Artwork by Gathie Falk,  Men’s Right Boot

Gathie Falk
Men’s Right Boot

ceramic sculpture; condition noted
7 x 11.75 x 4.25 ins ( 17.8 x 29.8 x 10.8 cms ) ( overall subject )

Auction Estimate: $5,000.00$3,000.00 - $5,000.00

Price Realized $4,720.00
Sale date: May 29th 2018

Provenance:
Acquired directly from artist
By descent to present Private Collection, Toronto
Literature:
Gathie Falk and Robin Laurence, Apples, etc.: An Artist’s Memoir, Vancouver, 2018, pages 99-103
While walking past a window display of a shoe store on Fraser Street in Vancouver, Gathie Falk was immediately inspired to create her well-known “Bootcases” series. Shelves lined with men’s boots and shoes reminded the artist of “their homely power, their ability to symbolize human presence and also human enterprise—tasks undertaken, distances walked—in an unpretentious way.” The artist had used a pair of black zippered boots purchased by friend, Tom Graff, to model the first nine boots. While working through the process, the artist morphed into a cobbler of sorts, cutting and shaping the soles and uppers of the boots while still wearing the hat of sculptor while carefully molding the clay into realistic worn-looking forms.

The artist remarks on this series:
“For the ‘Bootcases’, I did not want to make pairs either. I established the theme of single right men’s shoes and boots, which I mounted on shelves in glass-fronted cases. With the inside of the shoe facing outward. The inside, with its zippers and seams, is the emotional side of the shoe. The outside, which is displayed in shop windows, is the public and decorative side. The shoes in style them had thick platform soles and big clunky heels. I wanted classic shoes, styles that would endure through time when the trendy ones flopped.”

Glazed in deep oxblood red, the light creases of wear and the softening of the ankle shaft give the sculpture a realistic worn quality, a sort of proletariat reference on the wear and tear on the boot and the life of the wearer.

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Gathie Falk
(1928)

Born in Alexander, Manitoba, at the age of 13 she was picked from her class to take art lessons in downtown Winnipeg. She studied for a degree in education at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, intermittently (1955-64); studied art at UBC with J.A.S. MacDonald (1957-58), Lawren P. Harris, Jaques de Tonnancour (1959) and Glen Lewis (1964-67). In 1968, she participated in Deborah Hay’s performance workshop at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She taught at the UBC (1970-71) (1975-77). In her art, Falk produced sculpture, painting, and drawings with graphite on paper. Discussing her work, John Bentley Mays noted in 1990, “It was not until 1985, and retrospective of her sculptures, installations and paintings at the VAG, that the undertow of seriousness in Falk’s display of charm and irony was acknowledged.”

In a seminal essay written for that show’s catalogue, Vancouver curator Scott Watson noted the common image of Falk as ‘a surrealist of good vibes – a funky, bizarre artist for whom play and the recreation of her childhood are her most serious concerns. Much of her popularity is based on the mistaken idea that she is a master of whimsy.’ This view, Scott suggests, diminishes the work by ignoring its ‘darker aspect’ – ‘the chaos of many compositions and the emphasis on organic processes of decay and regeneration…the many metaphorical allusions to death.’ This fecund darkness is, in turn, grounded in the artist’s Mennonite Christianity, to which she was (and is) devoted. If there is darkness in her work, says Watson, it is ‘the sign of a fallen work which is in exile from paradise. But Falk’s is also a world in which attentiveness is a prelude to redemption.’…. Falk’s simple, slow combination of everyday actions…. owe much to avant-garde performance in its time – the logic breaking music of John Cage, for instance, and the conceptual dance of Deborah Hay, and the mixed-media experimentalism that was simply in the North American air some 20 years ago. Falk used all the tools and timber in that avant-garde inventory, but she used them to build small utopias of the spirit in the modern wasteland.”

Literature Source:
"A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, Volume 1: A-F, 5th Edition, Revised and Expanded", compiled by Colin S. MacDonald, Canadian Paperbacks Publishing Ltd, Ottawa, 1997