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Past exhibitions at Art Mûr 2009 |
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Drifting November 7 - December 19
Text by Michael Rattray
The new work of David Blatherwick echoes the pathology of a virus and the abject fascination it engenders through the visualization of its structure. The role of the microscopic at once distances the reality of the self from the body while concurrently effectuating the very cellular processes in view, acting as a feral reminder of a site of limitless expansion, threat and creation. The task of the painter in a world defined by technology is to re-codify the medium: to be a reflective foil to a world surrounding itself. These new works situate the limits of painting, but they are limits that are singularly defined by a function of proximity and perception. Within each of the new works, what becomes apparent is that the viewer is presented with a cordoned view of a complex initiative. The multi-layering of paint creates a sense of depth within the tableaux, but the depth appears as a flattened surface, as if the world created by the artist is attainable only through a formal analysis of composition. Yet, the compressed aesthetic of the works is confounded through looping: patterns appear to tangle and disentangle themselves at random, consequentially, the painter succeeds in mirroring the chaos of the molecular. Calculated and controlled, each image appears to stretch over itself, giving way to an order that derives its complexity by insinuating a visual world untouched. The real gives way to the unreal through a masking of painterly affordances that engender a sense that the viewer is privy to a site where milieus of structures act simultaneously. While the works can be argued as non-representational, they are bound by what the artist calls a point of departure. This point of departure can be seen as the ability with which the imagination worms itself within itself, tangling up and knotting, to come to new configurations and adaptations that could have been missed were it not for the opportunity of stasis. Compositionally, these works function under the rubric of abstraction, yet they imply that the way in which the abstract functions allows for the structure -the very cellular make-up of an organism- to come into view so as to generate something new, something unforeseen. In this way, the works generate new intricacies at which to code and re-code the foundations of the unknown.
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David Blatherwick
David Blatherwick
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Mangroves: Floating Between Two Worlds November 7 - December 19
Text by Amber Berson
Canadian photographer Holly King’s Mangrove series is an investigation into the artist’s own subconscious. The photographs border on the uncanny, although never uncomfortably so. Instead, her preternatural compositions engage the viewer’s curiosity – the viewer is not sure how to approach, and yet is drawn to do so. At times the images are reflective, occasionally disquieting and always thought provoking. The twisted roots of the mangrove forests that form the base of this series provide an entry point for an investigation into the shadowy parts of the artist’s imagination. The differences between what we know to be real and what we perceive as real are often slight. The work of Holly King stems from an attempt to prevail over the uncharted territory of both her imagination and that which is perceived as true. In her creations, King endeavours to understand her subconscious mindscape as manifested through photographs recalling actual landscapes. This new series, stemming from earlier pieces also focused on roots, reflects King’s interest in drawing, in the linear subject and in geometric abstraction. It is a move away from previous series – despite the photographic medium in which King works, her oeuvre has contained a certain painterly quality. These new photographs tend to melt into themselves, drawing the viewer in and letting the imagination drift. The Mangrove series causes the viewer to approach with at a slower pace, to investigate deeply into the darker nooks and crannies and to attempt to find reason within a work that so clearly plays with our understanding of real and imaginary. Nothing is incidental in King’s photographs, yet it is not always manipulated. King’s process often involves the use of maquettes – not digital manipulation of the images – creating an eerily surreal image that seem both familiar and strange. Her photos go beyond setting up the angle and vantage point of the shot; they force us to try to see things as the artist does by their very nature. In her own way, King follows in the footsteps of other notable Canadian landscape artists: the artist forces her viewpoint onto the images, overcoming the landscape’s subject and revealing something more about the artist then perhaps intended. The near perfection of the natural lines and shapes of the mangrove forest provide an entry point for King to contemplate her subconscious thoughts. Equally as important, the series provides an opportunity for the viewer to ponder their own imagined realities.
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Holly King
Holly King
Holly King
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The place where you live is lit by the sun November 7 - December 19
Text by Marsha Taichman
We live in a culture that is losing its collective sense of wonder. With daily tragedies and horrors on the 6 o’clock news, it is easy to become numb. Sherri Hay has the rare ability to shock with her art. The theatrical subjects that she depicts in her works are becoming increasingly ethereal and other-worldly. Hay is known for her disaster globes, 5-inch snow globes, transparent spheres filled with both attached and free-floating white polystyrene cut into buildings and highways. When shaken, the tiny people trapped inside fall to their dismal fates, cars spin through the air and silently crash, enacting calamities that we bear witness to and hear about secondhand. We are left to construct their micro-narratives. In this exhibition, entitled The place where you live is lit by the sun, Hay’s work moves further from the familiar. A 2-foot Plexiglas square box holding water is reminiscent of the disaster globes in its materials and movement, but is slightly more abstract and much more hopeful. Beads of condensation drip down the inside of the container in tiny rivulets, and suggest potential regeneration in the form of a small, safe ecosystem. Nature in these works is exotic and outlandish. Genderless, almost-human forms covered in flowers offer a reverse anthropomorphism, where bodies bloom with delicate leaves and lilies, each petal giving a small performance. While Hay has constructed other flower people and hand-painted them in bright colours, it is notable that the latest piece, The first star hangs between his feet, is monochromatic. There is great attention to light in this work, calling attention to the contrasts, shapes and surfaces of the disembodied landscape. In it, a leaf-covered creature emerges on the horizon, crawling beneath a canopy of delicate vines on all fours, leaves fanned into hands. Its face is slightly in profile, but there are no features to search for emotion. A lone white bloom punctuates its head like a bold accessory, an adornment against the skin of leaves. The ambiguities in the work create interest as one cannot be sure whether this character is the hunter or the hunted. Hay’s work is an incongruous combination of movie set, outer space and ecological disaster. She takes pleasure in blurring the boundaries between science fiction and social reality, providing a land populated by chimeras and cyborgs that stimulate the imagination.
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Sherri Hay
Sherri Hay
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Sweet Crude September 19 – October 31, 2009
Text by Marsha Taichman
Cal Lane remembers her grandmother making cupcakes, then covering them with paper doilies and sifting icing sugar on their tops to create a decorative lace pattern. It is an accessible memory from her childhood that is revealing of the cultural inheritance she brings to her practice. In Lane’s series Powdered Tires, large car tires stand upright in the gallery that have been dusted with powdered sugar in latticed designs. The gentle impermanence and frivolity of the sugar seems to oppose the firm practicality and mobility of the tires, suggesting both utilitarian and domestic productions, and stereotypically masculine and feminine roles. Lane not only trained as an artist but also as a welder, and cultivated her skills for fabricating functional objects as an artistic technique. Contrasts are integral to Lane’s tactile 2- and 3-dimensional sculptures. There are elements of hard and soft, strong and delicate, masculine and feminine, art and craft, inside and outside, ancient and contemporary in her pieces. In Sweet Crude, Lane takes industrial objects, including oil cans, and incises them with ornate patterns. These cans are endowed with a completely new, aestheticized purpose. They manage to retain a sense of their former lives since they are identifiable for what they once were. The cans’ familiarity as functional objects and their uniqueness as an artistic medium make them accessible to a wide range of viewers. The cuttings depict power struggles between coupling mythological beings, urban street scenes and animal-studded landscapes, to name a few scenarios. Whole worlds are mapped out and carved from the metal surfaces of these cans. Splayed into cross-shapes, it is easy to discern continents and bodies of water in the tableaux. Up close, there are striking forms and details nestled in the red or black filigree: a pickup truck, a gunman, a maiden in profile.* These silhouetted people and objects reveal as much as they conceal, and they do not amount to a cohesive whole. Consider the exhibition’s title: The term “sweet crude” refers to the most sought-after form of petroleum. It is a vast understatement to say this is a resource that nations have fought to gain and to protect. In examining the power struggles of war or sex, a straightforward narrative is impossible. Clear allegorical expectations will not be met in the tangled tales Lane weaves. And the raw beauty of the objects confuses the complicated issues to which they are alluding. * The work that I am directly referring to is Oil Drum Map of the World #1, 2008, 70.5 x 79 inches, plasma-cut steel oil drum.
Touring exhibition dates: Art Gallery of Mississauga Southern Alberta Art Gallery Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides Maison Hamel – Bruneau (Québec)
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Cal Lane
Cal Lane
Cal Lane
Cal Lane
Cal Lane
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Vanitas August 15 - September 12
Text by Tatiana Mellema
As spouses and artistic collaborators Nicholas and Sheila Pye take both a delicate and dangerous look at married life. Working in performance, film, video, installation and photography the duo explore the teetering dynamics underlying human relationships. Staging the things that can go wrong in a mutually dependent and suffocating partnership, the artists play out scenarios arising from the facets of marriage. They use themselves as subjects performing dualities of attraction, repulsion, dependency and loss in a theatre that elicits Bertolt Brecht, Eugene Ionesco and the Brothers Grimm. Documents of their performances are presented as finished works, images reconfiguring a range of art historical antecedents from surrealist film, still life and narrative painting to nineteenth and twentieth century portraiture. Dark and beautiful, as well as challenging and funny their works are powerful emblems of the transformations that empower human intimacies. In their series of videos and photographs Nick and Shelia carefully stage scenes akin to historical vanitas and portraiture paintings in order to address issues of impermanence. Their painterly images arrange objects such as rotting flowers and skulls in a style reminiscent of sixteenth and seventeenth century vanitas paintings, whose mementos of death were intended as moralistic reminders of the transience of life and the futility of pleasure. For Nick and Sheila however these objects are used for their state of erosion that is symbolic of change and renewal. Transformation is considered in dual portraits of the artists as well, where they resign their physicality to nature. Depicting an eerily serene submission to the realm of earthly cycles, their portraits suggest a psychological opening to the reality of impermanence. Throughout the Vanitas corpus the Pyes’ present the necessity of coming to terms with change. Although not included in this exhibition, their recent video Loudly, Death Unties (2007) is a revealing component of this series. The final part of an ongoing film trilogy staging tensions and catharsis in love, in this video Sheila dies and floats peacefully into the air while Nick is left alone with a ritualistic fire that signals purification. By using death as a positive symbol of change, the piece completes the fable of how two people in a dependent relationship find their autonomy again. The Pyes repeatedly explore this theme of empowering new beginnings through mementos of death and love in settings that illicit imagined fairy tales and ancient myths. Staging richly symbolic allegories, Nick and Shelia explore the cycles of transformation necessary to human intimacy. The artists expose the ever-present questions of existence that are central to our supposedly routine relationships.
i Nicholas and Sheila Pye Artist Statement
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Nicholas & Sheila Pye
Nicholas & Sheila Pye
Nicholas & Sheila Pye |
After Landscape August 15 - September 12
This exhibition project by Montreal painters Harlan Johnson and David Hall presents a doubled barreled look at industry and its' place in the modern landscape. The paintings of Johnson and Hall present contrasting representations of landscape that question the present state of human society in relationship to oil and other industrial systems. Both artists portray the incursions of oil and other technologies as they dramatically transform the landscape. Informed by our awareness of art and social history, their works engage the spectator in a twin-edged reflection upon these two registers of representation. Conscious of the landscape genre and its romantic underpinnings in idealized views of nature; the works present an uneasy present view of the land, art and industry. Johnson’s acrylic paintings present a fixed moment of time, depicting burning offshore oil-drilling platforms in a marine environment. The works reflect an interest in the rich surfaces of colour field abstraction that informs his approach to representation. Iconic depictions of offshore conflagrations and "blow-outs" reveal the dramatic impact of technology upon nature. Hall’s works present bird’s eye views of urban landscapes, in which past present and future are conflated. Notions of progress and decline are invoked via the eerily reconfigured landscapes. Hall’s wide-angled tableaux portray cleared-out tracts of vacant land and vestiges of urban infrastructure from different The points of view depicted in the landscapes of both artists are privileged ones, not normally accessible to the casual observer. In the case of Johnson the observer is offshore, at sea level, in the presence of looming industrial structures in a state of crisis. With Hall’s work the viewer is elevated, proposing a vantage point lifted far above the ordinary. Through these contrasting points of view, as well as the sumptuous presence of painted surfaces the artists engage the viewer's gaze while enlisting them as witnesses to the impact of industry and changing ideals of progress.
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Harlan Johnson
David Hall
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Fresh Paint and New Construction July 11 - August 8, 2009
Text by Mike Patten
Fresh Paint and New Construction features over 200 recent works from thirty-nine up-and-coming students, selected for their quality and originality, in a juried exhibition. This year’s students are from the from the University of Ottawa (Ottawa, ON), York University (Toronto, ON), Concordia, University (Montréal, QC), Université Laval (Québec, QC), Université du Québec à Montréal (Montréal, QC), University of Western Ontario (London, ON), University of Waterloo (Waterloo, ON) and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Halifax, NS). The first edition of Fresh Paint, which made its debut in 2005, showcased works by five undergraduate painting students from Concordia University in Montréal. Now in its fifth year, the project has grown and evolved to include not only painting students, but also students studying sculpture from Montréal and throughout Eastern Canada in both undergraduate and graduate programs. This is an opportunity for the selected artists to present their work in a professional context. Many students presenting work in the past editions of Fresh Paint have subsequently moved on to become professional practicing artists with representation from established venues. In 2005, we invited Annie Hémond-Hotte and Nicolas Grenier to be represented by Art Mûr, and Magalie Comeau in 2006. Galerie Orange and Lacerte Art Contemporain now represent Ianick Raymond and Alexis Lavoie from the 2007 show. The Edward Day Gallery has enlisted Andrew Morrow from the 2008 exhibition and the PUSH gallery, Vitaly Medvedovsky, to name a few. Fresh Paint and New Construction offers a glimpse of the best of what’s to come in painting and sculpture while providing a critical educational component for the exhibiting artists.
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François Raymond (Université Laval)
Scott Bertram (NSCAD) |
Espace Verre: Orientation4 July 11 - August 8, 2009
This year's Espace Verre / Cegep du Vieux-Montreal graduating students include: Jamie Goodyear, Mélanie Lambert, Clément Bergeron and Édith Deschênes. This exhibition is the result of three years of hard work leading to a DEC in Metiers d'art, with a specialization in Glass. www.espaceverre.qc.ca
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Mélanie Lambert
Clément Bergeron |
The Resale Pierre Ayot, Dominique Blain, Pierre Blanchette, Kittie Bruneau, Michel Campeau, Pierre Chénier, Tom Dean, Pierre Dorion, Marcelle Ferron, Karille Fuglem, Violaine Gaudreau, Diane Giguère, Charles Guilbert, Betty Goodwin, Ron Grieco, John Heward, Harlan Johnson, Wanda Koop, Richard Lanctôt, Francine Larivée, Nicole Lebel, Marc Leduc, Serge Lemoyne, Rita Letendre, Herbert List, Michael Merrill, Gilles Mihalcean, Monique Mongeau, Julie Ouellet, Rober Racine, Thomas Renix, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Roadsworth, Sylvia Safdie, Marc Séguin, Stephen Schofield, Charles Tyler, Pierre-Léon Tétreault, Claude Tousignant, Martha Townsend, Angèle Verret, François Vincent, Mark Vanstdal, Irene F. Whittome, Robert Wolfe, Sawan Yawnghwe
July 11 - August 8, 2009
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Modern Camouflage May 23 - June 20, 2009
Text by Marsha Taichman Upon entering Juliana España Keller’s studio, there is an image of a woman, a self portrait by the artist. An ongoing motif in España Keller’s work is the self portrait, in this instance, head on, like a deer in the headlights. But rather than looking stunned, España Keller looks weary and knowing in an unstable world. She gives the viewer a direct stare. Her camouflage makeup accentuates the fact that she is otherwise unadorned, her hair is drawn away from her face, and her shoulders are bare. Rather than showing the viewer more of herself, her face in obscured by war paint. One might recall Gavin Turk’s Camouflage (Self-Portrait) or Andy Warhol’s Self Portrait with Camouflage from toward the end of his career, after he had been a target for both art criticism and gunshots. Though Keller’s work also nods to consumerism and commodity culture, it is more subtle, requiring viewers to ask questions of this image and the art within the exhibit that it accompanies. She is offering herself to the viewer as the target, entreating viewers to examine concerns that are integral to her practice: concealment, illumination and theatre with a purpose. España Keller’s diverse artistic background is showcased through her paintings, photographs and sculptures. It is easy to feel trapped, surrounded, when looking at these works. Everything is bound in some way, framed, but still unsafe. Her sculptural light box installations illuminate troubling subjects: the artifice of a toy gun, a dock lurking in calm water. In this project, she inserts herself in rural settings with selected tools and props, and then photographs what transpires. The images are visually seductive, with rich hues and vibrant colors, which make them more difficult to see them as threatening. Examine the image of the Husky in profile and the animal trap in concert (yet to be titled). The dog, strong and regal, is reduced to the role of victim by association because of the trap’s terrible potential. What the images and sculptures represent is untamed, but there is a sense that camouflage is being employed here as well, as staged images that seem to blend in with nature photography. In our high-tech, sci-fi reality, we have made a collective claim on the wild, and España Keller draws attention to this sad fact. In this exhibition, the battle is to move the boundaries between the urban and the rural, the physical and the cultural, the understated and the overstated, to explore the in-between. Modern Camouflage is a highly personal investigation of what constitutes the self and its surroundings. Perhaps the artist herself phrases it best when she claims, “It is a soulful search for the ‘urban primitive’ in all of us.”
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Juliana España Keller
Juliana España Keller
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Moats, Ropes and Revisions May 23 - June 20, 2009
Text by Jaynus O’Donnell
Judith Berry’s playful, yet ominous landscape paintings conjure immediate visual associations. Suggestions of aerial mapping, children’s building block toys, candy, mazes and mythical worlds are present in the works. In viewing these paintings I instantly find entry points that are simultaneously nostalgic and pastoral, maintaining enough ambiguity to allow narrative interpretations to wander and remain dynamic. The works imply concurrent processes of construction and destruction. The architectural elements consisting of natural materials (wood, sticks, grass) and human-made forms (black and white plastic-like structures, brick, pruned bushes) appear to be in the midst of completion. While the destructive aspects, such as fallen trees; collapse; temporary structures and erosion, appear to foster the progress of construction through provisions of material and space. The viewer is initially invited directly into the work as a builder and there is ample room in the works for their imaginings to become additions to the landscapes and to the activities therein. The cyclical implications of these courses of erection and collapse combined with a constant sense of rebuilding imply a passage of time and human (or possibly animal) activity. However, these temporal and circumstantial impressions remain only as intuitions. The uncertainties embedded in the works seem to be the result of a scarcity of contextual information about the time and space of the landscapes. Scale is greatly ambiguous without such reference points as human figures. It seems just as plausible, within the same landscape, for a giant hand to sweep in and rearrange a pile of sticks as it does for a tiny person to require assistance from machines or other people in completing the same task. There is also little information about the structures’ uses, how long they have been there for, who made them and from what materials. These questions and the minimal contextual information does not arise from a lack of clarity in the work, rather, it seems that these inquiries are formed by using recognizable imagery with odd variations in tandem with confusing scale and spatial considerations. Black and white structures, reminiscent of licorice candies, act as buildings with seemingly no entrance and hedges form mazes that appear to never trap you in a dead-end. The paintings urge the viewer to enter the world and attempt to answer the questions that emerge during viewing and thus, further implicate the audience personally into the work.
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Judith Berry
Judith Berry |
Bone China May 23 - June 20, 2009
Bone China emerged as a reflection on the relationship between synthetic and organic aesthetic properties. By fusing the two, Ramsay has attempted to create a kind of hybrid object that while alluding to both, partakes in neither. Each Bone China piece is the result of an intuitive, meditative interaction with the piece of bone in which new volume is added and refined. This process is repeated until a final form is achieved in which the boundaries between the original, organic, and new, synthetic elements are lost. The white finish completes the work by obscuring much of the surface detail of the bone leaving behind an object that defies categorization and frustrates attempts to identify technique, material or provenance. Bevan Ramsay’s practice may be understood as an ongoing reflection on the possibility of illustrating complex ideas through the material facts of an object and the formal relationships between its constituent parts. The work does not provide commentary on, or editorialize the subjects it deals with. Rather, it is an attempt to create physical representations or metaphors for complex phenomena. Formal ideas are the most basic currency of his art practice, but they are also inseparable from materials and process. The practical outcome of this approach is a fixation on conceptual unity. Although the concepts he investigates are problematized in his work to create conceptual compounds, there is nevertheless an attempt to leave them with the character of a semantic whole. In this way the ideas are diffracted and collapse in upon themselves through the same material exploration.
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Bevan Ramsay
Bevan Ramsay
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En pure perte April 11 - May 16th, 2009
Text by Jaynus O’Donnell Manipulating mechanisms and materials such as wood, electric engines, resin, metal, glass and light, Guillaume Lachapelle creates fantastical yet familiar miniature worlds. Skillfully utilizing these concoctions of material and technology, the artist generates tiny architectural realms that speak of physical and psychological conditions. It is implied that these conditions are potentially generated by our relationships with urban environments, and specifically, with the physical structure or ‘stuff’ of these environments. Urinals and toilets, furniture, half-finished buildings and façades combined with dramatic lighting, subdued colour and implied (or literal) action in the scenes express a dream-like existence, where movements are repetitive and night is long, if not everlasting. The works are structurally sparse and their narratives vague, producing room for viewer intervention. This physical and psychological spaciousness seems to almost conflict with the minute scale of the works, but, in actuality, it creates an openness and unfinished feeling that enables the viewer to place themselves directly within the action (or implied action) of the scenes. Becoming a part of the artwork in this way may enable audiences to empathize with the creatures and anthropomorphized objects present in the miniatures. And even more interesting, is the potential for multiple narrative completions carried out by different viewers. There are many stories to be found in these worlds. Lachapelle seems aware that the ambiguity created through fragmentation and spaciousness coupled with unusual action allows for viewer controlled interpretive threads to emanate beyond the immediate temporal surroundings of the artworks. Eventually, in addition to Lachapelle’s original intention, the artworks become imbued with the natures, desires, fears and hopes of their onlookers. The combination of the familiar with the unfamiliar begs the viewer to be both attracted to and confused or curious about the miniatures, a combination of states which prompts further intellectual involvement in a piece of art. For myself, Lachapelle’s work prompted questions about isolation and decomposition in urban environments. I wondered about the happenings of night, about what we don’t often see in cities, about rooftops and abandon buildings and the skeleton of the city. The work made me question my own position within the city. What the urban atmosphere looks like and how we are able to or manage to navigate it seem important contributors to our collective and individual psychological, perhaps unconscious, states. Viewing Lachapelle’s work and placing myself within his frame provoked me to see the unusual in the commonplace during my travels throughout the urban landscape.
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Guillaume Lachapelle
Guillaume Lachapelle
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Landscape of Sorrow and other new work April 11 - May 16th, 2009
Text by David Garneau
Nadia Myre’s beaded Indian Act and her half birch bark, half aluminum canoe History in Two Parts (2002) are iconic Aboriginal Canadian art works. Indian Act (1999-2002) consists of all 56 pages of that federal statute transliterated into beads. White seed beads displace letters while red ones occupy the ground, suggesting that the government’s words are racially ‘white’, the colonist’s language. These passages can also be read as blanks, mute absences punctuating red territory. Tempting as it is to read post-colonial ‘Indian’ meanings into every gesture First Nations’ artists make, Myre might be assumed to also express content beyond that one matrix. Taken as a whole, the primary theme of her oeuvre is not Aboriginal but a delicious and acid relationship with language, people and environment. It is not just colonial prose that tastes both sweet and bitter to her tongue, but also (not knowing) the Algonquin language, masculine words, the language of power, of intimate relations, visual language, and so on. Myre struggles with signification, the desire to mean but not be consumed, to express but not be taken only at her word. She seems to suffer from logophobia and logophillia simultaneously: a drive to speak and a fear of saying the wrong thing. Myre is a poet who wants to make something trustworthy of text, something tactile, a tangible material that can be held between thumb and forefinger, pieced by a needle, re-formed and made mute to literal meaning and open to affect. Because of the hundreds of hours she and her assistants put into hand crafting the Indian Act, her enterprise seems more transfiguration than deconstruction, more loving than iconoclastic. It is as if she wants to meticulously replace the old words with new ones but is uncertain what to say. She wants to coax, not command—make over words into speechless texts. Images are speechless texts; they are mute without viewers to give them tongue. Writing in white, these spaces are now fill-in-the-blanks where interlocutors can craft their appropriate meanings. Of Journey of the Seven Fires, Myre explains, “this series borrows ideas from the Seven Fires Prophesy Wampum Belt, which speaks about the destruction of the earth if we do not shift from materialism to spirituality.” These large pieces consist of beaded logos of “companies whose practices cause or have caused environmental damage and who have a dubious or difficult relationship with First Nations people.” Like the Indian Act, the gesture is time consuming and loving, a form of magical thinking that imagines a transformation of consciousness and a better relationship founded on care. She is not despoiling these logos but ritualistically making them over, needling them. The action is shamanic rather than a shaming. It is an exercise of the belief that tiny, personal, repetitive gestures have the power of prayer. The other new series resembles a Surrealist picture poem—suggestive visual puns that both invite and resist reading. The titles (Pet Cock, Try Cock, Automatic, and Lubricator) are gleaned from piping and instrumentation diagrams. Myre may be offering a critique of the masculinization of industries, but given her other tactile poems, she may also be demonstrating the erotics of the work place—how sites usually thought to repress desire actually embed “Desire Schematics” in the fabric of its discourses. The tone of these works is earnest amusement—the pleasure of making connections and playing. Aboriginal artists often have their every gesture read as an echo of their culture in ways that mainstream artists are less likely to face. Some succumb to the script and play to expectations within ‘Indian’ tropes. Others, like Myre, have a bit of fun being incomplete and imperfect ‘Indians’. By combining industrial design and Aboriginal beading, she invites but does not quite satisfy ‘Indian’ association. She knows that some people will think the pipe images have Algonquin meanings. Such play is funny but also melancholic, an acknowledgement of a loss. Many Aboriginal artists have an anxious relationship with their culture. In order to signify in the contemporary art world they had to learn to speak the dominant language, know its history and ways. It is extremely difficult to be competent in both systems. This sounds like a choice, when in fact it is a negotiation with the assimilationist project. Some artists are very clever about opening up a space between the cultures where they mumble new selves into shape. Myre has an allergy to sentences that attempt to engineer people and a love of the poetic, the suggestive, the seductive, the malleable and mis-taken. “There are many ways from which to look at the work but for the most part they all come down to grappling with things I don't understand.” There is throughout her work a desire to signify, to come into presence but also to be imprecise and uncapturable, of having a self beyond words, being present but escaping comprehension.
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Nadia Myre
Nadia Myre
Nadia Myre |
Retrospective on paper (1955 - 2004) February 26 - April 4, 2009
Text by James D. Campbell
Much critical ink has been spilled extolling the virtues of the sculptures and paintings of Claude Tousignant. (And I plead somewhat guilty to that crime myself.) Less so on his daunting inventory of works on paper, which date from the earliest beginnings of his project through to the present. (And I plead guilty to that neglect as well). Why so neglected? From the 1950s through today, this artist, like so many others, chose to exhibit what the public wanted to see. For the most part, that meant paintings and sculptures. Of course, he also exhibited works on paper, but only intermittently. The truth is that the full breadth of the artist’s creative lifetime is there to be found on paper: in watercolours, inks, oils, lithographs, sketches, collages and so on. Tousignant’s status as one of the most important artists now working is beyond doubt. A further proof of that stature can be found in the technical virtuosity of his works on paper, which afford a fulsome measure of his genius. Paper has always been a support that, for him, offers a fertile ground for experimentation. Some are sketches for paintings and environmental installations, but not many. Most were meant to stand alone. And they do. The small works from the 1950s are dazzling. Here the artist’ pure instinctual love of pure chroma comes shining through in an almost Fauvist way (think of Kees van Dongen’s rugs, cloaks, shawls and throws with their clustered aggregates of pure chroma and you will see what I mean). Long before he painted his first monochromes on canvas, his ardour for and intoxication with pure colour seeps out of his works on paper like some lovely distillate of eye, mind and spirit working in concert. Could he have painted those monochromes without these myriad attempts, many of which are now on exhibit at Art Mur? I, for one, doubt it. Consider a work from the 1950s in soft-edged vertical zones of white, ochre and red. The elongated taches of pure chroma are delicate and overwhelmingly inviting, and there is a fine sense of harmonic balance throughout. The works exhibited here are nothing less than revelatory of a life spent pursuing the infinite possibilities of pure color and form. Tousignant’s audience – which will only grow wider with his current retrospective at the Musée d’art contemporain – should make a point of visiting the Art Mur exhibition halls. Chances are that they will not have the same opportunity any time soon. Works on paper are manifestly fragile things, and we are lucky that so many of these have survived in pristine condition. As soon as the museums latch onto them, they will be dispersed far and wide. Run, don’t walk, to Art Mur and feast your eyes.
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Claude Tousignant
Claude Tousignant
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Unraveling - The Dress of Jadwiga February 26 - April 4, 2009
Text by James D. Campbell
A tattered dress hanging freely in space seems less resilient than the flesh it was meant to clothe, but more enduring than human memory often is. Ewa Monika Zebrowski’s grandmother’s dress is, for her, a palpable enigma, a fragmented palimpsest of memories lost and rescued. She has said that she would have preferred that it were embroidered with a narrative braille that her fingers could read. But its enigmas have led her to create one of her finest bodies of photographic work. Literally unraveling it may well be, but the artist has transferred its enigmas over to her viewers, to unravel for ourselves, in time. Zebrowski is an artist who has never been uncomfortable with the enigmatic. This is true of her earlier work, and the Venice images in particular. In this new work, she celebrates both her grandmother’s living memory and the enigmas her dress embodies through ceremonial observance. This lends her deeply private subject matter work an unusual pungency, a sense of the liminal, and a deeply haunting face. She navigates the borderlines of her experience, explores her own memories and commemorates her grandmother in a medium well-suited for that purpose. The rituals of photography allow for full commemoration, after all. Zebrowski knows this well. But there is something more. Distance is as important to the photographic image’s power as it is to the act of commemoration itself. She is respectful of that necessary distance. And yet she succeeds in rescuing from oblivion not just the enigma of her grandmother’s dress, but her body memory as well. She wore that dress and carried it with her throughout her life on her diasporic journey through time and circumstances harrowing and domestic. Why? Any answer must remain, of course, speculative. Zebrowski has made a deeply private ceremonial into a meditation on memory and loss that we all can understand. Her memorabilia becomes commemorabilia, and somehow communal, as we remember along with her. She proves those commentators wrong who hold that the photographic image is mute in that it is, while perfectly adequate as a reminder, inadequate as a commemorabilium. (1) Her grandmother’s dress is an ephemeral artefact, subsequent to attrition and more than fraying at the edges – like memory itself. But, aura-laden in thoughtfulness and resonance, it is a perfectly effective and eloquent commemorabilium. Clearly, Ewa Zebrowski, in these photographs (and video) of her grandmother’s dress and of her stepdaughter wearing a recreation of it, proves that “photography is not valued so much for capturing – transcribing – as for going beyond (or beneath) an artifact’s superficial appearance, in order to capture what is most valuable in it”. (2). Her grandmother’s dress becomes not just something worn – even though it still carries latent body memories along with it – but something thought. Something still lived, remembered, commemorated – and still capable of seizing the imagination. This photographer goes beneath and beyond the surface of images and things to secure what is most valuable and offers us her own commemorabilium. Endnotes 1. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study 2. Frederick N. Bohrer, “Photography and Archaeology: The Image as Object” in Envisioning the Past:
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Ewa Monika Zebrowski
Ewa Monika Zebrowski
Ewa Monika Zebrowski |
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Tu n'es qu'une étoile February 26 - April 4, 2009
Text by Jaynus O'Donnell
In the body of work Tu n'es qu'une étoile , Simon Bilodeau combines monochrome, what he terms “no colour”, painting and sculpture to create a dramatized representation of reality. In this skewed but accessible vision, Bilodeau questions the role and status of the artist in relation to art consumers (viewers) and traditional spaces for viewing art (exhibition spaces). References to construction/destruction and incomplete or degenerating architectural spaces indicate the instability of metaphorical structures such as authenticity and visual understanding. This commentary points to the fragile and subjective quality of meaning formation when considering visual symbols, including artwork and the physical spaces where artwork is situated. Minimalistic tendencies such as uniformity of colour and form edge into this milieu and are present in some pieces. However, combined with the inclusion of gestural tactics in Bilodeau’s work, these tendencies become peripheral and seem not to indicate a straightforward affinity with Minimalism . However, it is partly this minimal and sparse physical appearance that enables the viewer to initially become engaged in activities of mental completion and construction. This viewer-dependent interaction (or participation) creates a more level relationship between the artist and viewer; the reinstitution of the viewer’s choice through active intellectual involvement and meaning construction encourages a more personal interaction with the work. In this self-reflexive yet inclusive strategy, Bilodeau develops a concern with diluting the authority of the artist. And in doing so, creates multiple and layered meanings through diverse viewer involvement. The introduction of this autonomy succeeds in combating notions of art-stardom and acknowledges the importance of viewer interaction in the completion of artworks. The creation of art becomes something more than a solitary venture and the artwork seems tentatively placed in time and space, becoming ever altered by its surroundings. This notion places artwork not only in temporally and spatially variable atmospheres, but also in the most literal of social contexts. The art interacts, it is interacted with and it is altered by opinions, judgments and actions of the spaces and people around it. Minimalism has often, and arguably falsely, been criticized for its coldness and inaccessibility. And while there are elements of - and even historically relevant homages to - Minimalism in Tu n'es qu'une étoile, Bilodeau successfully avoids the criticisms associated with the movement through openly implanting entry points and social components into the austere landscape of his painting and sculpture practice.
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Simon Bilodeau
Simon Bilodeau
Simon Bilodeau |
Abstractions of a Paradigm January 14 - February 21, 2009
Text by Jaynus O'Donnell
In viewing Scott Yoell’s work, one is prompted to more closely examine the physical and metaphysical states of their own proximate societies. Confronting the ideological agendas of culture production, and especially the production of artificial cultural paradises, Yoell explores issues pertinent to a variety of disciplines and concerns including the construction and consumption of visual culture and media. In his body of work Abstractions of a Paradigm1 Yoell utilizes sculpture, installation, drawing and time-based video and sound to explore and critique humankind’s relationship with the world it has constructed and with the natural world. Works such as A Fiction of Paradise, 2007 and What Remains?, 2008 look at the spaces in between: the discarded, the forgotten, the ignored, and the temporally fragile. Notions of lapsed time and detritus settle into these works and establish an uneasy correspondence between excessive human desires and the natural world. A Fiction of Paradise, 2007 exudes a clinically detached aesthetic. In this diptych, Yoell’s palette is limited to black, grey and flesh tone. The image of a deceased albatross on the left and the contents of its dissected stomach on the right are realistically rendered, and recall medical illustrations common in textbooks and encyclopedias. This visual relation to scientific data conveys notions of indisputable truth, evidence and invention. Yoell appears savvy to the stereotypical notions of optimistic progress associated with scientific activity and turns this knowledge toward a critique of cultural activities taking similar liberties. The bird’s stomach is shown to contain an enormous accumulation of plastic memorabilia often associated with tourism. The inability of the animal to digest these human-made products creates a tension between the natural (bird) and the unnatural or human-made (plastic). The fact that one bird could be so overrun with and possibly have died as a result of these leftover cultural artifacts seems to point blatantly to our overproduction and inability to cohabit with our natural world. What Remains?, 2008 similarly critiques the idea of humanity’s self-constructed waste. The piece metaphorically depicts the North Pacific Gyre, a section of the Pacific Ocean whose swirling current has collected and held onto many miles of superfluous products of human consumption. The plastic and silicon used to construct the piece aptly reflect the composition of many of the items found in the actual North Pacific Gyre. Similar to A Fiction of Paradise, 2007 and the other pieces in Abstractions of a Paradigm, this work serves as a reminder of the way we cyclically produce, use and discard our cultural surroundings, and questions the necessity of the initial production. 1. Paradigm. noun: a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated ; broadly : a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind
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Scott Yoell
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Matérialisation du signifiant January 14 - February 21, 2009
Text by James D. Campbell
In her enigmatic new paintings, Magalie Comeau deconstructs the architecture of space itself, both inside and outside, not only to simulate its new tenses and tensions, but to reveal and highlight the tremulous private body that inhabits it. This painter, in so doing, elliptically touches upon the transit of that body through the social world, and the fugitive workings of memory and desire. In her paintings, mysterious organic forms and fragments of architecture seem to emerge from the void as though locked behind unbreakable panes of glass. Their infiltration of or passage between other realities across seemingly infinite spaces echoes the way that memory has with things past and fleeting. Certainly, Comeau’s space in painting is not just a geometric space, but a space of thought, memory, meditation -- and manifestation. The space is also then, of course, the privacy space, both hers and ours. It is also a painting space that is uniquely our own. Her geometrical deconstruction of the spaces we inhabit sacralizes the human, and she attempts to show how human agents necessarily morph in order to survive in the face of the unknown. The perception of her work can induce a certain salutary vertigo, and she encourages us to assume a series of varying perspectives upon it. The paintings are never static – and they discourage any semblance of stasis in their presence. The artist has said: “Je décortique la logique de l’espace afin que l’image fasse appel à un déplacement du corps et se transforme selon le point de vue où elle se donne. J’incite ainsi visuellement le spectateur à adopter plusieurs perspectives et échelles de proximité avec le tableau afin qu’il puisse faire une immersion dans l’environnement proposé et se confronter à une zone d’inconfort l’appelant à se réinventer des codes en relation avec l’image.” While, on one level, her passionate and unswerving deconstruction of the "logical space" opens up new avenues for her painting, her dimensional deconstruction of the space of memory and desire means new experiences for the sensitive viewer. Her invocation of phenomenological space and its interstices – the liminal spaces between – is handled in a haunting and convincingly deft manner. Her subversive use of geometry betrays an almost Buddhistic meditation on the dialectical relationship between human beings and the spaces they inhabit. Comeau’s signature space is more about inhabitation than it is about evoking the volumetric space of architecture. While it often seems as though the vignettes in her paintings verge on or interface with some strange virtual reality, the truth is that they thematize a space for the lived body, and thus broach our relationship to the social world. Arguably, Comeau is adding a new dimension to the illusionistic space of painting, while at the same time never losing sight of the quintessentially human. Hence, the title of her recent series: Matérialisation du signifiant.
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Magalie Comeau
Magalie Comeau |
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Sense of Space November 15 - February 21, 2009
Text by Katie Apsey
"… [While we were growing up], the cultural revolution started by Chairman Mao had successfully turned China into a really crazy country. Education was a lie and lies were truth…" -Gao Brothers The career of the Gao Brothers, an internationally recognized duo who burst onto the arts scene in the late eighties, crosses multiple genres and styles - from emotional performances and romantic photography to bombastic installations and Pop Art sculptures. The Brothers often offer a more subtle take on post-Mao China than their Chinese contemporaries. They address both a painful cultural legacy (their father was jailed and then murdered during the Cultural Revolution) and the side effects of the program of industrialization/urbanization/modernization propelled by the Chinese state – with unusual hope and vulnerability. Architecture and man-made spaces figure largely as metaphors for the human condition within a society frantically rebuilding itself and re-entering the international scene through capitalism and consumerism. In the Sense of Space series, naked, awkward humans are shoved and/or placed into a type of wall storage unit found in many urban apartments. Like a living Louise Nevelson sculpture, the unit becomes a visual translation of the cramped and isolated living situation within a chaotic city where people often have no contact with their neighbors. The men and women in the wall unit are physically close but psychologically distanced - unable or unwilling to communicate with each other outside the walls of their miniature worlds. Similar ideas are reflected in recent series, such as The Utopia of Construction and The Outer Space Project. In these digital renditions, miniature figures inserted into countless cells recall bee hives, industrial storage units, ant farms or high-rise apartments. Through such stark utopias (literally no(t)-place), the Gao Brothers bring overlooked everyday activities into sharp focus. De-contextualized and compartmentalized within these “forever unfinished constructions” (a symbol unique to Contemporary China), the people initially appear to reflect sadness and a deep, spiritual poverty. Closer examination, however, reveals that some “residents” of these Bosch-like worlds are smiling - even embracing; the Brothers leave room for redemption. In 2006, the Brothers’ repertoire began to shift with their Miss Mao series. Each Miss Mao represents the quintessential twentieth-century Chinese political icon with his trademark mole and haircut, yet disturbingly modified. Here Mao appears caricaturized, taking on the chubby cheeks of Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio’s phallic nose, but also large silicon breasts. With the candy-coated look of a Murakami sculpture, Mao is no longer threatening, but only a grotesque parody of the ideology, “Communism is the Mother of Us All.” Signifiers get crossed – maternal warmth is made lurid by Western consumerism, Communism made shiny and infantile with absurd sweetness. One example, Miss Mao in Confinement, includes the entire body of a gold-painted James Bond model. She is enigmatic; she could be giving birth or masturbating. Does the red dragon (red symbolizing prosperity and good luck but also the State and the Communist party) give her pleasure or pain? Can the monstrosity that Mao has become give birth to a new China grounded in her long cultural history? Or can she only find momentary masturbatory pleasure by shielding her face from the lies? The Gao Brothers leave us to ponder and hope.
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Gao Brothers |
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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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Flash Forward 2008 January 14 - February 21, 2009
Emerging Photographers from Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Flash Forward is The Magenta Foundation’s annual emerging photographers competition. Now in its fourth year, this compelling look at the future of emerging talent from three countries brings to light the talent and promise of an exceptional group of photographers. Flash Forward showcases the future of photography, focusing on emerging talent that jurors have identified as having great potential. This small volume is essential for curators, collectors, advertising professionals and artists who wish to stay fully informed about up-and-coming photographers. The jury is comprised of top industry professionals. This year’s jurors are Dean Baldwin from the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto, Sara Knelman from the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Simon Bainbridge from the British Journal of Photography in the UK, Paul Herrmann from Redeye—the Photography Network, Paul Wombell from the Hereford Photo Festival, Darren Ching from Photo District News in New York and Debra Klomp Ching from Klompching Gallery in New York. Catalogue available http://www.magentafoundation.org/books/flash-forward-2008/FF08-final-lowres.pdf
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Lucas Foglia, UNITED STATES
Sabrina Russo, CANADA
Sabrina Russo, CANADA
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