Impositions / Setts
Jun 10 – Jul 10
Cheryl Pagurek, Barbara Lounder

Opening Thurs, Jun 10, 6-8

Where visual symbols have been employed in an effort to paralyze the mind, they are here used as a means of energizing it.

Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride.

Cheryl Pagurek, Box of Garbage Bags, 2002


The works of Barbara Lounder and Cheryl Pagurek converge through the theme of pattern. Patterns of design, patterns of society, patterns of appropriation, patterns of tradition, patterns of time, patterns of lineage, and patterns of industry are conceptualized to inform the past, present, and future. Setts & Impositions asks us to re-shape our thinking about established patterns, whether they are physical or intellectual. Examining two designs—the flamboyant tartan and its associate histories, and the detritus of our society in the form of commercial patterns—these works offer us alternate perspectives on cultures and on ourselves as cultural consumers.

Lounder’s Setts playfully manipulates the chequered and duplicitous history of tartan—one of the most identifiable signifiers of Scottishness. To obtain a plaid, the coloured threads of warp and weft of the square mirror the section next to it in length and width, creating a new hue wherever bands of the different colours cross. The selected colour combinations are assembled in setts. Setts/tartan/plaid patterns were originally a matter of personal taste. Bonnie Prince Charlie wore Highland plaid and kilt fighting the British in the Jacobite wars. The powerful association of plaid with rebellion was such that after the Battle of Culloden, the British passed The Disarming Act of 1746 outlawing the wearing of Highland dress (i.e. plaid) making it punishable by imprisonment and deportation. By the late 18th century, when the lower class had abandoned the plaid, the upper and middle classes began to adopt it, establishing the link between sett and clan. In 1822, the combination of King George IV’s visit to Scotland and Queen Victoria’s Balmoralism created a veritable craze for wearing tartan, and the kilt came to signify patriotism. The Highland regiments, exempted from the tartan ban, offered a further heroic image of tartan with their conquests in India and America. By the late 19th century, tartan was fused to a lucrative commerce, which continues to create new designs that are worn "with tribal enthusiasm, by Scots and supposed Scots from Texas to Tokyo." 1

The discovery that her surname, Lounder, is a Scottish verb meaning to punch or bludgeon—actions associated with overt masculinities—has been deployed to question and, at times, to feminize a patrilineal Scottish icon – tartan. Setts tartan-ized installation wall, complete with packages of various ‘Scottish’ brand goods, questions the cultural power of tartan that forges global Scottish kinship. The literature juxtaposed with these products recalls the history and sources for Setts. Together, these elements constitute a no-name brand of tartan and Scottishness, which calls into question its own authenticity.

Barbara Lounder, Setts, detail


The final stage in the cottage production of tartan, called waulking or stretching the cloth, was traditionally women’s work and was often accompanied by singing, joking, and impromptu verses. The artist continues this tradition by applying texts to form a Lounder word-sett onto tartan. The virile male symbol of the tartan kilt has been described "[I]n its bare essence as…nothing but a loin-cloth…a primitive garment,"2 that represents the base meaning of Lounder. Using her surname as a mesostic, each text block contains a column of letters spelling out LOUNDER. She then crosses it in with snatches of Sir Walter Scott’s gothic ‘bloodlust’ works (that helped to secure Scottish national identity in the mid 19th century), and with loutish words from the modern detective novels of Ian Rankin (whose writings have again popularized Scotland and made fashionable the rough edged characters, cities and landscape). The textual warp and weft underscores the mix of historic Scottish truths and half-truths, that are subverted for the dominant blue and red LOUNDER word-sett.

The tartan garments that serve as the ground for embellishment are degraded versions of Scottish national dress. The ancient masculine unstructured belted plaid has evolved into a formal kilt with sewn pleats, and has even been co-opted as women’s dress. The kilts applied with the LOUNDER word-setts are ambiguous in their gender. Does a tartan button (a button on a kilt?!) imply feminine origins and does this repudiate the lore that you should not wear your mother’s tartan? If so, how can it ever be reconciled with LOUNDER’s warrior word-sett? Yet perhaps the final comment on the rugged Scot in his unsewn plaid is realized by the four-in-hand ties that attempt to transfer the glamour and power of tartan into the confines of the constructed and sewn bias-cut tie. Can the ‘man in the grey flannel suit’ truly resemble the kilted and bare-legged Scot? The untied and disheveled images of the tartan ties suggest that the executive is letting loose and casting off his formal (British?) self for a new roguish Scot whose "mortal grapple [can be] overthrown." (Sir Walter Scott)

Just as Lounder uses found tartans as a field for exploration, Pagurek appropriates pre-made commercial patterns for packaging, sewing, and paper toys for her templates. Using an assortment of stencils as guides, she cuts shapes out of existing photographs according to the requirements of the pattern. Here, areas of the photograph literally fall off the page and are gone, thereby destabilizing the original image and recording a new one. By permitting the pattern to dominate, Pagurek confronts and undermines the photographic record. As a result, the viewer is required to unpack the image on several levels; to decipher the partially cut-out photograph by recalling photographic tropes, and to recall the types of objects that would BE related to such shapes. Thus the photograph itself represents the lost image and the pattern the lost object.The easily identifiable shapes of Sewing Pattern 1 (dress) and Sewing Pattern 2 (trousers) dominate over the photographs of children who remain invisible behind the patterned conventions of form and gender. Other industrial patterns that are difficult to decipher are rudely stamped across photographs of scenes that document highly charged moments of emotional complexity that are hard to reconcile and situate. Garden Hose Packaging substantially erases a romantic, loving moment and Pantyhose Packaging screens a funeral, a time of grief. Both leave one speculating about the lost image and emotion as well as the pattern form itself and what it once contained.




Barbara Lounder, Setts (Ancient Wilson tartan with text excerpted from a poem by Sir Walter Scott), detail

The juxtaposition of unrecognizable with readily identifiable patterns echoes back and forth in Impositions and amplifies the surprise of both. A tissue box we realize has its own iconic pattern that makes an abstracted serrated oval form indisputably recognizable as the ubiquitous Kleenex box—a sign of civilization and comfort. Though the pattern of the package obliterates any identifiable individuals and the various moments of intimacy in these works, the commodification of such common objects makes them part of a cultural bond (here represented by a Kleenex box, horrifying as that may seem). Box of 4 Wineglasses recognizes our shared activity of flattening boxes for the recycling box. It is this action that binds us and that enables this shape to be understood. The promise of cheer and companionship in the missing wine glasses becomes squashed and relegated to the debris that we partially see depicted.

The duplicity of historic time and the nature of photography itself is expressed and questioned in the images of families and friends. Photographic records are de-personalized as the patterns re-focus and shift the images, not only the actual historic record, but also the intention of the original record. As Barbara Bender has suggested, an "alternative history attempts to demote or undermine aspects of contemporary social relations . . . . Ideological representations are integral to relations of power and control."3 Pagurek offers us new pictures in order to create new histories, but ones with vestiges and proof of the past. This is clearly expressed in works such as Box of Garbage Bags and Paper Toy Pattern 3, where Pagurek isolates individuals from a group setting that they never expected to leave, and in so doing reformats their status and power.

Cheryl Pagurek, Garden Hose Packaging, 2002

Conversely, blocking out, as in Video Tape Sleeve, protects the subjects from an anonymous prying gaze, as there is no means of seeing behind or around the obstruction of the imposed pattern. Here the missing centres of pictures act as a viewing hole reminiscent of a peep show; but the voyeur is disabled and cannot fully access a private image that is blasted through. The newly constituted photographic record is hung on a wall and creates a shadow of its missing part, a vestigial memory of the cast-aside image. The view goes no where except to the white wall, that resonates with absence and loss. The new image, however, can be re-cast, signaling a future if hung on different coloured walls, on wallpapered walls or possibly over other hung images. It holds potential.

Patterns and images traditionally unite us with our past, and can conjure moments that were experienced—real or imagined. They fill in blanks. In their patterns Lounder and Pagurek each address what is missing by deploying the common place, the evident and the well recorded. Setts & Impositions questions the veracity of patterns of history that, like dreams, are formed to suit our requirements and fantasies of past and recent time, and project hope into an imaginable future.

--Alexander Palmer

1 Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Highland Tradition of Scotland," The Invention of Tradition. Eds. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Granger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 41.

2 H.F. McClintock, Old Irish and Highland Dress (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1943), 166.

3 Barbara Bender, "The Roots of Inequality," Design and Aesthetics; a Reader. Eds Jerry Palmer and Mo Dodson (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 190.

Cheryl Pagurek received a BFA from Queen's University (1990) and an MFA from the University of Victoria (1992). She has shown her installations, sculpture and photography in solo, two-person, and group exhibits across Canada. Recent exhibits include shows at the Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), SAW (Ottawa), the Ottawa Art Gallery, Vu Centre de diffusion et de production de la photographie (Quebec) and Eastern Edge (St. John's). Other exhibits include those at Open Space (Victoria), the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, TRUCK (Calgary), Floating Gallery (Winnipeg), Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston), Hamilton Artists Inc., Gallery 101 (Ottawa), la Centrale (Montreal) and WKP Kennedy Gallery (North Bay). She has work in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Library of the National Gallery of Canada, the Ottawa Art Gallery and the City of Ottawa. She lives and works in Ottawa, and gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa for the creation of Impositions.

Barbara Lounder is a Nova Scotia artist, currently living in Dartmouth. She has been exhibiting for over twenty years, with her work featured in group and solo shows across Canada, the United States, Poland, Germany and New Zealand. Barbara Lounder’s artwork is in the collections of The Canada Council Art Bank, the Nova Scotia Art Bank, Carleton University, Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Department of Foreign Affairs. She is the recipient of a number of awards and grants. Currently, she is Dean at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where she has been on the teaching staff since 1986. The artist wishes to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism and Culture

Alexandra Palmer (PhD) is the Nora E. Vaughan Fashion Costume Curator in the Textile section, Royal Ontario Museum. She is also adjunct faculty, Graduate Programme in Art History, York University and Art History, University of Toronto. She has curated and published extensively on fashion history.