DARK MATTERS TO THIS TORONTO-BASED ARTIST
Story by Odessa Paloma Parker
For someone who professes to have still not perfected her technique, artist Adrienne Kammerer’s enticing world of dark entities and intriguing figures are truly magnetic in their draw.
Kammerer groomed her talent while working at Badlands Vintage; with long pauses between shoppers entering the store, she was able to hone the artistic ambition she admits was always within, just not yet tapped. “My interests have always been artistic, but directionless…” Kammerer admits. “I liked artistic things but never found anything that I really enjoyed doing.”
Now, her work is featured in the pages of The Walrus, and interest in her often macabre images is increasing. After coming to Toronto from her hometown of Burlington and briefly studying Graphic Design at George Brown, she dabbled in screen-printing and video editing before settling into creating the slightly sinister scenes done in graphite that she’s known for.
From mulleted families to grim figures of the distant past, Kammerer’s subjects are pieced together from images she finds, primarily on the internet, as she has not studied life drawing or any formal artistic techniques. She recalls that her first works were based on images from the website Awkward Family Photos, and the scope grew from there. Though sometimes her process involves finessing – “It’s about becoming more observant…so the drawings become more realistic,” she says of her continuing dedication to refining her work – ultimately what’s rendered casts an eerie spell on the viewer, not least because one point of reference that Kammerer nods to is the occult.
Part of the trio of artists involved in Narwhal Art Projects’ current exhibition, Three Knocks, Kammerer’s pieces like “Memento Mori” depict primly dressed children bearing arcane tools, books with scripture, and a devious look in their eye. Her preferred medium of graphite lends a dramatic, antique quality to the images – a quality the work of her fellow exhibiting artists Jamiyla Lowe and Katy Horan also possesses. Lowe is also Kammerer’s roommate (they united over their shared interest in screen-printing after meeting through a mutual friend); Kammerer notes that their work is often shown together because “[it’s] set in the past, it’s dark but still kind of funny.”
Another Toronto art scene kinship that Kammerer feels is with the members of Team Macho, who were also working with screen-printing techniques when she met them. She notes that Lauchie Reid and Stephen Appleby-Barr, two members of Macho, were encouraging and helped nurture her fledgling attempts at drawing.
When looking at Kammerer’s work, it would be hard to imagine a time when her talented wasn’t completely self-possessed; to go back through her family’s history, you’d find a great-gandfather in Vienna, an architect and painter who “studied under Otto Wagner”, and whose large-scale landscapes and portraits hung in the family home to be sub-consciously absorbed and admired by a young Adrienne. “Those would probably be my first exposure to art,” she says of his work.
Perhaps it’s this lineage of artistry that pre-disposed her to the practice, and there were signs in youth that expression through drawing could well lead to Kammerer’s later success. She says that in grade school, she drew pictures of sad dinosaurs and unicorns behind bars to express her frustrations. From there to “killing time” with her craft whiling away the hours at a vintage store, to showing her work at one of Toronto’s most popular galleries, the trajectory has perhaps been slow coming but shows no signs it wasn’t the path she was meant to take.
Check out Adrienne’s work at Three Knocks, Narwhal Art Projects, 680 Queen Street West, Toronto
