Hilary Haseltine ~ Evoking the Mysteries

by Ann Rosenberg

There are family photographs of her in the doorway of a Marble Temple—one of several local shrines which embody humankind’s aspiration for transcendence. Haseltine’s aims as a mature artist, may have begun while spending some of her childhood in Bangkok. After returning to Southern California at age seven, where she spent a great deal of time with her paternal grandmother. Haseltine’s best days were spent climbing amongst canyons and caves exploring plant and animal habitat. Enjoying self-directed, unstructured activity caused a sense of real time to vanish and blurred the distinction between the real and the imaginary.

Haseltine moved to Canada in the late 60’s where she worked and studied fine art photography at Emily Carr University of Art and Design; she graduated in 1985 and started producing her first professional multi-media artwork in the late eighties and early nineties.

TROPHY HUNT 1985
Talented students’ early works are seldom worth mentioning. Trophy Hunt, Haseltine’s installation in the 1985 Emily Carr’s Graduation Show, is an exception to that rule. This eight-part mural featured ‘paired’ illustrations pre-empted from Art journals and Wildlife magazines.

Two suitable images were chosen and shot on negative b/w film. Next, each of the transparencies was projected separately onto photographic paper through the windows of suitably cut out mats. A representation of a woman taken from an art journal was transformed into a positive image on the left; a photo document from a hunting magazine underwent a similar process to create the illustration on the right. Finally, the eight pairs were enlarged and re-printed as 16 X 20 inch silver gelatin prints on sheets of fiber-based selenium-toned photographic paper.

The viewer was confronted by a sequence of contrasting, but inter-related subjects. The Trophy Hunt art works by a 20th century males who depicted women as powerless ‘prey’ on display like trophies, were set beside depictions of moments in a deer hunt. This narrative was critical of hunters who take animal trophies for the purpose of experiencing a sense of power.

The depictions of deer being stalked, shot, hung up, skinned and, finally, disemboweled in juxtaposition with paintings of women as sex objects made a lugubrious point in Trophy Hunt. It would be hard to imagine that the artists (or indeed) the magazines from which Haseltine took the images would approve their use in these ‘montages’ that fuel outrage as they progress. Certainly, Trophy Hunt provoked debate in the College about many issues, including feminism and copyright.

AFTER GRADUATION
After her graduation from ECUAD, Haseltine started her own photographic business working on contracts that drew upon her new area of expertise. She was hired by several local institutions including the Chilliwack Museum and Historical Society, the City of Vancouver Archives, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Maritime Museum to make images from glass plate negatives and limited edition prints for Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology.  Between 1985 and the early ‘90’s, b/w photographs taken on trips to the Hoodoos in Alberta; the Badlands of the North West; Sedona, Arizona; the Mojave Desert that straddles California and Nevada; the Coral Desert in Utah; Flaming Gorge, Colorado, New Mexico’s Bisti Badlands became resources for the large, photo-based art that she would begin to produce in the early ‘90s.

THE ALTARPIECE WORKS, five of its six illustrations use the ornate framing devices of ‘found’ traditional, Italian Gothic or Renaissance altarpieces (like the ones shown in Art History class) to encompass John Heartfield-inspired visuals that make ironic, sometimes bitter commentary on such wide-ranging issues as birth control Roe v Wade, the exploitation of women, underage labourers, and ruthless developers. The sixth has a framework comprised of Deco-style skyscrapers. Unlike any art piece she would produce later, all have specific names that add depth and black humor to the individual altarpiece and its content. The Last Supper is the title of the triptych that houses visual references to a 19th century factory and its oppressed, undernourished workers.

In form, the frameworks surrounding the montages are reminiscent of the doorways of the marble Buddhist Temples in Bangkok where the artist spent time as a young child. Such monuments undoubtedly made a lasting impression and may have contributed to Haseltine’s taste for the structures characterized by complex bi-lateral and tri-lateral symmetry and the nave-like vaults she constructed in her later images of the YELLOW and COPPER WORKS of 2001.

In 1992, Haseltine began an extensive group of large photomontages called the BLUE WORKS with hand-painted blue-tinted backgrounds. In doing so she set a precedent for work to follow: GRAY, YELLOW, COPPER, URBAN PETROGLYPHS & JADE WORKS. Each subsequent phase after the BLUE, was characterized by not only a particular colour but prevalent techniques. There was however an exception with one body of art she did after the COPPER WORKS which was called URBAN PETROGLYPHS and I will talk about that later.

BLUE WORKS 1992-1997
The first thirty-three of the forty-one images in the BLUE WORKS features wilderness (or rural) images. A tint of blue oil paint was carefully rubbed into the surface of each photographic background with cotton batting. Cut-out figures and motifs were then positioned on top of the ‘blue’ backdrops. Some were blue-tinted or b/w vignettes; others, multi-colored collage shapes that were thickly over-painted then scratched into with a sharp implement to reveal imagery that was hidden underneath the surfaces. The completed photomontages were re-photographed and printed on formats some as large as 3′ x 4′ feet.

In one of the Blue, turn-of-the-19th century ‘twins’ –one with half of his own severed head cradled in his arm— hover in a desert landscape. They evoke Surrealist Rene Magritte’s floating gentlemen in bowler hats, an artist Haseltine admires. In its counterpart image heads that have been cut in half of the same boys, rain down from the sky to form a conical-shaped heap on the ground. Some of her prints also comprise a ‘natural pair” as two includes two chairs that ‘sit’ above the landscape while having separate motifs that are distinctive.

Within the next several members of the BLUE group, Haseltine appears to be developing her own personal ‘icons’ which are repeated, echoed and interwoven in this sequence and elsewhere in her oeuvre. Clothed arms truncated at the shoulder and snake-fences made of ‘slices’ of stone are among the arresting symbols that arise from the world of Haseltine’s particular subconscious in the inexplicable fashion that Max Ernst and other leading Surrealists would have approved.

However, there is a shift away from the intrusion of unexpected elements towards the expression of imaginings that seem to have been dictated by the spirit of the specific site. A Stonehenge-like worship circle is ‘erected’ in response to the ritualistic ‘need’ of several dolls that lie in a relatively flat plain far removed from the rocky escapement in the distance. The women with arms upraised crown’ a chain-link fence in order to echo the arabesque of the deer antlers which are stacked alongside it.

Under the influence of Holly Roberts whom she also admired, Haseltine fashioned cut-out shapes evoked by what she discovered when she scraped through layers of brightly colored paint to reveal parts of collage materials ‘buried’ underneath. These forms were then montaged onto the wilderness backdrops where they seemed to ‘belong’. A figure with a head shaped like a mushroom, sports a loose-flowing multi-hued robe and fancy golden ‘runners’. This apparition could be the spirit of the hoodoo who stands warily on guard, ready to flee at the sound of a human footstep.

The method described above became the principle means employed to inspire (and inspirit) the applied motifs in BLUE WORKS The strange, sometimes partly-animal creatures that resulted became specters that stood, walked and soared in the eerie, aqua-tinted landscapes. They were Rain Dancers, Kuchina Sorcerers, Shamans who, according to Aboriginal lore, are responsible for calling down water from the skies in the arid, American South West.

The last creations of the montaged pieces in the BLUE group, however, evidence two new orientations. The immediate foregrounds are made from the torn parts of b/w photographs positioned at the top and bottom of each format to reveal two different ‘midnight blue’ landscapes in the spaces between. Arms and hands gesture downwards to the dune image affixed beneath, where a waiting dog has been carefully retained as part of its cut-out profile. The dog ‘watches’ the person in the middle ground standing in the rich, blue darkness gazing towards a Moholy-Nagy–like abstract light-writing display. In its counterpart, where the hands of floating bare arms support the upper-most portion of a b/w landscape image, below which another night view is presented as a central feature.

Then she has a short sequence which exhibits a dune landscape presented in three ‘vertical’ parts. Two blue-tinted elements surround and complete the b/w centre of the same vista. Similar dune-like settings form the backgrounds for other members of this mini-series. Black squares are painted on top of the backgrounds have been collaged with smaller images. Some are carefully cut or ripped pieces of blurry snapshots of a deer in flight that are tinted in flesh tones,; others are details of sky or sand washed with a faint hint of blue. The feeling this subset exudes (as a group or singly) is very different from all that has gone before. Anger, disruption and confusion come to mind—emotions that appropriately reflect an unsettled period of the artist’s life.

The unexpected intrusions of diverse phenomena into unrealistically blue, reality-based settings indicates the artist’s basic adherence to the principles and practice of mid 20th century Surrealism where the ‘conjunction of opposites’ and the intrusion of the unexpected were goals. The effect is calming and mystical not frightening. For Haseltine, these works were about the deconstruction and reconstruction of imagery that could only transmute in this specially devised, blue, transformative medium. In the last few BLUE WORKS, Haseltine created visual analogues for disjuncture not for healing. The mode is no longer surrealist but reflects abstract forms similar to those found in 1970’s works by Ellsworth Kelly and Barnett Newman

GRAY WORKS 1997-1999
The artist moved from an extended period of wide-ranging experimentation. The GRAY WORKS, a tribute to her father are about death and dying. The chronology does not reflect the narrative ‘logic’ appropriate to the subject.

The backdrops of some of the photomontages of the GRAY WORKS are images of sand dunes; the soft tonality was controlled in the darkroom and the use of the mirroring technique she further develops in this body of work. The extended landscape effect was created by enlarging and printing identical reversed and un-reversed b/w negatives to make a print. Then when the prints were joined together around a central vertical seam, it formed an imaginary landscape that displayed bi-lateral symmetry. The symbolic, b/w montage elements (crucial to the implied story of one person’s end) were affixed manually onto the ‘fabricated’ sites of rippled sand dunes and the beatific clouds from which angels with trumpets might burst. These montage motifs were carefully excised with a surgical steel blade from the excess paper that surrounded them in a technique that had served Haseltine well when she made the BLUE WORKS. At the final stage of production of the constructed panel the whole image was then rephotographed and the seams that ran vertically down the pieces were digitally removed. In the GRAY WORKS the symbolic accoutrements range from low tech elements such as a cardboard coffin containing the ‘corpse’ of her father wrapped in a white cotton shroud to a relatively luxurious pair of velvet ‘crematorium’ curtains to the gleaming, high tech stainless steel vault and door of the site in Los Angeles where the body was consigned to the furnace. An ‘empty’ landscape where the footprints that would logically have also been present in the right-hand side of the vista have been ‘magically’ erased, is full of the spirit of the departed.

Many of the particulars in this body of work pertain directly to the death trappings and cremation of the artist’s own father in Los Angeles. The result is poetic, not maudlin, universal rather than particular. It is also not troubling that Haseltine mixes her father’s remains with the sand in the portion of this series where you see HANDS depicting hands scattering the ashes into the air and then rubbing them into the sand.

GRAY is a very effective title (and hue) for a series about geographical and corporeal transmutation – in Haseltine’s words, “a process that is ambiguous and inconclusive.” It is the comparison that can be made between the aging and death of the human being and the geological transformations that occur in the land over eons as mountains slowly disintegrate and eventually become sand. Both processes are inevitable and beautiful. Gray, in this body of work, connotes sadness and calm and also a quiet acknowledgment of the mystery of death.

Because the montage elements in the addendum of the hand images—”HANDS” were carefully positioned within the confines of boldly painted rectangles similar to the black squares displayed in several of the final BLUE WORKS, they created a striking visual link with that subset, although the method of production was somewhat different.

In “HANDS” small, uncut photographs of ashes being sifted through fingers, being blended with the material of the dunes or cascading to the ground like waterfalls were positioned on dark gray rectangles hand-painted on sheets of photographic paper that have been exposed in the darkroom so that they became a medium gray.

Unlike the BLUE WORKS, all the finalized images of GRAY now has been produced on archival fine art water colour paper using an inkjet printer up to. 3′ x 4′.

The construction of more than one bilaterally symmetrical compositional element within an image in the GRAY WORKS will be commonplace in the YELLOW, COPPER and URBAN PETROGLYPH WORKS that followed.

YELLOW & COPPER WORKS 2000-2003 Unlike the art created earlier, none of the YELLOW and COPPER WORKS are photomontages and that represents a new orientation in Haseltine’s art along with her shift to archival fine art water colour paper and the use of the inkjet process. New also is the fact that color is not hand-applied now but achieved through a method of colorization in the computer lab. That the YELLOW and COPPER WORKS are endowed with slightly different tonalities and that the groups are designated in reference to those hues is ‘logically’ consistent with the photo-based art that predates them.

Another sign of development takes place in regard to the artist’s use of bi-lateral symmetry. Two vertical ‘mirroring’ splits are frequently used in the YELLOW and COPPER and a third split is not uncommon—a fact that allows the production of more complex constructions. In both groups (but particularly in COPPER) Haseltine cuts through photographs like a plastic surgeon, to give some of the motifs already destined for reproduction a different, ‘nipped and tucked’ appearance. This phenomenon compels the viewer to study the final artwork closely in order to determine what details are causing the déjà vu effect in regard to the identical and not quite identical echoing motifs that stretch across seemingly infinite plains or extended altar walls.

The most important distinguishing feature and the real reason that these prints should remain divided into two sections is not only their colors, but their different content. All the ‘panoramas’ in the YELLOW WORKS which are reconstructed from shots of geological formations appear to be sacred cities and shrines; all the COPPER WORKS that are composed of manipulated photo-documents, including some prehistoric dwellings, make the spectator believe that the inner halls of sites for worship or monastic retreat are being faithfully represented.

The ‘COPPER’ sequence is the first phase of Haseltine’s art to evidence the presence of human intervention in nature through contemporary inscriptions placed into ancient petroglyph sites. To facilitate an appreciation of the ‘writings on the walls’, Haseltine photographed these inscriptions carved into these respective petroglyph dwellings which sheltered American Aboriginals.
The YELLOW and COPPER WORKS include no implied narrative sequences. The fact that both sets explore the external and internal possibilities afforded by wilderness formations and human-constructed sites (without the intrusion of montage motifs) is a move towards further simplicity. Haseltine’s newly-favored technique of using un-reversed and reversed photo-vignettes take on startling appearances, in contrast, and endows her 2000-2003 photo-constructions with a higher level of originality and complexity.

In YELLOW, the end products of such manipulations are spire-like, totemic protrusions that encourage the belief that these are objects crafted by human beings for religious or ritual purposes like those that took place at Stone Henge. The ‘distorted’ repetitions communicate the impression that people built and carved the rhythmic vaults on which ancient pictograms and modern bits of graffiti have been painted. In a few cases, distorted conjoined motifs take on the look of body parts, body mites as viewed under an electron microscope and even layers of body fat. In many instances, Haseltine’s photographic ‘mirroring manipulations’ produce results reminiscent of Max Ernst’s ‘fold-over’ landscapes and the (by-accident) beauty of Rorschach tests.

Because none of these works bear individual titles, the spectator is invited, as before, to bring personal memories and experiences to the act of interpretation. Those who know the terrains that are reconstructed in YELLOW and COPPER will take pleasure in recognizing the manner in which the artist has transformed (or combined) expanded (or abbreviated) the specifics of many locations to make entirely novel sites. An enriched response may also come through a viewer’s ability to perceive how the structures that Haseltine formed from photographs taken in North America, reverberate with Hindu stupas in many parts of India; the sprawling ruins of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat; famous Buddhist temples in Thailand and the magnificent Mesoamerica Mayan and Aztec pyramids. For others, some images will recall human and dinosaur bones, the act of intercourse and childbirth and symbols whose shapes are reminiscent of essential procreative and nurturing parts—phallus, vulva, breast and belly—that were monumentalized and worshipped in ancient religions.

Different physical locations determined the specific content of these related groups of photo-based art. The YELLOW WORKS were derived from b/w images taken at Flaming Gorge, Colorado and Death Valley California. The COPPER sequence resulted from trips to the Arizona desert and the Palatki Red Cliffs in Sedona, Arizona.

In Haseltine’s words, the YELLOW WORKS “explores new symmetries”. The colour yellow is associated with irradiating powers of light. This yellow hue was chosen because, it serves to illuminate and heal. In crafting the symmetry and balance of the landscapes in these photographs, the artist hoped to produce within herself, a similar equilibrium.

In moving through such places as in the YELLOW and COPPER WORKS, the artist was able to sense and become in tune with the mythology of the locations. She began to ask herself  “When do we violate existing historical boundaries? Are we transgressing when we construct our own sacred space in an already existing one?  Why am I drawn to his sacred charge? 

URBAN PETROGLYPHS  2003-2006  In this group of images ‘black and white’ photo-constructions are derived from photographs taken of the calligraphy left by street painters and spray gun artists. The earliest images in this photo-investigation were based on the contemporary ‘pictograyphs’ the artist discovered painted on the concrete structures of skateboard parks, road underpasses, and the sides of buildings in BC and Alberta. In this on-going series, the devil-may-care athletic feats of the skate-boarders, is celebrated. Graphic explosions similar to those Haseltine’s art depicts can be found in every city environment where ‘Boarders’ are omnipresent and are reasons why the works in this sequence have such resonance with and relevance for the viewer.

Haseltine articulates her understanding of the connection between the need of the people in America’s early history to etch or paint medicine wheels into a petroglyph sites that confirmed presence and beliefs. Also, the urban resident’s impulse to incise initials and secret dialogue into cement connotes a similar need. This insight undoubtedly led Haseltine to find ways of presenting to viewers her own versions of the mysterious, unreadable writings and symbols which define the turfs and signify the presence of individuals and groups in various ‘Hoods’ and parks, a presence similar to that of historic times. Two of the very few words that can be deciphered in the URBAN PETROGLYPH suite—“Anka’s territ”. These urban pictographs are the sacred texts of today’s youth written in a cabalistic language understood only by the initiates—as foreign to many would-be ‘readers’ as the Arabic script of a rare, illuminated Q’ran; the ancient Hebrew letters of the Book of Genesis or the graceful Hindi lines of the Kama Sutra.

To further magnify the mystery of the messages the artist uses a new technique. Two mirroring splits, one vertical and one horizontal, combine in a cruciform to construct baffling images that occasionally (and aptly) resemble skateboards, ‘African’ totemic figures, the dizzying dazzle of kaleidoscope-like patterns. These manipulated works also incorporate eerie presences that recall such personifications of evil as Darth Vader or holy seraphs with four wings that fan so rapidly that they turn their markings into a blur. In one of them a ‘river of electricity’ has been constructed and a ‘goth’ star on the left is not echoed on the right by a similar symbol as the viewer would expect in an image that is otherwise bilaterally symmetrical.

The four, time-lapse, split image renditions of ‘boarders’ soaring in death-defying leaps are all spectacular but the most amazing is the image in which a four-way split of the same photo-source turns the flier into a pinwheel. Haseltine met the subjects of these spectacular feats while she was photographing their messages on the ramps.

The artist depended on the digital process to remove vertical splits in her photographs. She has become evermore confident and playful in her manipulations of un-reversed and reversed negatives, building other worlds based on the evidence she finds in this world.

Haseltine shifts her processing technique in this body of work by returning to photographic paper but in particular high gloss metallic photo paper which aptly portrays the urban subject. She continues to use photographic paper in her series following in the JADE WORKS.

JADE WORKS 2009-2011  In the Artist’s Statement of May 2011, Haseltine’s brief analysis of how the Jade Works were developing and how they were different from the works that preceded them affords a starting point for an appreciation of the series’ aesthetic.

The Jade Works prove that Haseltine has moved forward intelligently. She is now finally at one with her subject of choice as she always desired to be. She brings to the construction of individual images everything she has learned about a digital application of colour in combination with analogue b/w film since 2003.

Jade Works also brings each subject close enough for minute consideration, although that does not mean the ‘decoding’ is straightforward. The Shamanistic imagery in the series now features self-created, original pictograms (rather than manipulated tags, drawings or other found objects) as was the case, in the Urban Petroglyphs suite.

I begin with my aesthetic response with a comment on the obvious—the ‘green-ness’ which is as pre-eminent as Blue, Yellow, Copper and Gray colours occurring in previous series. Individual pieces, in general, attest to the power of the jade-green of precious jewels, and the colour’s association with leafy bowers and tranquil pools. For me, these photographs carry with them the subliminal scents of mint, cilantro, freshly cut grass and fast-running rush fringed rivers. Many convey a sense of wind rushing over landscape and water. The sacred breath of insight and conscience (that has surged up from within the artist) is manifested in the forms of various self-portraits that preside over and are part of every piece.

Sections within particular works capture the essence of wind, water and rock, the birthing places of faeries, sprites and gnomes. But even at the outset of this group of images, these magic places are inexplicable. For example, in one I believe I see a pile of antlers (a vignette that hearkens back to the Blue Works) while in the other half there is rushing water. As in the majority of the Jade works that follow, an apparition of the artist brooding over the scene her shadow unites the two parts indicating that they are of the same mind and the same soul.

The bilateral and trilateral splits in some of the pieces carry forward compositional habits from previous series but the source of what is conjoined in a four-part extension is often unidentifiable. The marriage of liquid to solid, of swirling to still, is frequent. These unions suggest violent forces of geologic creation, the improbable magic of alchemy and the pleasant discovery of a nugget while panning for gold.

A hand-painted fish symbol – with its upper body missing, in another one, one could perhaps see the photographer’s head appearing to be resurfacing from a turbulent whirlpool, a tiny God-like being in a triangle is embedded in the lower part of a photo-construction. In a fantastic, phantasmagorical jade ‘portrait’ with a rectangle window cut out of its torso while proceeding down the tree-lined rural road and hen she projects an eerie allusion of a beady-eyed guardian of the natural world who wears a double-fish breastplate.