concrete and sensory ways they play with idea and reality of “canoe”.