The Other Side of the Vent by Peter Kohut recently closed at Karsh-Masson Gallery in Ottawa, ON. Kohut, a 2021 graduate of the Master’s of Fine Arts program at the University of Ottawa, has been using paint steeped in formal and temporal concerns to address the slow, trickling movement of the everyday inner world of the artist. Kohut is transfixed by repetition and how the banal opens the mind to self-contemplation. The Other Side of the Vent presented a series of eighteen 24 x 18 inch oil pastels on paper developed in the Spring and Summer of 2020, and one large scale oil painting created this year, all exploring the veil-like form of an air vent in Kohut’s home.

My first impression of the exhibition title, before having seen the works themselves, was two-fold. The more obvious connotation was of the passage from one space to another; the vent acting as a form of barrier or screen to filter what passes through. On the other hand, ‘to vent’ — to release the floodgates of one's true inner feelings in order to quell some inner turmoil — suggests the removal of any barrier or filter. To be on the other side of this release, within your own body or as the receiving party, might situate you knee-deep in a deluge of emotions; the relative calm after the storm, a still lake that takes wading through in order to process the transition from ‘before’ to ‘now’.

Entering the gallery, I was greeted by a horizontal procession of four vents, framed in silver. Each of these vents is a vertical rectangle of oil pastel, roughly 14 inches tall by 8 inches wide, centrally isolated on a white sheet of  24 x 18 inch paper. These are the most richly coloured of the oil pastels in the show, their palettes deeply saturated in dark blue-blacks and warm and cool greys with vertical lines of tangerine-pink, quinacridone, and middle-yellow. Their unanchored forms levitate in void space, save for the subtle remnant smudges and spatters from the artist's process populating the white expanses around them. Long vertical scrapes push back multiple layers of pastel to reveal lines of luminous base colours. The pulled lines run upwards and downwards suspended in a field of tinted grey or black. The energy of their vertical motion varies from hesitantly fragmented to deliberate, with their vertical weight balancing on a vibrating precipice; pulled neither directly skyward nor wholly to the ground. With each piece the defining characteristics of the vent sharpen or fall away in various proportions, leaving the form of the vent itself floating in ambiguity. Kohut asks us to focus instead on subtle shifts of colour and line. 

Each change in palette and abstraction defines the vent anew, here it becomes blinds obstructing a window shimmering in a darkened room, there it is soil scratched away to unearth an ethereal light. The repetition of form and changes in palettes across these four works suggest we are staring at the same object or setting as it transitions through time and emotive meaning. Kohut’s intention in recording time is reinforced by his titles which read left to right as Late Summer Night 01, Late Summer Afternoon 01, Late Summer Night 02, and Late Summer Afternoon 02.

Beyond the main wall, the quiet curation of the space makes the gallery feel desolate and insular. I could hear a fan clanking repetitively in the space, intentional or not, it complimented the resonant visual hum of the paintings. I could imagine lying on the floor staring up at a ceiling vent in the mid-Summer heat listening to the trill of cicadas.

The remaining  fourteen oil pastels were unframed, grouped vertical and horizontal in threes and fours, and mounted with magnets spanning the central walls. This minimalist display expressed a bare honesty, as though Kohut had just now pulled them from his studio drawer allowing us a glimpse into a personal project. The angling of the walls separated the groupings into units of time - different mindsets - dictated by their palettes and therefore mood in soft pastel cerulean blues, yellow ochres, nickel yellows, and violets. Kohut also uses double entendres in his titles to tether his surroundings with emotions, such as  ‘Blue Evening’ ; ‘blue’ clearly functioning here as a reference to atmospheric light but also melancholy. 

The dimly lit outer walls of the gallery space remained empty. Instead I was drawn into a cyclical, inward contemplation of the works, and a keen awareness of being confined in this central space. What struck me about the exhibition as a whole was the underlying undulations of loneliness, anxiety,  sadness, and the calm of stagnation amidst the mundanity of repetition. Kohut pulls out the complexity within the experience of monotony revealing it as anything but. His crafting of light and form, and the works layout in the space made these emotive readings a gradual accumulation rather than an overwhelming wave. He gives us the time and space to contemplate the artist's shifting psychological landscape amidst pandemic life; a tumultuous daily rearrangement of emotions.

Just as repeating a word begins to dissolve its meaning into sounds alone, Kohut reiterates to open our minds to readings beyond the obvious. The object loses importance — was perhaps never important to begin with — and simply becomes  a vehicle for meditation. Instead, colour, movement and light guide us into the psychogeography of isolation. Even as Kohut introduces distinct features of the vent’s structure, such as a rectangular outer frame in Blue Afternoon 02, the vent’s identity has already transitioned into a chimera of object-environment-metaphor through the process of repetition.

The transformation of the vent continues as you round the back wall to face the singular oil painting in the exhibition. Completed this year and carrying the title of the show itself, The Other Side of the Vent is a striking visual contrast to the rest of the works in both size, hue and saturation. Central on the 70 x 56 inch canvas is an intensely-red rectangle containing a grid of fifteen stacked yellow-orange vents. The expanse of red shifts from a wall, to a window, to a portal. Its boundaries shudder against the background of pale blue-grey washes surrounding it. This taming wash is a flimsy act of erasure, as hints of yellows, oranges and reds show through its attempt at neutrality. Unlike the ethereal environments and controlled movements of scraping and squeegeeing in the pastels on paper, drips ooze down from the red rectangle grounding it earthward. Its amassed form feels heavy and viscerally real.

This painting is the opening of the floodgate; the spilling over of a slow build up of emotions. It feels like the central point in the timeline of the works displayed. It is an inferno contained in quiet; blaring overwhelm, and hot to the touch. Beyond the yellow grid lines of the vents is disintegration. Their boundaries can barely contain the red lying beyond which is seeping through and beginning to erode them. 

It is the only piece that includes writing, a prominent element in previous bodies of work from Kohut. Scribed onto either side of the red expanse, they read like mental notes or snippets from journal entries; comments on surroundings, noises, weather forecasts and Kohut’s inner sentiments within his studio. One line in particular reads: “all because there’s a lot of something,/doesn’t mean that its important”. With the presence of multiple vents contained within this one composition, Kohut reinforces the irrelevance of the vent as an object in itself. He even addresses us directly with, “just thought I’d say ‘hi’”, and, “okay, bye/I’m just tired today/and the sun is out”. He collapses our present into his past; drawing us into the studio which is partly contained in the mind of the artist.

A few of Kohut’s notes refer to amps and albums, and it was in the moment of reading these that my perception of the vent shifted yet again. The red mass changed into a huge amplifier and the space filled with sound. In his pastels, Kohut’s approach to layering, rubbing, and scraping away creates vibrational colour contrasts and layered transparencies. They communicate similarly to vibratos and rhythms in music; repeated but slightly varying structures of form, line, and colour. Despite the journey through representation and metaphor that Kohut takes us on he has a keen ability, and intention, to shatter his own illusions. He always returns us to his materials and the process of creation. The marked decision to leave smudges and residue build up speaks to Kohut’s insistence on tethering the artist's and the viewer’s physical and psychological understandings to the material of the painting. 

Moments of ‘imperfection’ are considered a part of the work as a whole. In Blue Afternoon 01, residue from a squeegee pull has run over the taped-off border leaving a short streak an inch below the central rectangle. Unlike the majority of the works which appear ungrounded in space, the squeegee residue in Blue Afternoon 01 begins to read as light reflecting off of a horizontal plane. This single squeegee mark grounds the vent-window in space but also in the reality of its making.  The fugitive image of the window and paper-as-space shimmers for a second before it inevitably crumbles back into its material presence.

I walked away from Kohut’s exhibition with a clear impression that collectively the works are a sensitive contemplation of the experience of the banal as a shifting space of comfort and discomfort. The Other Side of the Vent, as a whole, constructs an environment for reflection and the quiet turning over of the question of where meaning-making lies amongst the individual and the collective. Kohut prompts us to consider our own feelings of stagnation, confinement, and discomfort from as many angles as possible, as a project in self-understanding.


- Tiffany April