Gayle Kell’s multimedia dress made from butter wrappers (photo: Stephen Thirlwall)
by Stephen Thirlwall
Gayle Kells is a fine artist from Ottawa, with a studio at Enriched Bread Artists (EBA) on Gladstone Avenue just west of Preston Street. She paints mostly in oils on canvas, but also does intricate drawings, multimedia pieces, and installation works. In the past, she has also painted portraits.
One of her main themes over a number of years has been dresses. These range from very simple slip-like dresses to very fancy and elegant ball gowns, with frills, wide skirt bottoms and bright colours.
Kells has had many exhibits over the years in various downtown locations. In December, one of her works —a drawing that appears like intricate lace stitching —was shown in Centretown at City Hall’s gallery as part of the 2017 art collection purchased by the City of Ottawa. She also had a fall showing of a cross-section of her works at the EBA open studio.
Kells’ last major showing was an exquisite month-long (November) solo exhibition of paintings entitled “Serenade,” featuring her much loved theme of dresses. It was held at the gorgeous and spacious Sivarulrasa Gallery in Almonte, Ontario, a short drive west of Ottawa. While Almonte is a lovely town for visiting and shopping, it also has a very strong visual arts and music community.
The dress—an iconic symbol of womanhood and femininity—projects many faces, both inward to the wearer and outward to the public.
It can be a sign of status, culture, age, formality, style and fashion, beauty, comfort, and pleasure (to name just a few aspects). It can display opposites: freedom or constraint, sexiness or prudishness, prettiness or dowdiness, cultured or anti-mainstream (e.g., punk or Goth) or even combine elements. It can be highly tailored or tattered.
The clothes one wears may project who we really are as a person or act as a facade of how we want others to see us while hiding who we really are.
As explained by the Sivarulrasa Gallery, “Gayle Kells’ evocative paintings use the image of the dress as a starting point to reflect on identity, place, time, and memory relating to the female body. Richly textured and finely nuanced, the paintings draw attention to the dress as an object of adornment and ambivalence, evoking both positive and negative emotions.” Kells leaves it to the viewer to decide on each dress’s degree of beauty, morality and social appropriateness.
Gayle not only paints dresses, but also creates “dresses” from found objects, particularly corsets and girdles to which she attaches other things (e.g., pins and metal wire skirts, necklines, and see-through over tops or jumpers).
These assemblages appear appealing from a distance, yet restrictive and painful to wear on closer inspection. Women’s wear seems always a balance between beauty and pain (just think of high heels).
One of Kells’ corset dresses (photo: Stephen Thirlwall).
These pieces bring our thoughts to times, places and styles when and where women’s clothing was painful. The gallery’s front window displayed two “corset dresses” that made the gallery look like a high fashion clothing store.
Gayle’s dresses do not contain bodies and are clearly missing heads. There was only one small painting that suggested there might be a body in the dress, but even this was unclear. This is probably done so as not to detract from the impact of the dresses themselves. But there could be many other meanings that you could ask her about.
Perhaps it reflects, consciously or unconsciously, the social invisibility or isolation that many women have felt throughout history.
My favourite aspects of her work are its fancifulness and colour. Gayle is not afraid to use streaks or whole panels of bright and bold colours. Her ability to choose perfect shades or combinations of colour for each of her designs is wonderful. In several of her new works she used a lot of gold as a background highlight to the dresses.
Some of the dresses are in flight, moving across the canvas like ghosts spirits, comets or phoenixes.
Some of the colours appear translucent, as if there is a light shining through. In a few of her pictures, the dresses seem to be transforming into other objects as they stretch or bend to reform; perhaps also suggesting transformation of the women who might wear them.
On viewing art, the viewer might at first find a work very stirring, but the next time they see it, their attraction has faded. An important element of Gayle Kells’ work is that her paintings are enduring. Having seen her work numerous times, I am captivated every time. Each visit provides new appreciation.
This makes Gayle’s art of particular appeal to art collectors and a wonderful addition to any home.
