Mike Hansen at James Baird Gallery in Pouch Cove

If I had to choose just one word to describe Mike Hanson’s early works on paper currently on display at James Baird Gallery in Pouch Cove, it would be this: Puke-y.

Maybe it was that I was incredibly hung-over from the night before (poker, Scotch) and that that very morning had vomited an evil-looking, purple, viscous liquid into my toilet just before the long drive to the Pouch Cove gallery. Maybe it was the fact that when Angela, Jim Baird’s partner and hostess of the opening offered me a glass of red wine upon my arrival, my stomach, the source of many a mysterious sound and much pain that day, threatened to propel it’s meagre contents onto the gallery floor. Maybe it was that one of Hansen’s pieces has the word BARF stencilled across it. Whatever it was, upon seeing Hanson’s early work, the colours and composition did nothing but remind me of regurgitated food.

This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing.

Hansen’s earlier encaustic works on paper (circa 1997-98) entitled the It’s Your Call Series are very weak when compared to the newer mixed media works on display. They look muddled and static and have none of the luminosity encaustic work has in the hands of a more skilled artist. There is a tepid attempt at criticism of post-modern art in Hansen’s collaged in photos of Jeff Koons’ Puppy and a Basquiat painting (stencilled with the words DUH, and EGAD respectively) which do nothing for me aside from reveal Hansen as something of a dimwit when it comes to skewering art he doesn’t like. The inclusion of Chinese Hell Bank Notes (traditionally burned to lessen the time an ancestor’s soul must spend in the Underworld) likewise left me cold as they only seemed to make the composition even less dynamic, more cramped and added nothing interesting conceptually.

Did you ever notice how when after you puke it’s like the hang-over just recedes and you can begin to concentrate on getting better without all that poison in your guts? It seems like that’s what happened to Hansen. Bigger, crisper, cleaner and immeasurably less puke-y, the newer works blow Hansen’s older stuff right off the gallery wall. It’s like he had to purge all the bad stuff from his system. From 2002-03, Vivasection and Storm show a confidence in gesture and handling of materials lacking in the It’s Your Call Series. I kept coming back to one piece, Gideon’s Holy Bibles (2003), a simple drawing of a precariously stacked column of red bibles looking as though they might fall right off the page onto the floor.

It’s interesting to note that Hansen’s recent move to Toronto from Newfoundland has brought out themes in his work related to the traditional iconography of visual art in this province. Fish, landscape and religion are a recurring preoccupation in the new stuff.

It’s also interesting to see an exhibit in which a sampling of an artist’s development over a five-year period is shown in the same space. It makes the earlier, puke-y works more understandable and necessary as growing pains in Hansen’s continued progress as an artist, though they sure didn’t help the health of my intestines the first time I saw them and they make the show as a whole feel more than a little uneven.