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Past exhibitions at Art Mûr 2008 |
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The Emergence of Perception From November 15 to December 20, 2008
Text by Mark Clintberg
There are clouds. Explosions maybe. Storms? From what one might first consider, the front of the image is immediately revealed as a side, a back, an inside too. Spriggs’ subjects are often spectral, a bit like sorcery. How this is accomplished, technically speaking, is outside of my inquiry here. Instead I will address the typology of his work, and its play with dimensionality and the body. David Spriggs’ work collides concepts from Futurism and Cubism: speed and movement as ultimate ideals; simultaneous multiple representations of a form from different angles. Eliminated from Spriggs’ program is the Futurist aestheticisation of war and violence, though the tension of these historical associations aren’t completely excised from the work’s potential reception. But he is not an artist blindly casting about for historical fraternities to ingratiate himself with. What his work puts forward is a derailing of these antecedents’ two ideologies. Spriggs’ projects are bastard children, art historically. From the perspective of another century, they might be grotesque: mutations of sculpture and painting, not properly belonging to either category, being neither and both three- and two-dimensional. Of course, this spatial and typological confusion is exactly why they delight the contemporary viewer. We enjoy the typologically grotesque. What is at the root of this pleasure? Beyond their technical ingenuity, these works also suspend a form between two and three dimensions. This feat has captured the popular imagination in other fields too – notably in cinematic special effects. These peculiar fixations are ripples from what Yve-Alain Bois calls the “formless,” borrowed from Georges Bataille’s notion of the informe. The formless “serves to bring things down [déclasser] in the world,” confusing typologies and classification. Spriggs’ objects accomplish as much on two fronts. By presenting multiple surfaces for an image that functions on several dimensional levels. And by perplexing the boundaries of his forms, which are often gauzy and nebulous. Like the immersive works of Robert Irwin and James Turrell, they develop ontological encounters with their viewers. Martin Jay’s writing on baroque form furnishes an ontological framework for engagement with Spriggs’ work. Summarizing the work of Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Jay writes that the baroque form relies on “obscurity, shadow and the oscillation of form and formlessness.” The initial links possible between this description and the artist’s work are clear. His clouds and explosions skate the edge between the informe and structure. Even those works that are more diagrammatic, such as his ambitious large-scale illustration of the inner workings of two escalators, further hint at the disintegration of form by virtue of Spriggs’ loose and expressionistic handling of line. But Buci-Glucksmann’s analysis of the baroque goes further: he suggests that this category is also anti-Platonic in its rejection of the visual in favor of the haptic, with all the excess and surplus associated with the image. This interstitial quality is paralleled on a sensory register. The sense of touch and sight become entangled in these works. Sensory organs are not hermetically sealed from one another: sight 1. Yve-Alain Bois. “The Use Value of “Formless”.” Formless: A User’s Guide. Bois and Rosalind Krauss. New York: Zone Books. (1997): 13-40. Quoting Bataille. Bois’ proofs of the informe ¬– horizontality, base materialism, pulse, and entropy – add to a dynamic understanding of Spriggs’ practice and should be explored in future writing on his work.
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David Spriggs
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Définir l’éphémère From November 15 to December 20, 2008
Text by Michael Rattray
It is within the locality of the dream where we are at once sentient of ourselves within a multitude of reflections. The momentary awareness of self reveals transitions between those subliming resonances of reality and our want of an unbiased infinite. The sky and water may beckon us, yet we do not fully comprehend why or how we could be within both at once, or better, everywhere within everything at once, to perhaps know the presence of omniscience. Pure materiality, with a hint of applied aesthetics, reminds us of the beauty contained by the object. In it, recollections of the past and forecasts for the future may play within one another, mimicking the present as if they could coexist in transcendence, but leaving us to our constants nonetheless. The partition between past and future always rests with the present moment, and we are bound to it while one side gains precedence over the other during the course of our lives. The work of Henri Venne implicates the viewer to know themselves through their refracted image. The autonomy of the object is fractured, the reflective glass separates yet joins the works with the spectator, articulating a depth of field that is flattened yet sculpturally dimensional. A one-point perspective realizes its ambivalence through movement. Here, the spectator can control himself or herself within the environment of art appreciation. Consistently aware of their fractured and refracted image, the space of representation attaches a sequentially autonomous order. The one and the other rest in symbiosis, likewise the landscape rests assured of the face it becomes once realized through a sight unseen. As Venne has commented, these works are meant to echo the relationship of painting and photography. In the works, a combination of formalist aesthetic and ephemeral logic directs the spectator towards an awareness of oneself, and one’s place in the space of representation: the gallery. Within it, there is a consistency of exchange, where what was outside itself becomes inside, and what was known becomes unknown, conflating our idyllic gestations into well-worn theoretical manifests. Part painting, part photo, part sculpture, the work of Venne appropriates known ideals so as to reflect what is known as the unknown.
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Henri Venne
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Ornament / Armament From November 15 to December 20, 2008
From the local to the global, the contemporary culture of fear is nurtured and land-marked by the image of the gun as the threat and the security from threat. The tyranny of this paranoia is very easily applied in images and news footage of various events reinforced by prepared statements to keep the viewer in an uncomfortable state of imminent danger. The AK-47 is the iconic weapon of choice for resistance and revolution against superior military powers and is often displayed as a valued possession; almost like jewellery. Weapons are often regarded as valuable indicators of power within urban culture and generally speaking rarely utilised. This installation questions the dominant position of the gun in all its aspects within our modern world.
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Orest Tataryn
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Champ Témoin From October 25 to November 29
For the past fifteen years, Michel Boulanger’s creative process has been concerned with pictorial and graphic experiments, reflecting on how images are formed and the role they play in our definition of reality. Landscape, his favoured motif for constructing the real, is the perfect place for depicting mental representations that one makes of nature. Drawing is central to this multidisciplinary process that also includes painting and film animation. Over the years, the work has become a series of complex compositions in which the rules of representation highlight the avatars concerned with perceiving images. From this perspective, 3D modelling has become the preferred drawing tool for exploring generic representations of space. In his approach to the moving image, Michel Boulanger is interested especially in the possibilities of writing linked to the continuous malleability of the animated 3D sequences, enabling, in particular, the empirical development of sequences without preliminary scripting. In his recent production, he explores the fact that an identical object modelled in 3D can be continually manipulated and transformed. Thus its movements can be modified, the same scene can be filmed from various angles and exposed to new lighting, and the objects in the composition can be covered with new textures and so on. In the animated Champ témoin, a nocturnal chase through a cornfield, a series of animated loops propose slight variations at each beginning. The start and finish of this unique work are perfectly identical, so much so that one cannot recognize the true beginning nor identify the end.
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Michel Boulanger
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Qualia From November 15 to December 20, 2008
Text by David Elliott
One of my favorite books from the early seventies was Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass. I particularly remember the cover; a line drawing of a simple chair in the center of a circle, caught in the radiating geometry of energy nodes. It was as if Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man had been replaced by Van Gogh’s humble wicker seat. Sit down & wake up! Easier said than done. To be here now is the most basic call to focus and according to Alpert, the fundamental path to enlightenment. Although the book is long gone (victim of communal living), I continue to think about it after all these years and still dwell upon the idea of achieving a locus in the world that is both anchor and lightning rod. Renee Duval’s new paintings locate us in just such a way, achieving a level of transcendence that is rare. The mechanics are surprisingly simple yet infinitely subtle. Duval has concentrated on the ageless interaction of trees and sky. When I first saw the work, I confess to being surprised at the initial punch and the subsequent staying power of such an obvious figure/ground combination. Their physically commanding scale and point of view, coupled with Duval’s ability to perfectly pitch colour and tone keeps them abuzz. In her press release, the artist speaks of verisimilitude and certainly Realism with a capital “R” and its accompanying fidelity to nature and technical finesse are important aspects. Duval’s work most immediately recalls other phenomenological, realist painters such as Jack Chambers or Antonio Lopez Garcia, but it also reminds us of the connections between this kind of perceptual realism and other art practices, particularly in its nuanced control of light. In front of one of her paintings, we are engaged in a mind/body/eye contest that is not dissimilar from what we might experience in the presence of a work by James Turrell or Robert Irwin. In Duval’s earlier paintings, the artist included her hands within forested landscapes. They operated as guides, didactically instructing us to engage in the ritual of seeing as though it was a game of hide and seek. Over here! No, here! Look at this! While there is a charming innocence to this approach, the invitation to see in the more recent paintings is uncluttered and in the end much more convincing. With the images de-populated, the viewer becomes the sole human presence. Heavy impasto of earlier panels is replaced with beautifully modulated glazes giving the paintings an epic sense of light and space. The point of view is less earth bound. The gaze is towards the heavens. One of the works in this current show is a circular, telescopic view of pure sky that acts as a tribute to Renaissance and Baroque ceiling painting and the tradition of di sotto in sù particularly Mantegna’s famous fresco in Mantua, minus the cherubs. The other paintings use trees as a foil for the sky, contre-jour, the branches echo our own nervous system and other mysterious constellations. Transmission choreographs a tree and a cloud in close harmony. Hold is high chroma with a brilliant blue sky in hard contrast with a tree. In Ever, Duval’s atmospheric handling of chromatic grays creates a marvelous spatial envelope. Curfew strikes me as something of a stoner classic. Perhaps the title is a give away. The painting invites the viewer to lie on their back in a park at sunset. Rather than facing the horizon to see gaudy streaks of yellow and orange, guided by a small pine, we look straight up to where colour is of a subtler hue, remaining still, nestled under a sparse canopy of branches, we let the light slowly drain out of the sky. Pure bliss.
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Renée Duval
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Past exhibitions at Art Mûr 2008 |
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Group of Seven Awkward Moments From October 2 to November 8
Text by Michael Rattray Canadians have a funny kind of national identity, meaning specifically we do not really have one. To say that there is a national identity is to enter into a discussion without end -because there are just too many different kinds of people in Canada- it would be impossible to pin identity to anything, let alone a top-down Multicultural Act, or a Group of Seven. Strangely though, in art, that is exactly where Canadian begins, with a Group of Seven. In Diana Thorneycroft’s new series Group of Seven Awkward Moments, the momentous humor Canada is famous for is contrasted with the nation’s dirty little secret: that it is not funny at all, and in fact, much too serious, bordering on menacing. The new series of works falls into a line of art objects created by Canadian artists within the last few years that utilize parody and play to explode the hallowed imagery of nationalized corporatism. In the case of Thorneycroft, the use of backdrops that are reproduced works of the Group of Seven and Tom Thompson, combined with stereotypical iconic representations, produce strange entanglements of visual narratives that are at once laughable, and in the same engage preconceptions regarding what it is that defines a nation. The idealization of an empty and prosperous landscape, claimed authentically Canadian while in the same owing much to Scandinavian landscape painters, is rendered as a manufactured fabrication. The series is littered with black humor, addressing issues of colonization, sexual identity, corporatism, environmental destruction and celebrity. The image of Bobby Orr, for example, falling into the Don River to his death while his shimmy buddies concentrate on scoring, provides a dizzying moment of Canadian pastiche. The works embody the manufactured, exportable, and fallacious concept of Canadian identity. The paintings become the backdrop for a performance of tourist economies, simulating instances, rumor, innuendo and destruction: the unsaid of national narrative. Group of Seven Awkward Moments follows the artist’s interrogation of popular representation and violence, but envelopes the series in the curtain of nationalism. An empty landscape is an easy way to detract from the reality of its occurrence, those unsaid memories that betray any kind of consensus. The work of Thorneycroft echoes the unsaid and the fabricated, leaving the viewer to judge any truth within the falsity of its construction.
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Diana Thorneycroft
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In the scream of things From October 4 to November 8
Text by Erin Silver
Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life.– Giorgio de Chirico All objects lose by too familiar a view. – John Dryden
In the Scream of Things aptly describes the scene: A young girl is both herself and possessed, at home and in the realm of the unfamiliar, summoning and summoned by an array of household objects, cats, birds, and butterflies. Amid the supposed safety of objects, the young girl commands the environment that also threatens to betray her, seemingly wielding the gift of telekinesis, that which becomes a curse without the mastery it requires, like the dream that suddenly, unexpectedly, becomes a nightmare. Janieta Eyre’s new cibachrome series In the Scream of Things (2008) is inspired by Balthus’s unnerving depictions of childhood and Neil Gaiman’s otherworldly Coraline and might be read as the familial offspring of her earlier works, where surrealist and uncanny occurrences have replaced the serenity believed to accompany the norm. Portrayed here is an image of childhood that at once exposes the capricious nature of the imagination and the menacing realm of the real. A combination of Lewis Carroll’s whimsical, fictional Alice, and Alice’s inspiration, the solemn, real life Alice Liddell, the young girl wears multiple brightly-colored wigs that change in time with the brightly-colored Victorian rooms, rooms that quickly transform from welcoming solace to chilling austerity. The girl is not only a child when standing on homemade stilts, lazing on couches, and reading oversized books, but also a tired hostess to flying creatures that demand her attention, follow at her feet and hover at her head, a helpless captive to objects that threaten to attack her, to the knowledge of an escape into the outside world that her isolation denies her. And though permitted to visit, the viewer who peers in on the child who has been left to fend for herself remains helpless to her plight. Contained within the young girl’s house—and head—is foreboding sense of dread and danger, an unease that cannot be rationalized away. And why should it be? That which is quietly assuring in one photograph is that which finds its distorted mirror in another: a safety that is not to be confused with comfort, a house that is not to be confused with a home.
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Janieta Eyre
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August 23 to September 27, 2008 |
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Stone Days August 23 to September 27, 2008
“Stone days is a diary of days. All kinds of days: good days, bad days, on days, off days, slow days, stone days.” – Barbara Todd “There you will see tongues in trees / Books in brooks / And sermons in stones.” – William Shakespeare
We are accustomed to calendars that demarcate our experiences by days, weeks, and years. We cross days off as though we are relieved to escape them and to only move forward. However, some of us keep diaries, record, recover, and revive our days. Our days become our objects, malleable to our unique resignifications, revelatory in their results. Not all diaries require pen and paper, as Barbara Todd’s Stone Days (2007) illustrates. In this multimedia work, Todd selected texts—her own, as well as snippets of speeches, poetry, and prose borrowed from others—to inspire arrangements of stones gathered from her annual August sojourn at her grandparents’ Lake Huron cottage. She then photographed, photoshopped, and printed a year’s worth of consecutive stone configurations on vellum. Todd explains, “The layering of these translucent images came to constitute the cumulative quality of presence, of memory and of dissolving into past days.” Vellum is but one medium through which Todd’s meticulous documentation manifests itself: her stone/texts can be “leafed through,” albeit virtually, in cyberspace, where access to Todd’s days is but a mouse click away. Her stone/texts can also be wrapped around oneself in the form of the quilts made by Todd that carry in their stitching, and in the placement of “soft” stones, the intricacies of Todd’s episodic narrative. We cannot predict the outcome of all of our days, nor can we always detect their subtle differences. Diaries can help us to map out our pasts and, in turn, intuit our possible futures. Like the Chinese game of Go, Todd’s stone diaries are built from the ground up and search for a balance between presence and absence, action and inaction, strength and weakness. Even the best of Go players can expect to lose half of their matches, and Todd’s stone days speak to the wins and losses of human existence. “Take the eggs that talk to you, not the ones that are impressive on the surface.” Todd’s text on Valentine’s Day—a day given to lovers to worship both flaw and flawlessness, with the understanding that one is required to appreciate the other. A telling entry, then, one that foregrounds Todd’s Stone Days as an unconditional ode to one year in a life lived. 1. Barbara Todd, artist’s statement, 2007
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Barbara Todd
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Tangle Wood August 23 to September 27, 2008
A consistent process of change interludes the work of Shayne Dark. With a fascination for the beauty of pure color, the new works of Dark speak to an appropriation of painting and the natural environment that seek to distort and envelope the gallery space. Relying on conventions of installation, namely the commanding of space, the scale of these new works foregrounds a specific monumentality, where the haphazardness of the natural world is presented as a singular commodity refined as art. Relying on the site-specificity of each gallery, the installed works become complicit to a random ordering of change, creating a space almost akin to a live performance. Every showing becomes subject to its surrounding, thereby appropriating the space as its own and exposing the limitations and differential values contained by the white walls of the gallery space. A work like Red Tide will shift dependant on its installation, all the while maintaining a luminosity only attainable through the application of pure color. What appear to be individually molded pieces are in fact the collected driftwood from the artist’s walks. The wood, removed from its natural occurrence, takes on an alien and otherworldly appearance. Framed through the angular wall-like constructions, the sculpture assumes the anarchy of fire. Tangled Wood develops a similar aesthetic, but appears to be growing up straight from the gallery floor. The sculpture, upon initial glances, appears to defy convention, operating through a simulation of material that appears as natural as it does constructed. The work Last Stand, a column of over 12 feet in height, creates an order from its abstracted branches, jutting out in the round and appearing as almost jagged and sharp to the touch. Together, the works transform and involve the space of the gallery in a process of multiplicity that creates an organic construction, echoing the artists concern for creating a space that has no singular point of view. What is fascinating about the new works is the way in which they uphold a fragility that defies their scale and monumentality. There is an unchecked potentiality, where at any moment a collapse appears imminent. The aesthetic quality of the works rests in the quiet contemplation and appreciation for the beauty of color. The works appear electric, alive, growing, but maintain a quiet status as if bearing witness to something in the present, or having borne witness in the past.
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Shayne Dark
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Delirium August 23 to September 27, 2008
The recent works of Dennis Ekstedt explode over the tableau. The immersive black backgrounds entail a reasoning that we are somehow contained within an ever widening darkness, expanding our knowledge as sights of illuminated referents swirling in a myriad of configurations. From a proximity of distance to the up-front spectacle, our isolation is personified through individual points that amalgamate to larger entities and celestial bodies, posing questions of our place in a sublime method of abstraction. Each work seems to pierce through its very flatness, defining a narrative line of passage, but convoluted through a multi-level system of engagement. It appears as through, as a viewer, that the correlation of the galaxy and the cityscape present questions of space and distance that can remind ourselves of the wonder that can be found through painting. For myself, upon viewing I am transported somewhere between my first memories of turning pages dedicated to renditions of the heavens -where the impossibility of the sheer size of a galaxy was ciphered through the accessibility of the book- and the first time I can remember flying, where the world was quickly, and unexpectedly, transformed before my eyes into a sea of configurations and possibility. In short, these paintings provoke a sense of child-like fascination and wonder within my mind, which is something that should never be forgotten within the quickness at which our world operates. There is comfort in the realization that you are one but many, and that your individual perspective operates as a singular ray of light contributing to a larger whole. These works remind of the all-over abstract work of the late Gershon Iskowitz; except it appears a deepening complexity to the system of painting has been applied here. The works move from a galaxy like stasis, to the consuming moment where the sheer volume of life has over-exposed the vision of the agent. In works such as Progression 3 and Sprawl 17, filters of atmospheric haze, akin to a pollutant, blurs a clear vision and implies a passing from one painting to another. It is as if the viewer is traveling towards a bright distant offering, but at each instance where the world appears to open up before our eyes, a new system appears to readily distort our complacency, reminding of the importance to remain questioning of those spaces that enchant us, haunt us, and remind of our luminary presence within a potentially infinite black.
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Dennis Ekstedt
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July 12 to August 16, 2008 |
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The fourth edition of Peinture fraîche / Fresh Paint July 12 to August 16, 2008
Art Mur is very pleased to announce the fourth and largest edition of Peinture fraîche / Fresh Paint, a group exhibition of twenty-five up-and-coming artists from Ontario and Quebec, which provides an excellent overview of work from the next generation of painters. Each year we invite professors of painting from Canadian universities to select five students who stand out for the quality and originality of their work. This year we have decided to extend our invitation to Concordia University, Université du Québec à Montreal, Université Laval de Québec, University of Ottawa and York University, transforming this project into a major event and the only one of its kind in Canada.
Concordia University Courtney Burke, Carl Osberg, Vitally Medvedovsky, Megan Cameron, Marisa Hoicka York University Kristi Ropeleski, Shannon Moynaghan, Amy Shackleton, Alex Fisher, Angela Jordan University of Ottawa Andrew Morrow, Amy Schissel, Brittany Shannon, Isabelle Melançon, Mariel Kelly Université Laval de Québec Patrick Dubé, Harry Villeneauve, Carolanne Fournel, Benoit Blondeau, Isabelle Demers, Université du Quebec à Montreal Louis Bouvier, Isabelle Guérette, Isabelle Guimond, Marwan Karout, François Georget
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Andrew Morrow
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May 9 to June 18, 2008 |
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Vignette May 9 to June 18, 2008
The landscape tradition of Canadian Painting is recognized as the seminal art of Canada. In the wake of the Group of Seven, many artists have chosen to deal with the group’s iconic status as the Art of a Nation. Beyond the limitations and contradictions inherent to the Group of Seven, they have nonetheless acted as a catalyst of engagement to artists who work within this landscape tradition. Melissa Doherty’s new works seek to engage the viewer by invoking the history of landscape painting, but this engagement is determined to destabilize the gaze of a national construction. The title of the show insinuates the underlying tone of these works. The softening and blurred rendering techniques employed through the paintings signal a space of re-presentation, politically infused and motivated to activate changes of perception. Similarly to the shifts in perception that occurred with the advent of flight, where traditional views of the world were altered, Doherty’s work seeks to alter our understanding of the landscape in a Canadian context. Doherty comments that, as opposed to a manufactured heroism, these works display a manufactured intimacy. The downward aerial perspective seems to imply the artist has appropriated an almost omniscient point of view -which is inherently a place of uncompromised introspection- and pieces together a landscape of isolation, seemingly placeless in its rendering, but continuous in its construction. Formally, the works display a compositional quality drawing from abstract and minimal aesthetics. From a distance, the works can appear abstract, implying the flattened all over compositional style of formalism. As one approaches, the works open up to reveal a familiar distance, as if revisiting a lost memory. Implicitly, the works convey a serial narrative denoting a process-based deconstruction of the landscape. Each painting in its own right speaks to the next. The dissolved white background consumes the differences between pieces, as if erasures of detail could complete the borders of the imaginary community and thoroughfares that connect them. Highlighting the givens of the constructed narrative, Doherty has included a slight of hand; no road leads home, they only lead to themselves, and likewise, no home is connected, they are isolated unto themselves. As opposed to the continuity sought through early Canadian landscape painting, Doherty’s work invokes a notion of narrative, but it is a narrative constructed through a lens of critical distance with the cognoscenti in sight. Michael Rattray
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Melissa Doherty
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Cheese, Worms and the Holes in Everything May 9 to June 18, 2008
The Painting Pathogen: Recent Works of David Blatherwick "Colonisation or colonization occurs whenever any one or more species populates a new area. The term, which is derived from the Latin colere, "to inhabit, cultivate, frequent, practice, tend, guard, respect", originally related to humans. However, 19th century biogeographers borrowed the term to describe the activities of birds or bacteria, or plant species." David Blatherwick’s new paintings betray a polychrome profusion of sinuous shapes and invasive signifying units. Before we even know it, they have insinuated themselves inside our thinking. Like a virus that has performed a containment breach between painting and our own environmental (lived) space, having moved with alacrity outside both the bio-safe facility of the studio/lab and the Art Mur exhibition space alike, they overtake eye and mind before we even know we have been colonized. When I look long at the paintings of David Blatherwick, and then longer still, I don’t think necessarily of the work of his brave confreres, his peers, or even his predecessors, in painting, I see in my mind’s restless eye images out of supercomputing, wetware, wireheading, the whole biocybernetic software of mind – and, not least, bacteriology. Slippery like wetware, segmented like an Inuit hunter’s trap, with all the unfettered infinity-loop antics of a Fibonacchi sequence, Mobius strip, Mandelbrot fractal or viral code, Blatherwick’s recent paintings bleed full-frame in real space – and bring us to our knees. An infection is universally understood as the detrimental colonization of a host organism by a foreign species. In an infection scenario, the infecting organism uses the host's own resources in order to proliferate. However, in terms of experiencing Blatherwick’s wily abstracts, think of a symbiosis between parasite and host that is consummately thoughtful – and altogether benign. After all, most multi-cellular organisms are colonized to some lesser or greater extent by extrinsic organisms, and by far the better part of those exist in a commensual relationship with the host. The sheer virulence of Blatherwick’s paintings is noteworthy. Consider the symbiotic parasitism that is the relationship here of painting to host organism construed as exhibition hall, and proceed from there to what they are doing to the inside of your own forebrain. Blatherwick’s seizure of real space (the space outside of painting) is coextensive with that of cerebral space (the thought from outside) – but with an intent to influence, change, colonize. After all, colonization – coup d’etat of the viewer’s own thought waves, but in a good way -- is his avowed goal. If Blatherwick’s subversive works are akin to pathogens, they also find another analogy outside painting in programming, especially in Unix systems, where semaphores are a technique for coordinating or synchronizing activities in which multiple processes compete for the same operating system resources. Semaphores are one of the techniques for inter-process communication and every time the undulating shapes in Blatherwick’s paintings seem to morph and multiply, they are signaling their own mutations in real time as we absorb them. Quite suddenly, his paintings become something else. Their viral codes seem to constantly assemble, diassemble and reassemble and keep us on our toes. If symbols are traditionally been readily more associated with paintings while metaphors are reserved for poetry, well, Blatherwick’s work helps reverse this trend. If his desire as a wetware hacker of a painter has been to take advantage of analogies with a physical interface with the brain; he has pursued the pathways of visual perception to alter the mindset of his viewers, and lead them over the threshold into what were, just yesterday, tomorrow worlds, but are now more present than future. Blatherwick creates his own hot zones (1) and containment is simply not an option. James D. Campbell Notes 1. ‘Hot zone’ refers to an area that is considered hazardous owing to biological, chemical, or nuclear contamination. The "hot zone" also refers to the area in which dangerous biological organisms are handled, such as the Biosafety Level 4 of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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David Blatherwick
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From March 29 to May 4, 2008 |
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Éden March 29 to May 4, 2008
Text by Michael Rattray The biblical Garden of Eden was representative of a metaphoric existence without consequence or reality. The story of expulsion -a result of dabbling too deeply with what had been provided- has acted as a metaphor to many over the course of the 'common era'. Beyond the spiritual and religious connotations associated with a monotheistic parent figure expelling its creations as a kind of punishment, the warnings inherent to mutating forms and matters of existence hold a current to our reality. The new work of Nicolas Grenier examines the construction of life itself through painting. Using the color palette as a kind of DNA strand, each of these new works is the result of one base source, or code. None of the new paintings are in truth a realistic or authentic representation of an existent place, or person. They are representative of choices, the choices made by an artist defying standards and creating without consequence, and hold parallels to those who are currently unweaving the very strands of life to see what new combinations may become available. Eerily familiar in their rendering, yet completely void of actuality, they remind the viewer of what may be sitting behind closed doors, perhaps under lock and key in a room not unlike the one rendered in "painting name here". In our current time, running towards a future we can only speculate may resemble our present; Grenier's work is representative of a caring, well-planned ambivalence, and an ambivalence that questions without fear of judgment. For every warning, there is a beautiful fruit to bear in its consequence. Within the routes traveled in our quests for understanding what beauty could be, jumps, breaks and continuities of discontinuous repetitions remake themselves. While these works examine and look to an unknown future, they are routed and embedded in the traditions of the past. Rather than terming them a hyper, or super, kind of realism, as has been discussed with reference to Grenier's work in the past, these new works are perhaps representative of the future-real. It could be a future where mistakes will be made, and perhaps in our progression those mistakes will be frozen in time on a pedestal, but they will be foreshadowed by a landscape rendered timeless through our new lenses of understanding. But the rub of ambivalence holds the last word, as the artist has left the reality to show itself over time; a number of painted apples adorn the exhibition space, and while they hold an appearance of outward beauty, they are none the less, rotting from the inside out.
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Nicolas Grenier
Nicolas Grenier
Nicolas Grenier
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In the Headlights March 29 to May 4, 2008
Text by Tatiana Mellema Jakub Dolejs's large-format photographs and sculptures are about the mechanisms of picture making and consumption. Born in Prague where he completed a Master's degree in Fine Art at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design, Dolejs has based his practice in Toronto, and has become well known for his works that playfully blend painting and photography. Dolejs's works tap into Western culture's obsession with the visual by engaging pictorial codes from a range of images throughout history, including eighteenth century French rococo paintings to contemporary cinema. Working as a painter, sculptor, and photographer, Dolejs builds elaborate stage sets, and also methodically orders furniture, lighting, architectural details, and minimal materials, into three-dimensional trompe-l'oeil that he then photographs. Rather than painstakingly arranging his interiors in order to recreate a sense of the authentic, his sculptures and staged photographs demonstrate the process of picture making and distribution. These works are thoughtful deconstructions of the manipulation behind image construction, and the historical legacy of their consumption. In works of staged gallery scapes Dolejs elicits conventions of authorship, illusionism, and commerce that have historically informed artistic practices. In his piece La Nuit Américaine (2007) Dolejs has built a stage set of a typical eighteenth century French salon, including replicas of paintings by rococo artists Jean-Honore Fragonard and Jean-Siméon Chardin. Dolejs's stage however unexpectedly depicts the bottom corner of the salon room, brutally cutting paintings in half and omitting elaborate architectural details from its scene. By imposing the violent cropping of the camera onto a three dimensional space Dolejs exposes the painterly conventions of illusionism that continue to inform contemporary practices of film and photography. The aristocratic air of his salon also brings to mind the eighteenth century's history of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism that Western modernity is based upon. Dolejs explores the fraught legacy of modernity in contemporary culture by distilling its historic visual strategies found in today's cultural products. The antagonism of modernity's dominant artistic model is playfully intervened by Dolejs through his photographs of dramatic orderings. A number of the artist's photographs include arrangements in his studio of black slats of plexiglass, shop lighting, rococo architectural details, and iconic modernist furniture including a Charles Eames chair and an Eileen Gray chrome side table. Undercutting tricks of illusion employed by photography and painterly effects, these photographs demonstrate the manipulations behind old and new languages of representation. Paying pointed tributes to, among others, supremitism in White Square (2007), eighteen-century connoisseurship in Display (2007), and cinema in Homage to Antonio (2007), these photographs are about the social, economic, and historical realities behind picture making. Dolejs reveals that the legacies behind Western culture's founding myths continue to haunt contemporary visual practices.
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Jakub Dolejs
Jakub Dolejs
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From February 21to March 22, 2008 |
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Story of a Global Nomad From February 21 to March 22, 2008
Text by Michael Rattray Nomadism is an abstract. It describes a freedom to potentially be anywhere at anytime, to take from whatever can be taken, and to leave whenever to be somewhere anew. Consistently, the nomad has occupied an anthropological distortion, where the term was perhaps applied too loosely and vaguely. The process of colonial appropriation distorted known territorialities to the principles of the nomadic; that of the landless, those whom move at whimsy, seemingly without place. While in the real, those who seemed to be without place were in fact patterned, their movements’ routine and contained within a perimeter defined through geographic constraint. The new works of Jinny Yu echo notions of the nomadic, in both misconceptions and concrete understandings of the term. Deleuze and Guattari have commented that nomads can be localized within monads, acting as singular nomads “that entertain tactile relations among themselves. ” The nomadic monad, or module, offers a parallel to Yu’s earlier works and relates to the artist’s understanding of the artist as a migratory creature, one who has the ability to shift between contexts and identities within the “increasingly liquid field of trans-global relations. ” Two visual systems preside over the majority of the new works. The systems are defined by an appropriated pattern occupying the underlay of the work, which appears to be static, while an appropriated overlay pattern juts out from the background, appearing to convolute, distort and haphazardly foray among the fluidity of the underlay. Each work, constructed with three sheets of aluminum occupying a space of six by six feet, built from a single set, or module, combine to make-up the finished piece. The works, while maintaining an appearance of fluid structure, upon closer inspection can be reduced to their singular parts, even down to an individual line of graphite. These monads that make up the greater whole, while at times appearing in a state that resembles something solid, can just as easily become anarchic, or nomadic in their associations to the greater field of view within the structure, as is evidenced by the repetitions contained within the work Multiple Trees. An invocation of the problematic nature of assumption, or definition, within a master or universal narrative construct is evidenced through the works contained in Story of Global Nomad. Whether the appropriated sources are eastern in influence, western in construction, southern in flavor, or northerly contained they represent a systematic awareness of the patterns of our current predicament within a trans-global world. While we may be free to pursue nomadic states of wandering within a world of accessible consumption, the structures, the modules and the maps that we must navigate our freedom within nonetheless contain us. Nomadism may refer to an abstract, but it is an abstraction still dependent on a system to understand itself within, therefore no more outside, or inside, a place than another. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. “The Smooth and the Striated.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (80). pg.493.
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Jinny Yu |
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Images troublantes d'un monde idéalisé... From February 21to March 22, 2008
Text by Tatiana Mellema For Melvin Charney the cities we inhabit are alive and well but they have morphed into vast regions while our grasp of urban phenomena is mired in cozy quartiers and driven by dated ideals of progress. Charney’s work seeks to redefine some of the fundamental values that have marked every form of human settlement. He is one of Montréal’s most influential artists, responsible for a variety of the nation’s well-known public artworks including The Canadian Tribute to Human Rights, Ottawa (1986-90), The Canadian Centre for Architecture Garden in Montréal (1987-90) and Les Maisons de la rue Sherbrooke (1976) that was part of the infamous Corridart exhibition taken down by city officials on the day before the opening of Montréal’s 1976 Olympic games. Both nationally and internationally recognized, Charney’s work has been in numerous museum exhibitions including, briefly, P.S.1 New York, 1979; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1979, 2003; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1982; Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1994. He represented Canada at the Venice Biennale on two occasions - the XLII Venice Biennale International Exhibition of Art,1986, and the VII Venice Biennale International Exhibition of Architecture, 2000. Trained as an artist and architect, Charney takes the city as the subject of his work, in drawings, photographs, montages, paintings, sculptures, and site-specific constructions that play on the spaces, forms, and cultural representations of our urban structures. Central to his art has been his photo-based work UN DICTIONNAIRE… (1970-2001); four hundred and twenty six reproductions of newspaper images are organized to examine relationships between people and their changing urban environment. Using this archive as a thematic and visual source, Charney’s works layer and juxtapose images unearthing in this way larger social, political and economic structures that engender public and private space. Built structures that we normally take for granted as neutral are revealed as the product of an urban consciousness that citizens both register and generate. Charney attempts to reveal human characteristics embedded in built form. In the series, ONE FIT SIZES ALL, he picks up on the total standardization and codification of the urban space. Charney sources includes the ubiquitous American skyscraper; or, for example, an overbearing façade of the Université de Montréal’s HEC (School of Business.) His preoccupation with wire-service photos published in the front pages of newspapers has recently given way to a concern with the back pages – the heady realm of sex-trade advertisements. The processes of the standardization of space is now applied to the human body, starting with critical components of reproduction and our potential for genetically modifying the size, shape and behavior of the human form so that it fits into the spaces that society is capable of generating. Iconographic constructs are fragmented; the size, shape and behavior of new urban creatures emerge from their fissures. Charney isolates codes from the spatial patterns of our lives in order to examine ideals behind their production. Clusters of cities that still thrive in urban zone are alive in his work, its transformation carried out by the daily compliance of its citizens who become the agents of their own destruction. Charney’s works remind us that material objectivity does not exist, and that in fact our production of the city is rooted in the logic of power. As we codify our public and private space according to illusions of progress, we codify our own experiences of the human body. We may not look like walking skyscrapers, but the absurdity of Charney’s metaphor reveals itself as not so absurd after all.
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From january 19 to february 16, 2008 |
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SPITTING IMAGE From January 19 to February 16, 2008
Text by Kelly McCray There is a vast amount of information one can acquire about the identity of a person or an individual from the image of the figure; from portraits, photographs to sculptural representations, we are conditioned to make decisions about identity based on the "book's cover." In addition to personal biases, the figure becomes a contemporary metaphor for "human"/humanity, as artists filter concepts and personal themes through the presence of the physical body. The Edward Day Gallery exhibition, Spitting Image , explores the multiple layers of the figure that reach beyond the realm of representation. Angela Grossmann, through her raw, strident collage imagery of the Alpha Girls confronts issues of gender and maturity as her young girls, on the cusp of adulthood, pose provocatively for one another and an all-to-eager society. Recent figures, such as her young boxers, shadow punch their way into masculinity, while others adapt to the landscape of the other; the landscape of transitioning. In direct contrast, Bonnie Lewis, through her Nasty Girls paintings, portrays animated young women kicking and screaming at a male dominated society, into which they are about to be thrown. Using large house paintbrushes to create ephemeral oil portraits, Heather Graham conveys intimate gestures of strangers from the Internet while David Pellettiers fibreglass Bridge sculpture conveys an eloquent dialogue of communication. A major glass artist, Mark Thompson, portrays the play of youth looking into adulthood through a portrait of his son gesturing as a young pilot flying into the future. Individual natures and personalities breathe from beneath the portraits of Dan Hughes while Sophie Jodoin, through her Diary of K series, portrays K's reality as a little person, representing her "monumentality, grandeur, fragility and vulnerability". Through her recent Errata series, Catherine Heard's sculptural busts with twining eyes, mouths, nostrils further her investigation of medical science, monstrous deformity and mythology while Dan Kennedy's new paintings from his Lost In The Echo series unearths ephemera from the past to depict a narration of archetypes investigating Darwin's Theory of Evolution . John Oswald's digital portrait, After Rembrandt , morphs contemporary 21st century society with classical, historic painting by seamlessly transforming the face of a young contemporary dancer into the visage of an elderly woman painted by Rembrandt in the 17 th century. The multitude of representational visual gestures provides much more than the book cover and reach beyond the pages of a novel to provide the very essence of human nature.
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Daniel Hughes, Untitled (Stipl), 2007
Catherine Heard, Errata (mouth), 2007
John Oswald, After Rembrandt, 2006 |
ABRACADABRA From January 10 to February 10, 2008
Deciding on a title for a group exhibition is always quite challenging. The word or the phrase chosen will dictate the selection of artists and the work that will be exhibited. The moment the concept is created everything else seems to fall into place. That's exactly what happened when I encountered the word "ABRACADABRA." It became obvious that this was the word we had been searching for. With this ancient magical formula we could now curate a surprising and colourful exhibit that would allow us to introduce many of our artists to the Toronto art scene. In ARACADABRA we gather works by 11 artists represented by ART MÛR. Some of them are already known in Toronto however most of them are to be discovered by a new audience. The selected works include painting, photography, sculpture & installation. We can say, to a certain extent, that these artists are magicians that use their ability to transform raw material into amazing art works. They have that magical touch that leaves the viewer in awe. How did they do it? How is it made? How does it work? In viewing their art we become kids again, intrigued by the secrets concealed by the work. For the true believer, magic is in the eye of the beholder. Works like Holly King, Guillaume Lachapelle, Dennis Eksted reveal worlds of fantasy. Playing with light and traditional notions of the still life, Holly King's photographic ménages reference the gothic fairytale and shadowy landscapes of a troubled wonderland. Guillaume Lachapelle's improbable maquettes deconstruct architectural expectations, confronting the viewer with castles incorporating mechanized oars rowing to nowhere. Science fiction and reality also merge in the work of Dennis Ekstedt, whose paintings of the cityscape at night resemble an urban matrix and bring to mind the futuristic landscapes constructed in our imaginations. In today's world magicians don't exist anymore. We call them illusionists, and art has a long history of conceiving illusion. Claude Ferland reminds us with his series 'The eye of the quattrocento' of that very important moment when the artist discovers the notion of perspective; the illusion of depth. On the same note Nadia Myre's 'Basket for My Love' also plays with the notion of illusion, a basket that can only exist through it's own shadow. In her work 'Everything I know about love' she refers to a snake's ability to shed its skin and leave old scars behind. Cal Lane's own investigation of the object is equally transformative. It questions the illusion of faith and the hidden objectives of politics. Beaulieu's mechanical works give life back to a collection of natural detritus in a frenetic cabinet of curiosities where feathers, butterfly wings, and leaves tremble and spin wildly in unexpected animations brought on by the trick of motion detectors. Using similar technology in her sculpture, the work of Lois Andison threads a narrative of possibility and belief in the investigation of the human/machine. Andison's exploration of the cyborgian hybrid in 'Iris' (2001), features a fibreglass version of a dressmaker's Judy with mechanically opening breast-plate armour which counters the inscription of woman as spectacle and object of voyeurism1. The spectator is captivated by the interactive movement and awaits final disclosure, ending with the smile of the one that just been caught. In another of his large-scale sculptural installations, emerging artist David Spriggs has used layering as a device to capture a three-dimensional image of a ghost. Monique Bertrand's sculpture 'Marionnette à Tige" brings us behind the scenes of a laboratory scene that shouldn't be witnessed. When observing, odd feelings emerge - maybe you shouldn't be looking. For Fabrizio Perozzi, (oil on paper), represents empty covered boxes and reminds us of the simple trick of making everything disappear. Together, these artists allow the viewer a moment of pause, of wonder, or of possibility - a moment of transformation. The spirit present in this selection of artwork is one of optimism and play, of fantasy and imagination, even of magic, as the title suggests. Carolyn Bell Farrell, Autobody, p.20
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