How we live in our heads

CASSANDRA SAVAGE SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

In a world filled with images of airbrushed faces that are merely skin deep, Joel Shack's exhibit of sculptures, drawings and paintings is a gentle reminder that a face is a portal to an entire head filled with thoughts, fears, dreams and visions.
Shack starts with an image of someone in his life – a friend, family member, colleague or acquaintance – and looks into (rather than at) his model to see beyond the physical qualities of the face. The result is a kind of portrait that probes much deeper than skin to map emotion, experience and body language, as well as skull lines, cavities and other structural elements of the head.

The exhibit, An Evocative Openness, opened at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery on Sept. 9, with a gathering of 70 friends and supporters who turned up to celebrate Shack's first solo exhibit and second major career (previously an architect and professor, he worked as a designer on such projects as Toronto's Eaton Centre, Ontario Place and McMaster Health Sciences Centre).

At first glance, Shack's work looks like a series of sketched faces made up of simple black lines, layered and overlapped to create shadow and texture. But there are subtle details in each piece and visual themes throughout the exhibit that tempted me to probe deeper: there is pale color, mostly blues and yellows, washed over the black lines; chasms of harsh lines run down several of the faces; sculpted half-heads appear either open- or absent-minded; most of the faces appear still and thoughtful, while a couple of them have barely-detectable smiles; and there is plenty of meaningful white space.

One of the factors that has shaped Shack's work is that he suffers from Parkinson's disease, which affects the nervous system. Shack is fascinated by the metaphor that we live in our heads and living with the disease has provided him with unique insights into this metaphor.

"The head is a transparent thing," Shack told the Bulletin in an interview. "I mean, if we look hard enough at somebody, we'll be able to look into them and through them because we're not just all on the surface."

For Shack, a head is like a seed, which has grown into a complex world of ideas, thoughts and values. "We live with ideas more than we do with physical knowing," he said, at which point I realized his art isn't about faces at all; it's about personal histories, private thoughts and the subjective reality in which we each exist.

"Mirror Depth," the poster-child for the exhibit, is a self-portrait drawing and it has already sold.

"It seems like the head is searching for something, looking into itself. I started with my face and you can see the eyes intensely looking, trying to get into the mirror to see deeper into myself," said Shack. But what stands out about "Mirror Depth" in a room filled with heads, is the pair of hands holding a paintbrush at the bottom of the drawing. It is part of Shack's heads and hands series, where the hands represent the doing and the heads represent the thinking. The hands are practical, grounded and literal and their realism contrasts with the metaphorical head. I was so drawn to the head in this piece that I barely noticed the painter's hands and found it difficult to contemplate them when I did. I'd been drawn all along to the more stark images of disembodied heads floating in space. But despite my unease with the practical reality of hands, "Mirror Depth" is a highlight of the exhibit.

In the series of paper head sculptures, "Beloved Memories Held in Shadows" is a piece with special meaning to the artist. The paper skull is solid on one side and hollow on the other, half a skull. After sharing my interpretation with Shack (Is it an open-minded person? Or perhaps a world of ideas filtered through external reality?), he explained the intended meaning of the piece.

"It's my mother-in-law and, during the last 15 years of her life, she had Alzheimer's," he said. Iridescent blues and greens on the inside surface of the skull represent the beloved memory glowing inside.

"It's quite dark," said Shack, "but it still glows."

Of all the sculptures in the exhibit, I most easily connected with the Proboscis group. It's a step sideways from the human heads that dominate the room but it's clearly attached to the overall theme. When we look long and hard enough at a nose, said Shack, it's a strange looking object. I tend to agree, however Shack's Proboscis sculptures aren't the least bit jarring to look at. They are gorgeous dark reds on cream-colored paper that is curved to make valleys and shadows. Look at Shack's sculptures from various angles for surprise gaps, streams of light and new meaning. Maybe you'll find the head with a secret camel's eye.

"Streams of Expressive Emotion," a painting on canvas, is one of the more colorful pieces in the room and its face has one of Shack's hard-to-detect gentle smiles. A valley runs through the face, almost splitting the image in half, connecting the eyes, nose, mouth and throat.

"This one suggests that there's a powerful stream that runs within us," he said, adding that the line actually exists structurally in our heads through connected cavities and passages.

Each day, for the past three years, Shack has set to work in his solitary studio before dawn to study what it means to live in our heads. Although this isn't his first exhibit, it's a milestone in Shack's career as an artist because it's solo and the public seems to like what he's doing.

"The response has been wonderful and it feels right," he said.

Shack hopes people will invent their own meanings when they look at his work.
"That's why it's an evocation – anything that's implied pulls the viewer in and allows them to participate and have their own interpretation."

And while you're engaging in his work, appreciating a rare deep look into the human head, keep your eyes out for the occasional hand or torso, which hint at Shack's next artistic venture: "I'll keep on working on heads for a while. But I think I'm ready to look at the full figure."

Shack's exhibit continues at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, 950 West 41st Ave., until Oct. 13.

Cassandra Savage is a freelance writer/editor living in Vancouver.

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