Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie’s lyrics feature in paintings inspired by the band’s songs at Gallery 1313 exhibition

Quick: pick your favourite Tragically Hip lyric.

Go with what immediately comes to mind. I’ll give you a moment to think while I blast the first three Gord Downie gems that come to my own mind onto the page in the moment: “And the tourists take their T-shirts off …” from “Yawning or Snarling”; “It was handsome at the auction / Oh, but when we got it home / It grew up into something we could / No longer contain” from “Pigeon Camera”; and “Porn speaks to its splintered legions / To the pink amid the withered cornstalks in them winter regions” from “Poets.”

I just yelled the same question to my partner and the response was immediate from the next room: “My girl don’t just walk, she unfurls,” a line from the early Hip deep cut “Everytime You Go.”

So, yeah, think of your favourite Tragically Hip lyric. Now? Paint it.

Such was the task set to 18 different artists from around the world — 75 per cent of them Canadian, as mandated by the Hip itself — by the nifty new exhibition “Echoes of the Flame: Art Inspired by the Lyrics of the Tragically Hip,” at Gallery 1313 in Parkdale. A quarter of the proceeds from the sale of the original artwork will go toward building the Tsi Tyónnheht Onkwawén:na language and cultural centre on a Mohawk reservation in Tyendinaga.

Lead singer Gordon Edgar Downie, who died from brain cancer at 53 five years ago, is no longer with us and the Tragically Hip, in turn, now exists primarily as a sort of collective sentry guarding its own musical and cultural legacy from a respectful distance whilst missing a crucial limb. But “Echoes of the Flame” is proof positive that Downie’s words and the Kingston quintet’s music will outlive us all, especially if it continues to find new life in the ears — and eyes — of its beholders.

“Well, that’s nice to think, but we’ll never be forgotten until we are. You can never be replaced until someone else comes along,” joked Hip guitarist Rob Baker, a painter himself (albeit privately), at the invite-only opening of the exhibition at Gallery 1313 last week. “But this is incredibly gratifying to see. We’re kinda done, but it kinda continues on and it continues to happen, and whatever happens tomorrow from the ripples moving outward, whatever it is, I don’t know. But it’s great to see music taken into a different medium, y’know?”

Downie himself would have enjoyed the breadth of artistic vision on display in “Echoes of the Flame,” affirmed Baker, precisely because he always left his oft-inscrutable wordplay entirely open to individual interpretation — although Baker did concede his late friend would probably have been a tad embarrassed by all the attention.

“Aspects of it, yes, but not by seeing the artists interpret his ideas or his lyrics, and make them their own and do something with it,” he said. “He would think that is fantastic. He’d hate the accolades and all the s— that goes with it, but he would love to see what people do with it.

“Gord would never, ever say ‘This song is about this.’ It’s poetry. You put it out there and people either pick it up or they don’t, and if they pick it up they put their own spin on it. They put themselves into it. That’s the way it’s supposed to interact. People find their way into the song and then the song becomes their song and then it comes out again in new form. He would love that. I love that.”

As was the case with other exhibitions presided over by Los Angeles-based Song-Word Art House — which has done thematic shows devoted to such genres as punk rock and the blues, as well as to the songwriting of John Lennon, in the past — the only real rule applied to the international artists chosen for “Echoes of the Flame” was that Downie’s lyrics themselves had to feature somewhere in the work.

In some pieces, such as the multicoloured wall of text that is Brigitta Kocsis’s “Blow at High Dough #1” or the photograph of a remodelled New Orleans street sign that Toronto’s Rob Croxford constructed in honour of “New Orleans Is Sinking,” the words are front and centre. Others, such as Kingston painter Simon Andrew’s gorgeous “Bobcaygeon” — wherein the words, to borrow a phrase from Downie, “reveal themselves one star at a time” amidst a lakeside landscape bathed in violet light — or the sneaky cityscape homage to lyrical details found in “Grace, Too” conjured by Canadian artist Jeff Bartels take a more subtle approach.

All of the works, which also include contributions by fellow musicians Daniel Lanois and Tom Wilson — who’s created a stunning testimonial to Canada’s shameful treatment of its Indigenous Peoples in the form of an enormous nun’s habit bedecked with the names of children found buried at residential schools nationwide — are similarly compelling precisely because they speak to the profoundly personal relationship all of us have with different pieces of music. No two people would ever create the same piece of art in response to the same piece of music.

This is why expat-Canadian curator Joe Woolf, who’s been itching to do a Hip-inspired exhibition since he co-founded Song-Word Art House, wasn’t troubled by the daunting prospect of treading on hallowed Canadian musical ground with “Echoes of the Flame.” In the end, it’s not so much about the lyrics and the music themselves, but the artists’ relationship with them.

“There’s always a lot of pressure to do right by these legendary songwriters, but I’m not the one making the art so I’m not gonna f— it up,” laughed Woolf. “I’m just kidding, but the truth of the matter is we take it very seriously and when we choose the artists, we’re choosing people who are internationally acclaimed, and they’re honest and they’re always coming in front of it from a really genuine place.

“And when someone comes to something creatively and genuinely, and they’re not trying to do something that’s commercialized or for the wrong reasons, we’ve always found that the artists are truly, truly genuine in their intentions, and they’re always honest and good, and we’ve never f—ed up one exhibition.”

The artists themselves approached the task of interpreting the Hip with varying degrees of familiarity, too.

Some, like Kai McCall — who painted a portrait of a young woman strolling mysteriously through the words “Rain fell through the night” in homage to “Ahead by a Century” — simply went with their hearts. He chose “Ahead by a Century,” he said, “because it’s always been my favourite Hip song” and is forever “anchored in my mind as a memory in my 20s,” because he and his friends listened to it non-stop while planting trees in northern Ontario during the early 1990s.

Others weren’t really acquainted with the Hip’s music at all, approaching the subject with an absolute purity of vision.

“I really don’t know a lot of their music and I didn’t know their history that much. I’m being completely honest,” confessed Toronto-via-Siberia-via-Kazakhstan-via-Israel painter Dina Roudman, who painted a garish whorl of colour in response to “Tired As F—.”

“But then I went on a journey to listen to a lot of their music and ‘Tired as F—’ connected to my lifestyle at the time: we were still in the pandemic, I felt really f—ing tired and I was exhausted from a lot of change. That’s why I chose that song. It was really hard for me, though, to mimic that song because I’m an abstract painter and at first I was really trying to focus on the words … but I forgot it’s not about the words, in the end, it’s about my feelings. And this feeling of being ‘Tired as F—’ came out in the painting. The words didn’t have to be the main focus.”

Ben Rayner is a Toronto-based journalist and a frequent contributor to the Star’s Culture section. Follow him on Twitter: @ihatebenrayner

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