Flexus Maximus: 12 Point Buck 

Leila Armstrong and Chai Duncan

September 23- December 16, 2011

Kenderdine Art Gallery

12 Point Buck is a collaborative duo comprised of Lethbridge artists Leila Armstrong and Chai Duncan.  In the fall of 2007, Duncan and Armstrong became aware of a mutual interest in exploring representations of nature as artifice. 12 Point Buck has a history of incorporating mass-produced and folk objects representing nature into their work.  These include toy replicas, statuary, decorations, scale models, and thrift store landscapes.

This installation, Flexus Maximus, was arrived at from 12 Point Buck’s interpretations of the Canadian folk artist Levine Flexhaugh’s landscape paintings. According to Armstrong, “Flexhaugh represents the Western Canadian landscape as highly idealized through the use of specific tropes: towering snow capped mountains, pristine lakes and waterfalls, lush greenery, a deer or moose, and the occasional rustic cabin.  His work is formulaic and consistent in terms of composition and subject matter.  It is the ideal that he represents which we address.  As well as our fondness for an artist whose paintings are so repetitive and yet distinctive.”

According to contemporary artist folklore, Flexhaugh was an artist who travelled throughout Alberta and Saskatchewan supporting himself and his family through rustic, Canadiana-themed landscape painting.  He produced an enormous body of work throughout the late ‘30s, ‘40s, and early ‘50s, all of which is formulaic, kitsch, and largely repeats the same compositional and pictorial elements: land with a stag in the foreground; trees rising up on the left and right; a lake in middle ground; and mountains in background.  Flexhaugh often includes slight variations to his standard formula: a waterfall or river may run into the center foreground; a moose rather than a deer may be represented; there could be a cabin included, and scenes vary from nocturnal scapes (represented monochromatically) to day time scenes (luridly colourful) or with seasonal changes with winter scenes painted in monochromes and summer settings in his consistently intense palette.  But in the end, a Flexhaugh is a Flexhaugh is a Flexhaugh, easily distinguished by technique, palette, and composition.

Flexhaugh reflects the current interests of 12 Point Buck which include examining nature as a cultural construct, collecting as a means of research and production and nostalgia as an historically shifting phenomenon. By literally pulling apart and reconfiguring Flexhaugh’s compositions, 12 Point Buck closely examine the stylistic and rhetorical devices he used and consider how those devices, and the paintings as objects function today.

Original Flexhaugh paintings included in this exhibition were graciously loaned from the collections of Neil Richards, Greg McIntyre, Don Thauberger, Jerry Jordan, University of Saskatchewan Art Collection, Chai Duncan, and Leila Armstrong.