This is the kind of artist Jacqueline Treloar is. She strives to open up what has been closed in us. She is a diligent housekeeper of the Infinite, making sure her allotted panels of the doors of perception swing to and fro as smoothly as possible.<\/p>\n This is the kind of artist Treloar is. Which means she inhabits a more-or-less embattled, confrontational role. \u201cIt is not news, \u201cwrites poet Ann Lauterbach in her The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience<\/em> (Viking, 2005), \u201cthat we are in a dispiriting time, one of personal and political cynicism, of unproductive doubt\u201d (p.190). In this age of the bureaucrat-artist, the committee-artist, the media-artist, the dogged sociologist-as-artist, Treloar is committedly, stubbornly, a visionary<\/em> artist, unashamedly in thrall to the energies of the transcendental.<\/p>\n Her tools are desire, passion, memory, humility and reverence. She wields them with both tenderness and verve, valourizing, in her researches and constructions, in recourse to her jewels, beads, laces, swatches, toys, trinkets, tschotskes, photographs and assorted talismanic objects, what she refers to as \u201cthe implicit power in the people we care for and who, in so many ways, have changed our paths and whose presence has altered [us] and enabled us to go forward\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Treloar pays attention, exquisite endless attention. She pays attention to history, to the arcing of the trajectory of humanist and devotional thought (those noble, august, crowned Madonnas, those elevated Marys) and she pays attention to our little (but not unimportant) places in that great\u2014sometimes almost forgotten\u2014hierarchical pageant. And, as Walter Benjamin noted in his essay, Some Reflections on Kafka<\/em> (Schocken Books, 1968), \u201cattention is the natural prayer of the soul.\u201d<\/p>\n Treloar is, in her way, a lavish participant in the epic spirit, a modern-day Mnemosyne, the rememberer<\/em>. She is a historian and enshriner (her Great Crowns are levitating shrines). Her works memorialize what needs to be memorialized. This is why her work is opulent but not extravagant (extravagance meaning\u2014as \u201cextra-vagant,\u201d going outside of the lines, as it were).<\/p>\n It\u2019s sort of silly, perhaps, but every time I gaze upon Treloar\u2019s exquisite, hovering crowns, I think about a nest holding newborn birds (maybe \u201can exaltation of larks\u201d), all of them lifting their open beaks upwards towards the light.<\/em><\/p>\n Crowns are ascentional objects<\/em>. The Madonnas they evoke\u2014as they generously evoke our own sublunary lives as well\u2014live high above the earth: on thrones, hillsides, on a pillar (see the Virgin\u2019s first century appearance on a pillar in Zaragoza, Spain, a visitation enshrined within the cathedral, the Nuestra Se\u00f1ora del Pilar (Our Lady of the Pillar<\/em>), and honoured by the city\u2019s annual flower offering, its Ofrenda de Flores<\/em>, a mighty cloak of woven flowers for the Virgin).<\/p>\n The Virgin is The Lark Ascending.<\/em><\/p>\n I love the fact that Treloar\u2019s majestic crowns are suspended in the air, held there by wires, dependent<\/em> from wires (that is to say, sus-pend<\/em>ed from wires, pendular, pendulum-like, hanging down). The paradox lurking for me in this depending<\/em>, inhabits the fiction I have allowed myself that these acensional crowns may, if cut loose, if suddenly left without restraint, will rise, not fall<\/em>. For me\u2014and I insist on seeing it this way\u2014the wires holding the crowns up are actually guy wires<\/em>\u2014holding them down.<\/p>\n Treloar\u2019s Madonna crowns are rising after Her.<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s funny how affixed we remain (living on a sphere) to the idea that heaven (the site of The Good) is up, and hell (the residence of evil) is down. Maybe it\u2019s all because of the structure of the human body, with the head\u2014as the locus of perception and consciousness\u2014at the top, and our ignoble feet way down below, at the bottom, in contact with the earth (as \u201cfeet of clay\u201d). What is good, or what aspires to the good, rises<\/em> (vectoring church steeples point up, birds fly up and away, our sensibilities yearn, when we are joyful\u2014or hopeful\u2014or aspiring) for upward mobility (one recalls Wordsworth\u2019s soul leaving his body in delight, when confronted by a field of waving daffodils: \u201c\u2026and then my heart with pleasure fills \/ and dances with the daffodils….\u201d).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.artoronto.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/great_puer_crown__side.jpg\" "\\"great_puer_crown__side\\"")
<\/a>Jacqueline Treloar, Great\u00a0Children’s Crown\u00a0(Corona Magna Puerorum)<\/em>, 2013, detail, fabric and mixed media, 4 x 5 foot. Photo: Lumir Hladik. Courtesy of the artist.<\/p>\n<\/a>Jacqueline Treloar, Great\u00a0Children’s Crown\u00a0(Corona Magna Puerorum)<\/em>, 2013, detail with Jaden, fabric and mixed media, 4 x 5 foot. Photo: Lumir Hladik. Courtesy of the artist.<\/p>\n<\/a>Jacqueline Treloar, Great\u00a0Children’s Crown (Corona Magna Puerorum)<\/em>, 2013, detail with Conrad, fabric and mixed media, 4 x 5 foot. Photo: Lumir Hladik. Courtesy of the artist.<\/p>\n<\/a>Jacqueline Treloar, Great\u00a0Adult Crown (Corona Magna Adultorum)<\/em>, 2014, fabric and mixed media, 60 x 48 inches. Photo: Lumir Hladik. Courtesy of the artist.<\/p>\n<\/a>Jacqueline Treloar, Great Elder Crown (Corona Magna Senium)<\/em>, 2014, in the Holy Trinity Church, Toronto,\u00a0mixed media, feathers and glass on nylon and plastic mesh base, 60 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist.<\/p>\n