Skip to main content
visual arts

Pestilence, war, famine, and death.

No, those are not my nicknames for the four federal leaders working the barbecue circuit (my pet names for that gang are unprintable). Rather, as those of you hotly anticipating the Rapture know, pestilence et al. are the disasters carried by four magical horses during the End Times. Christians, they sure can bring the noise.

But what if the horses themselves resembled My Little Pony toys more than mighty Pegasus - baby-faced Shetlands, not towering Clydesdales?

According to multimedia artist Mary Ann Barkhouse's new installation, The Reins of Chaos, if we gelded the mythology, so to speak, brought it down to a more manageable heft and scale, we'd have to set aside the fantastical spectacle of the End Times story and start paying attention to the obvious fact that, ecologically and socially, the planet is already well past its due date. By reducing the biblical allusions to kiddie size, Barkhouse focuses attention away from the fairy tale and back onto the nasty reality.

Comprised of four beautifully restored mechanical bouncy horses, the kind that used to be parked outside of grocery stores, complete with real leather saddles and fully functioning gyros (and, yes, kids and adults are free to ride the horses, for a quarter a ride), The Reins of Chaos looks, at first, like not much more than a momentary amusement. The monochromatic horses (black, white, tan, and milk chocolate) sport new, lustrous paint jobs, and the saddles are waxed and polished to their county-fair best. No bigger than rocking chairs, these pretty ponies could barely trumpet closing time at a mall, let alone the Apocalypse.

On the walls behind each horse, however, clues and menacing symbols wait and warn, in the form of luxurious, silken textile banners that have been perversely ornamented with intentionally rough, hand-drawn heraldic crests. Barkhouse is being a bit sneaky here - she must know that the majority of visitors will simply play with the horse rides and not look too closely at the banners and the signs found in each crest. And isn't that exactly how disasters start, when people overlook the details?

The black horse's banner carries a crest decorated with pelicans, a walrus and, horribly topical, an oil drill. The chocolate horse's crest is inhabited by bats and a vulture. The tan horse is paired with a crest housing a morose beaver and a wolf-like creature wielding a chainsaw. The white horse fronts a crest depicting two fish (a bass and a trout, I guessed) over whom stands a mer-lion about to rip open another fish with its claws. Clearly, this carnival is run by goths.

Note also how the crests are affixed to the banners - with safety pins, those archetypal punk rock accessories. By juxtaposing cheap cloth crests against shimmering bolts of expensive fabric, Barkhouse makes a deliciously anarchic gesture, a single-finger salute. The banner-crest combos reminded me of protest signs, or of student knapsacks smothered in patches.

Throughout The Reins of Chaos, Barkhouse skilfully plays textures and veneers against each other; creating a subtle dialogue between the smooth and the coarse - and thus, by extension, between the glittering surfaces manufactured by our luxury- and amusement-obsessed culture and the tattered and scarred landscapes said manufacturing leaves behind. For pennies a ride, Barkhouse warns us, we incur costs that last forever. We are mindlessly Jolly Jumper-ing our way to a man-made end time.

A side note: The Reins of Chaos is related to a series of Barkhouse installations that situate animal sculptures in disjointed, otherworldly domestic settings. Her last touring exhibition, Boreal Baroque, tucked rabbits, owls and other woodland creatures into tidy, chintz-draped parlours. One can't help wondering why or how these powerful and charming works were overlooked by Adaptation: Between Species, the Power Plant's new, and very large, humans-meet-animals show. Surely one Barkhouse work is worth any two European videos?

The Reins of Chaos continues at the Latcham Gallery in Stouffville, Ont., until July 17.

Interact with The Globe