In Conversation

Josefina Auslender + Tom Butler

September 23 – December 15, 2023

There is something about darkness, loss and the fallibility of memory that most prefer to avoid. As if through ignorance, we are safe. However, any Jungian analyst will tell you — we must embrace the dark to achieve balance. When we don’t, we risk being overcome.

The final exhibition of the 2023 season at Sarah Bouchard Gallery is a subtle and compelling exploration of some of the weightier aspects of human experience. The show positions the work of two very different artists in conversation around concepts of absence and loss. Both push boundaries between terror and triumph, finding beauty and poise in the effort to grapple with it all.

Exhibition Views Featured Artists Selected Works Press

Josefina Auslender

Los Caprichos + Los Caprichos 2023
It’s very easy. Los Caprichos came after a very difficult time in Argentina — the Dirty War. I was working with the series Los Cuerpos and when that finished, suddenly Los Caprichos began to appear. I decided to call the series Los Caprichos because ‘Caprichos’ are like happenings. They can happen in music, or in the visual arts — maybe literature. The series saved me, in a way — helping me come out of the series Los Cuerpos. It was a very unhappy time, and I was unhappy in my studio.
Los Caprichos came and while they were not easy works, they gave me lots of pleasure. They made me forget, in a way — not the past — but a way of being, so that I could come into another situation with myself and my art.
More recently, in 2022, I was struggling just to go into my studio. I wasn’t working. It wasn’t COVID — I always thought COVID could give me the opportunity to work more in my studio because I had to be in my house, but that didn’t happen. This was completely related to my husband, Aby, being ill and dying. All that time I was coming into my studio, and I couldn’t work.
When I decided to work with ink, something happened to me. It was very similar to what happened after Los Cuerpos. Back then, I needed to make peace with myself, with my story, the story of my country, with my studio… with everything. A similar thing happened to me when I began to make the ink drawings.
It isn’t that they made me forget Aby. I will never forget Aby. It was like being inside myself and my body, close to my soul, and being happy because suddenly I had something to say with my work. That’s why I call them Los Caprichos 2023 because it is the same feeling in a completely different time and context.
It felt the same for me as when I came out from that terrible Dirty War. The ink drawings happened three or four years after Aby died, and they felt like finding myself again. When Aby died, in some ways a part of me went away forever, but in other ways that didn’t happen. I recovered a part of myself, and I began to work.
These works make me feel that it is time for me to begin to think more about the fact that I am still alive and can do things. In a way, this work belongs to a very sad time, but at the same time it makes me very happy and gives me lots of pleasure because it allowed me to come out… it’s like living in a cave and suddenly finding a light on the horizon and walking toward the light and coming out into the world again. And that’s it. Very easy.

The image shows the view from the ground looking up through a circular opening in a dark, dense, tangled forest canopy with bare, leafless trees.

Two abstract paintings with black shapes on a white tiled background are hung on a white wall.

Tom Butler

Memory Sludge + Ruins
Memory Sludge, 2022-2023 continues Butler’s urge to creatively devolve photography, here attempting to turn modern photographs 'back into memories’. Standard 4 x 6-inch c-type prints from Butler’s own past have had their colourful pigment removed, re-constituted into a sludgy paste, and then reapplied to the original photographic paper. Butler’s ambition is to bring recent colour photographs closer to the experience of forgetting.
Three larger artworks are also presented in this series. Each 24” x 24” panel contains 24 photographs, equivalent to one roll of film, to create a collective slurry of people no longer known, places no longer visited and discarded artworks extant only in documentation. Butler likens the dark blobs to unruly animals in a circus big top, hence the curved horizon line. In this way he attempts to wrangle the photographs back into a primitive form, drawing them away from their modern, artificially fixed nature.
Also presented are Ruins, 2023, two 38’ x 50” graphite drawings of broken and distorted rooms. Much like his photo-based work, Butler’s room drawings are inspired by absence, but in this case, they are liberated from photographic source material. Much like memories, these Gothic greyscale drawings appear distorted and fractured by time, prone to leaks and given to ultimate fading.