Emptiness is the nature of all things.

I first met artist Brenda Draney at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2010. My initial impression of her paintings was that they were not fully realized, with their sketchily defined vignettes floating like islands in a sea of undifferentiated canvas. There was, however, a quality about them that expressed her ambition to tap into what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described as “the malaise of the society in which we live.” Like Lacan’s definition of psychoanalysis, Draney’s artistic practice is concerned with “whatever is not going right,” and it is “prone to all sorts of ambiguities.” I realize now that the seemingly incomplete character of her paintings for the sake of an uncertain status is precisely the point.

Draney paints with a broad brushstroke, generating a formal flatness of image, but this lack of detail transmits the idea of a depth that cannot be known. Her paintings are fraught with an ambiguity regarding the said and the unsaid. They reveal as much as they hide, like a shadow play that comes in and out of visibility. Her scenarios often portray individuals alone or in small groups, while the titles of the works provide little contextualization: Tent, 2012, and Vacuum, 2019, refer only to the objects pictured, and figures are identified, if at all, by their first names only (Betty, 2012, and Carrie, 2019).

Draney’s vignettes overflow with possible narratives that hemorrhage into the empty spaces of her canvases, calling attention to the dissipative nature of existential nothingness. Depicted is a disconsolate world, cheerless and banal, as though to underline the Buddhist sutra that “emptiness is the nature of all things.”  In Buddhism, emptiness is a practice of body and mind to achieve full consciousness, but in Draney’s paintings, emptiness speaks of the expunging of individual will from consciousness in a soul-destroying world. The open casket funeral in Wake, 2019, positions the deceased as the most wholly rendered figure in the composition. To his left hovers a barely demarcated trio of mourners. Next to the casket is a figure with a hockey stick, localizing the scene as Canadian. The rest of the painting’s surface is blank. Wake operates to an opposite effect to  French painter Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans, 1849–50, where a surfeit of details culminates around a burial hole in which no body is visible.

Reviewers of Draney’s work have often written about  how her vignettes are derived from memories. Indeed, she has talked about how “there is usually a memory as a starting point.” However, this is insufficient  to the visual effect of the vignettes, which appear unfixed, even to the canvases themselves. This floating quality articulates a sense of existence on the periphery of the elaborate system of power and privilege called society. In Rest, 2021, a barely delineated figure lies on a worn-out sofa. Next to the sofa is an old chair. The figure merges, in colour and line, with the contours of the sofa. The image is far from languorous with its shock of jagged lines, fecal-brown colour, and figure]  emptied of form. Unlike Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, ca. 1799, Draney’s figure reveals no dreams, just rest for the basic function of getting to the next day. As such, Rest reveals a deep truth about the moneyed economy and the wreckage it bears on the most vulnerable bodies.

The figure in Rest embodies a persistent allegory running through all of Draney’s work. It is the allegory of a racialized coloniality that has continued over generations of time and continues to press down on those deemed subalterns. In this sense, her work calls up Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s idea of “contemporariness,” a form of deeper consciousness of existence within the same time that can often produce insights about the world that are profoundly discomforting. As Agamben explains,

Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship to one’s time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it.

It is their “contemporariness” that gives Draney’s works a sense of speaking truth to power regarding the problem of individual and collective marginalization. Her paintings evoke an oneiric quality, but not in the enchanting sense of an indelible dream. Rather, they are like uncertain memories that oscillate between the will to remember and the will to forget. Their uncertain quality is enhanced by  recurring unpainted areas, which are symbolically important because they represent a space free from codes of the prevailing social order. They also express the notion that a more harmonious world is not possible to articulate. In art, there are many examples of emptiness expressing a space of symbolic potentiality. For example, in French painter Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, 1793, the entire top half of the painting is a green monochrome, the greenness charged with Marat’s post-monarchic ideals. In The Righteous, 2010,Draney depicts only the face, arms, and legs of a seated male figure, while the rest of the canvas is left unpainted. The extensive areas of unpainted surface function like monochromatic space, much like the top half of David’s Marat, from which resides a multiplicity of possible meanings.

Draney’s floating and fragmentary vignettes call up German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s concept of “remembrance,” rooted in the phenomenon of blushing, a fragment of emotion that can issue suddenly from a sense of shame or anger, but that can also relapse suddenly back into the realm of a vast social sphere of alienated existence. Like the Arcades Project,  Benjamin’s incomplete collection of writings, Draney’s patchwork of imagery is like assembling fragments imbued with transience, or like amorphous fragments that articulate the cruelty of a world disconnected from the desires of people. Yet, it is this cruelty that becomes the creative process for Draney. It is a cruelty that is at once shameful and engendering of shame, for according to Benjamin, claims of the hubristic triumph of Capitalism over Nature is annihilated in the blushing of shame.

Because the red of blushing does not stain the skin neither inner discord nor inner disintegration appear on the surface of it.  This blushing conveys nothing at all of the interior. Were it to do so, this would be enough to induce a new shame again: that of discovering humanity in a frail soul. Instead—as is actually the case—in blushing all reasons for shame, everything internal, is extinguished. The redness of shame does not well up out of the interior (and that ascending redness of shame, of which one occasionally speaks, is not the thing what shames), rather, the redness of shame is poured over the ashamed person from outside, from above; and just as it expunges his disgrace, so does it withdraw him from disgracefulness. For in the darkened reddening that shame pours over him he is withdrawn from the gazes of people, as if under a veil. Whoever is ashamed sees nothing, and he alone is also not seen.

The “incompleteness” of Draney’s paintings has the effect of a blush, like the slight pink stain on the side of the face portrayed in The Righteous. Her vignettes function like stains in the way that the depicted elements are loosely patched together. The term “stain” is a shortening of “distain,” from the Old French desteindre for “tinge with a color different from the natural one.” The noun was first recorded in the mid-sixteenth century in the sense of “defilement” and “disgrace.” French philosopher Georges Bataille saw stains as sites of liberation precisely because of their power to defile and convolute all fixed historical and methodological disciplines and discursive boundaries.  Stains exude an overflowing violent potential because they are like the marks left by the discharge of feces, marks that are usually suppressed from acknowledgement yet must be confronted and embraced to be free from the symbolic order. According to Bataille, a stain is always approximate to violence and eroticism, the latter characterized by an eschatological sensuality that risks the overflowing of social taboos. Draney’s paintings, with their murky islands of delineation, flutter between overflow and containment. They hover between the dichotomies of presence and absence, legibility and hiddenness, form and shapelessness, and remembrance and forgetting. Like a Bataillean stain, Draney’s vignettes signify the illicit trace of something real that is difficult to remove unless accepted for what it is. The stains of oppression, violence, and trauma permeate all of Draney’s work. In Repose, 2013, the torso of a figure [JS15] is demarcated by a smear of red paint that looks like a thick dollop of blood. A second rendering of her head appears in spectral form above her body.

Draney paints a daily stream of life marked by her formation in Slave Lake, located in northern Alberta. Her images are like whirlpools of uncertainty, and this uncertainty belies the very palpable conditions of existences of those portrayed. In Bear Trails, 2022, a group of figures sit in the woods. The painting makes explicit reference to French painter Édouard Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, 1863, but the reference is a negation. Draney’s group is opposite facing to Manet, and there is anxiety in the mien of the well-defined face of the lone woman. The group sits in a terrain vaguely reminiscent of the interstices of a partially cleared forest. It is not a bucolic image. Moreover, Draney’s title suggests not just danger but a fraught relationship between First Nations People and nature perpetrated by colonial genocide.

The banality Draney depicts is not merely the banalness of ordinary everydayness. She depicts the banality of lives shackled by the rules of capital, by social immobility, and by racialized othering. It is the banality of lives shaped by perpetual and reinforcing administrative and cultural violence. When I speak about banality, I am not referring to the ennui of middle-class living. I am not speaking about Madame Bovary or Walter Mitty. I am speaking about the banality of poverty, the dullness of marginalization, and the claustrophobia of racism, especially of Canada’s most oppressed peoples. Poverty, marginalization, and racism are so everyday that they are often barely noticed.

I sense that Draney is not interested in giving voice to the marginalized by reducing the narrative to simply that of generational trauma, which often reifies the narrative of dependency and helplessness. Rather, she is interested in grappling with the ways that people live in the face of generational hegemonic oppression. Her work does not gratify with the possibility of escape from an inhumane system. There is no redemptive pathway for her subjects to build wholeness from the world in which they are immersed. They are simply present in the world. To represent a subject in its entirety runs the risk of reducing it to a kind of cliché, the ultimate signifier of the banal. This is why the abstract, the blank, that which is unrepresented, is so important in Draney’s work. The blank signifies the unfulfillment of a truly unequal and unjust society.