A Celebration of Quiet and Small: Organic Resilience in the Work of Andrew Dadson

Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar wrote that “nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small).”​​¹

Andrew Dadson’s latest body of work casts itself in a space between the infinitely large and the infinitely small and serves as a reminder of the redemptive power of scale in our contemporary moment.

On a commercial street in Kitsilano, six blocks up from the beach, is a vacant lot slated for residential development. Its fenced perimeter and barren clearing provide a momentary gap in the street side vista of storefronts on West Fourth Avenue. Though the gap is an exception in the otherwise bustling neighbourhood, it represents something that resonates deeply with the history of this area—the parcelling of land, the drawing of a line.

West Fourth Avenue runs perpendicular to the south shores of Vancouver. These shores were once the Sen̓áḵw village inhabited by Indigenous Squamish peoples. The village was plotted out as a reserve for First Nation peoples shortly after the passing of the Indian Act in 1876. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, sections of the land were seized by the government for railway purposes, and by 1913 the provincial government forced the relocation of all native peoples at this site to other communities across the lower mainland. 

Since the 1920s, West Fourth Avenue has been zoned as a place of business; retailers and restaurants sit side-by-side for eleven blocks before petering out into residential buildings. Over the years, gentrification of the neighbourhood and inflation of rental prices has pushed the smaller, locally owned businesses out as the big brands move in. Count the rings of a tree trunk to tell its age; count the number of buildings from a Lululemon Athletica to get your eviction deadline. 

During the summer of 2019, Dadson trespassed on this vacant lot on West Fourth Avenue. He looked past the terrain of broken cement and littered garbage to find patches of wildflowers, marking them into sections no bigger than 6 x 12 inches. He mixed organic brews of cochineal, ochre, and indigo under a summer sun. Then, he used an airbrush to paint clusters of black medic, foxtail barley, and creeping thistle, and he photographed them. 

Later, he examined these site-specific paintings on a screen in their digital form. He enlarged them and built up multiple focus depths to enhance the clarity of the painted mass. These images were then printed onto paper, backed onto Dibond, and framed in wood and glass. When displayed in this final form, they engulf the viewer in a human scale of 6 x 4 feet. 

Dadson will tell you these works are foremost paintings. The sweeping cross-section of plant strands become the brushstrokes, the hand of the painter traceable in the rectangular spray of pigment. But these are also photographs, and their existence as such binds them to a process of abstraction. It begins with the abstraction of a moment to an image. 

Abstraction is both the language of photography and the language of global capitalism. Sometimes we confuse abstraction with extraction when thinking about capitalism. Both feature a process of removal, the taking away of something. Extraction, while turning the origin into a commodity through a process of separation, depends on keeping the origin somewhat intact in order to produce the commodifiable iteration. There is no gasoline, kerosene, or asphalt without the origin of petroleum. Abstraction, however, fundamentally shifts or re-orders meaning so that the origin can never quite remain the same. In this sense, it is both a process of taking away and one of building up, a layering of new meaning.

Abstraction has helped capitalism reach its accelerated contemporary force and, in particular, it has done so through the abstraction of scale. Without fragmentation on an individual level, without the alienation of individuals through labour, war, and economy, we would not have the sweeping global connectivity of the 21^st century.

Dadson’s new series may stem from a painterly motive (mark-making), but in a gallery they operate as photographic objects. This is clear in their activation of abstraction. They document a process of taking away, and they also show a simultaneous inversion and amplification of scale and depth—the blowing-up of the field, the flattening of the plane. 

The redemptive quality to the works is their ability to use this abstraction to re-order meaning rather than re-assert the capitalist structures implicit in the original site, the vacant lot. Rather than affirming the designation of an empty, cleared, stagnant zone—a zone of destruction in the name of construction—these images are instead an acknowledgement and a celebration of quiet and small gestures of resistance. They document the minute forms of organic resilience all around us, and in doing so, they shift the index to a deeper connection with time, a connection that references these plants as signifiers of medicine, salves, and sustenance.

In Black Medic (Medicago lupulina) Blue, a patch of plant life is dusted in a pastel pigment. The colour is hard to describe, but it carries something like the fragility of robin’s eggs or bluebells in bloom. This is distinctly not the blue of Matisse or Yves Klein, nor is it the pop blue of Warhol’s Blue Jackie or the rich cerulean blues of Helen Frankenthaler. It is not a consumer ready-made colour but a vibrantly textured organic colour, derived from its mixture of indigo with water, casein, chalk, limestone, and earth pigments. There is a tactile sense to the organic vibrancy, a softness that invites a sense of falling in as if you could reach a hand inquisitively into the centre of the spongy blue mass and become embraced.

These sensations are marked in stark comparison to a smaller work from the series, Creeping Thistle (Cirsium arvense) Black, which measures 2 square feet. Two sharp stems of thistles stand in the foreground, covered entirely in a black hue. Behind them is a blurred background of budding greens with spots of pink, identifiable as the flower heads of red clover.

This piece stands out as being significantly smaller in scale, but it is also the only work that delineates a depth of focus between background and foreground. The sharpness of the black thistle emphasizes the texture of its barbed leaves, which jut out like tiny clusters of folded paper cranes. There is an ominous mood to this image, furthered by its contrast to the soft pastels of the others. Where those images invoke softness, this image has a tangible prickle, and one imagines the dry crunch of the plant snapping underfoot. 

This aversion may be a gut reaction to seeing nature cast in black, like the uncanny images of oil-slicked sea birds or charred tree stumps. And yet, there is a redemptive quality to the blurred background of vibrant red clover flower heads. Red clover grows to rejuvenate the soil through nutrients that can make way for other species to grow. 

In Creeping Thistle (Cirsium arvense) Black, this push and pull between foreground and background is an echo of the larger theme of the exhibition: the slippage between the connotation of a weed or a wildflower. Weed is a word for unwanted plant life, and as such, the designation of the term is subjective. It is associated with plants that grow aggressively to encroach upon manicured property, or controlled agriculture. Wildflowers are resilient, they refer to many species, and they provide sustenance to pollinators to create an intrinsic step in the chain of fertilization of fruit and seeds. Weeds grow in vacant lots, and so do wildflowers. 

Dadson situates this series as an extension of his earlier paintings that he began in 2003. These involved Dadson painting local Vancouver lawns into a rectangle of flat black paint, and photographing them from above. Dadson was thinking through a cynicism toward the idea of the lawn as ownership, as well as the inherently painterly enquiries of mark-making, temporality, and the relationship between the field and the frame. 

These ideas extend into Dadson’s latest body of work, but what is new here is an implicit tension that emanates from two different kinds of intervention at play. The first is the mark-making of a painter, and the second is the action of an activist. To intervene through mark-making as a painter is connected to a history of humanist assertion of authorship—presence through insertion. To intervene as activism is to insert oneself as an interruption, an acknowledgement of the greater collective need beyond the individual. This is a tension that doesn’t necessarily need resolution, and that gives this series a compelling strength and honesty. In a time when we constantly question how to make individual changes for greater good, there is something meaningful in the importance of scale within Dadson’s own gesture. A celebration of the small, quiet, and slow amidst the big, loud, and fast.

Ten blocks from the vacant lot in the same neighbourhood of Kitsilano, a small group of activists started to gather during the 1970s. They would meet in the back room of a storefront on Cypress and West Broadway and from this small space they would talk about big problems and big ideas. They had embarked on an “intervention” in 1971, on a fishing vessel that sailed from Vancouver to a site of US Nuclear testing in Alaska. Their small boat was called Greenpeace, and that’s what they would call themselves, too. From this small group and this small intervention grew a non-governmental organization with offices in over fifty-five countries. Like the black medic, foxtail barley, and creeping thistle, they cast themselves in the physics of the infinitely small to take on the infinitely large. The question is, where will you cast yourself? 

April Thompson is a writer and curator currently based in Vancouver. Her practice is guided by critical investigations of photography and the moving image, spatial politics, and new media.

1. Julio Cortázar, Around the day in eighty worlds, trans. Thomas Christensen (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 47.

This article is published in issue 37.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue