Introduction by Lloyd DeWitt:
Christopher Baran’s work Vessel is an allegory of his continuing journey as an artist, which spans thirty years and has taken him from painting through First Nations practices to constructions and sculpture. In each of his projects he finds symbolic figures that express with uncommon directness, both in their objects and their making, a moral point of view that disrupts a dispassionate reading. The everyday figures, such as Sheep, a Disoriented Man, a Straw Hat, are meticulously crafted in often symbolic media. Baran employs shifts in scale or upends gravity and otherwise removes familiar handholds to unsettle our reading of the world. Straw Hat features a riotous parody of a special forces raid unfolding on a lady’s elegant hat, all at a scale that engages our child-like trust while skewering respectable sensibilities. Nature and our relationship to life around us are also examined with a spirit of fun, irony and unease in Sheep, Canoe and Vessel, the eponymous work of the exhibition.
Birch bark replaces gold and silver in Crown, the familiar symbol of sovereign colonial authority rendered here in soft warm organic skin. Smooth, humble pebbles and other natural stones are set in its surface, in place of pure, sharply cut gemstones. In another birch bark work, Men’s Dress Shoes (Homage to Vincent) are crafted with analogous level of great care that belies the distance trodden underfoot, a distance that has grown between the cultures represented by the shoes that at the same time, through their form and materials, embody the urgency of reconciliation. For Vessel, birch-bark is used to make a modern boat, a fishing vessel reduced in scale to precious size and given an indistinct, mysterious genesis and function. Like the shoes, Vessel reveals neither origin nor destination, but a journey that has to be undertaken.