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Past exhibitions at Art Mûr 2007 |
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Naturally Intimate Text by Michael Rattray To look over the new works of Sylvie Fraser is to be sequestered into an intimate exchange between spectator and artist. The images offer a distortion of place through layering and invoke the personal reflections of an artist working in the constructed spaces of self-representation. Through an amalgamation of place with self, the images both convolute and express a manufactured containment of the personal with the public. In the diptych Le bleu du ciel, Fraser, in her self-representation, uses multiple frames -the frame of the photograph and the frame of the tent window- as a means to possibly comment on the enclosed window of spectatorship. Through enclosure, be it through the gallery space or the private space of contemplation, the artist presents a border where she is located outside of our understanding, or outside the view of clear vision. As viewers, we do not encounter the artist in her natural environment of creativity; we are privy to the moments where constructions and enclosures have framed our understandings into exchanges of expectation. The artist creates outside of this expectation, and therefore is localized in the natural environment to perhaps echo the intimate act of creation itself. The second -or first photo, dependant on whether a choice is made to read the work from right to left or left to right- photo of the diptych can be regarded as an instance where Fraser opens up the dialogue of the work to be inclusive of regarding the natural as a construction unto itself. The sky resembles a tarp, further distorting understandings of place. The bleu of the tarp is juxtaposed to the bleu of her shawl, both utilitarian objects used to cover ourselves from the outside world. Therefore, while the artist seeks to be outside of the frame of the viewer, she is not outside of her own constructions of the natural landscape. Le blanc d'hiver offers an additional instance where the artist combines an element of the constructed landscape with the constructed self. The work, another diptych, again makes use of the tarp, only in this instance it acts as the landscape of the ground leading up to the rural construction. Contrasted with the white roots of the artist's hair, the piece offers a commentary on the feigned manipulations that occur within. A place where the subject rests in a constant state of inquiry and expectation, never sure of anything, but acutely aware of the reality that sits outside its own distortions of existence.
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The Capacious Memory Robbie Cornelissen From October 29 to November 2007 Text by Erin Silver Meta Knol, “The Elastic Pencil,” Het Reservaat, 2003. Knol.
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Robbie Cornelissen, Tweedlee Dum and Tweedlee Dee, 2002 |
L'Oeil du Quattrocento Text by Erin Silver Claude Ferland does fit into a box--a very small box, lined with red walls and a checkerboard floor. Bending his knees, elbows, back, the androgynous figure, costumed in black pants, red spats, and a jester-like hat, contorts his body, trying on various positions and never settling on one. In the claustrophobic environment of the video work L'Oeil de Quattrocento , this seemingly mythical creature is forced to be his own best friend, his own source of entertainment, waving around his scepter like Huck Finn chewing on a reed, certainly confined by the space, but also by the limitations of his own imagination. Citing Albert Camus as inspiration, Ferland quotes, "We invented a prison in the medieval period that was not tall and not large enough. The prisoner was always in a malaise position because he could not stand up or lie down completely."1 Within the red box, Ferland is his own prisoner, the walls around him seeming to cave in the more he attempts to extend them--a mise en scène situating Ferland as the contemporary embodiment of the historical condition described by Camus. What is suggested by this work is that even if he were to break free from physical confinement, he would inevitably confront the even tighter constraints of his inner world, "deceived by the illusion of liberty and by existence's lies, suffocating under our own malaise ."2 In discussing Ferland's work, Martine Rouleau asks, "Is it really the appropriate term to designate a sense of longing for something that was never lost because it was never possessed in the first place?"3 Though the scene may have changed, the terrain of enclosed space is not new to Ferland; consistently placing himself in fantastical, impossible settings that offer no beginning or ending, no logical way in or out, Ferland is held prisoner not only by his surroundings, but also by his own longing, paralyzed by the devastation of unattainable desires. In returning to or remaining at his starting point, in confronting the open world or the microcosmic one in which he currently finds himself, Ferland perceives his environments as just as much prisons as sites of freedom. Rouleau suggests that Ferland "conveys a disenchanted world in which all the elements of the fairy tale might be present but fail to yield the anticipated 'happily ever after'."4 Despite his carnivalesque attire and light-hearted demeanor, Ferland does not usher in respite from suffering; what Ferland posits through his entrapment is that perhaps there is no happily ever after, that perhaps we must learn to find modes through which to bear the prison of our own dissatisfactions. 1 Claude Ferland, "Artist Statement," Art Mûr, http://www.artmur.com/english/artists/artistes/Claude_Ferland.htm
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October 29 to November 3, 2007 |
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Room 1 The work of Kamila Wozniakowska appropriates currents and trends of the Western-Painterly Cannon as a means to subvert expectations concerning painting as an authentic tool of image rendering. Through a multidisciplinary practice of painting, printmaking and digital imaging techniques, the artist samples compositional elements of iconic styles, movements and persons affiliated with Art Historical narrative combined with personal photographs as a means to expose the underbelly of the painting as didactic narrative. The act of viewing the works is one that can leave a spectator confused, elated and laughing all within the same moment. It is hard not to chuckle at a work such as “New York Expressionist Kicking Dog”, even harder once you see a cyclical Pollock dancing for the spectator in a broken narrative succession occupying a single frame of the series. The work, a part of the larger Peripheral Visions series, is a sequence of fifteen images detailing Jackson Pollock, famed Abstract Expressionist and absentee promotional advocate for American Cultural Imperialism, kicking a dog of possible pedigreed standards. The absurd narrative, which includes an equestrian portrait as well as a nod to John Constable's ( June 11, 1776 – March 31, 1837 ) Study of Clouds series, sedulously comments on Art History's reliance on high cultured icons –the dog of pedigree, the equestrian master, the painter to own- as a means to assert a potentially contrived, or conjectured, narrative. That Pollock, arguably one of the most important painters of the 20 th century, is specifically referenced in the work while kicking at a dog should not be lost on the spectator. Is Wozniakowska commenting on Pollock's notorious temper? His unwanted pedigree of being stigmatized as the uneducated farm boy turned high culture darling of the New York capitalist vanguard? Alternatively, are we seeing the artist comment on the genealogy of narrative in art, where the story behind the work informs and explains the work itself, as if the work of the artist cannot last by its own value as an object of creation? The works contained in Peripheral Visions and Exercises de style are representative of a process-based aesthetic that confounds the image as a narrative construction or authenticator of the real. Through the quotation of multiple styles -be it the New Objective, 17 th century Flemish and 18 th century Venetian genre or the Pompeian Fresco- the artist comments on how shifts in narrative constructions throughout history can effect contemporary moments of perception. The pieces offer the spectator multiple readings and multiple views, commenting on both the formal aspects of image composition and the human relations contained therein. Text by Michael Rattray
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Songs of the Apocalypse O Rose thou art sick
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August 18 to September 22, 2007 |
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Room 1 Interaction with one of Lamontagne's works is, simply put, a surreal experience. By using one of several points of entrance, viewers are permitted to experience multiple views of combinations of two and 3-dimensional aspects of his work that redefine the rules of space. Whether looking through peep-holes, or in experiencing the final effects of his mise-en-scène, Lamontagne's work courts the viewer's curiosity and imagination, inviting them to let go of traditional ways of seeing and to enter into a playful relationship of what is possible. The piecemeal nature of his mise-en scène with the steam locomotive engine, paired with the accompanying audio recalls time gone by. It remains unclear, however whether this is a memory work, or from a parallel, past, or future time. The space itself appears somewhat liquid in that the various elements are capable of pulling even further away from one another, increasing their dissolving aspect. The upper portions of the canvases succeed at further confusing our understanding of this space with their contradictory gravity work. The streaked nude canvas left exposed would have us believe that there is an upward force on the painted image, while the subjects of the images are reacting only to the usual gravitational pulls. To further confound an understanding of the space, it is not clear as to whether the painted images are in the process of dissolving or being created. Like in dreams or memories there is a sense of something being slightly amiss, or askance. Suspended just short of being fully realized or separated from a state of wholeness, the scene is both static and yet there is a heightened awareness of the potentially impending series of motions that would play out. Other glimpses into parallel and alien scenarios are found throughout the exhibit, offering impossible views and playfully prodding the mind to accept or consider other possibilities. In keeping with past works, there is a focus on an interdisciplinary approach that merges and creates new realities as well as allows for a wide range of perspectives- while maintaining a playfulness. The everyday nature of the visual subject is inclusive, cemeteries, studios, countryside, fireplaces, a sunset, their simplicity is instrumental in allowing viewers to focus of the mechanics of navigating and understanding how the artworks inhabit their space, and the relationships that exist between the viewer and any of the given works.
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Perdre son temps pour enfin ne plus le retrouver, 2
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Room 2 Flavio Trevisan's Logic series (2005) confounds notions of architectural grandeur, as well as permanence, in its presentation of six small-scale sculptures that are reminiscent of architectural maquettes. While the opening of each sculpture gives the illusion of a microcosmic labyrinthine corridor made never-ending by unpredictable twists and turns, the interiors of these structures become an afterthought to their intricate exteriors. Using illustration board and drywall compound to construct his elaborate sculptures, Trevisan is both artist and architect, his work both concept and construction. Describing the creation of the surfaces of his sculptures as "a time-consuming process that involves the gradual accumulation of planes," he points to how these planes can be read as complex installations that not only mimic the pristine angularity and impenetrable robustness of the cityscape but also expose and examine the scaffolding that is typically hidden from view. Placed on the floor or on light tables, Trevisan's sculptures might function as architectural models of future building projects, but Trevisan's method strays from that employed in building construction, recalling the Constructivist emphasis on both material and spatial presence. He states, "Unlike the construction of a building where the final result is methodically predetermined, the approach taken here is the opposite, where the final form and space is merely the accumulation of progress over time." Rather than conceiving a building's exterior as a smooth encasement of a smoother interior, Trevisan's interiors are dependent on their shells. Like Tatlin's spiraling tower, Trevisan's layering process, at once conceived by the artist, takes on a life of its own as it carves out unique elliptical tunnels that invite the viewer to peer inside and to confront the limitations of these tangible and tactile spaces. Are the boundaries of these spaces as limited as they initially seem to appear? Trevisan writes, "Viewing the outside of the structure everything is revealed--the fabrication, the support and the depth of the field." In Trevisan's cityscape, buildings become transient, transportable objects that welcome various spatial configurations and prompt refreshing conceptions of architectural rootedness and reverence. Like fantastical portable holes slapped onto walls, Trevisan's sculptures act as thresholds between universes, portals through which the ephemeral and vulnerable nature of space might be explored.
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Room 3 Susan Bozic's newest series, The Dating Portfolio , explores the commercially driven desire for 'happily ever after' through witty large-scale photographs. In elaborate Cindy Sherman-like tableaux, Bozic poses herself as leading lady opposite Carl, 'the perfect man.' Carl and his girlfriend live the idyllic life of a credit card advertisement, full of privilege, happiness and romance. The fact that Carl is a lifeless mannequin could almost be overlooked. As Bozic says, "Carl is the perfect man...He's young, he's tall, he's fit, he's successful, he's romantic, he's attentive. Carl's girlfriend is in bliss. There's nothing wrong with him except he's fake, but she doesn't quite see that because she's blinded by her love." Taking nearly two years to create, this series grows from Bozic's previous black and white baroque-style images of luxuriously staged taxidermy. The Dating Portfolio reflects a similar aesthetic of pristine artificiality, but the gothic romanticism of her previous work is replaced by undertones of self-mocking humor resulting in what Bozic calls "The Club Med Look." In the series, Bozic was able to continue her explorations of fabricated worlds first inspired by her work with the theatre and cinema. But, by including herself in the tableaux, Bozic gives up a measure of control over the final image and further evolves as an artist. This growth can be seen in the multi-layered nature of the images: at first attractive and easily palatable, with a playful sweetness that draws viewers in, the photographs quickly become cloying and full of troubling questions upon closer examination. How often are we simply playing roles in our daily lives? How can a mannequin so easily become a surrogate for a human being? Are we being blinded by love? Why are we taught by society that a perfect partner will bring us happiness? Bozic reveals that the performances and psychological manipulation needed to enact movie-like romances actually oppose healthy happiness: "...It's a lot of pressure on men to perform as that type of person - a Prince Charming as opposed to a real human being. It's not fair for any of us." Through this series, Bozic explores the impossible hopes and expectations perpetuated by our media-saturated society. The recent boom in reality television dating shows and Internet dating websites that promise happiness through true love show how ingrained fairy-tale roles are in the North American psyche. The fact that viewers instantly recognize the scenarios, locations and hopes found in The Dating Portfolio attests to the longevity of commercial desires. Even while we laugh at the absurdity of Carl and his girlfriend, deep down, a part of us still desires the fantasy we see in the superficial image. of Carl and his girlfriend, deep down, a part of us still desires the fantasy we see in the superficial image. |
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July 7 to August 11 , 2007 |
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Espace 1 With her schematic and playful images, Annie Hémond Hotte describes complex interpersonal threads. The thematics of her practice include facility countered with awkwardness, as well as a balance of humor and tragedy. In past work she has analyzed architectural structures as patterns. Her current body of work continues with this interest in the repetition of motifs. Using pattern and grid as her aesthetic starting points, the artist references both interpersonal connections and technological networks, tracing the immateriality of human relationships.
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Espace 2 & 3 Floating isolated on flat single-toned backgrounds, the figures in Trevor Kiernander's paintings are unhindered by references to time, space, and environment. By fracturing images from pop culture, personal memories, and art history, Kiernander takes figures and objects out of their original context and into an alternate plane. The current media-driven society has created a world in which everyone carries a high level of visual literacy and automatic assumptions about visual relationships. Kiernander's works offer a moment of pause in which expectations of these visual affiliations are no longer relevant. Freed from the constraints of specific context, the viewer is allowed to create their own path through the work. The viewer quickly recognizes artistic quotations: a pieta composition, the tonal depth of a Rothko in the monochromatic backgrounds, still life compositions of Dutch allegorical painting, the painterly brush strokes of the Impressionists, or the figural work of the photo-realists. But, outside of their expected framework, these quotations open new possibilities. The viewer is able to question the relationship between subject and ground and the importance of art historical allusions while coming to their own conclusions about the narrative. Kiernander also plays with the theoretical “Gaze” in works like Jimmy and Charlie Shoot the Shit. Covering a figure's head with a paper bag, he comments on issues of access. Although the viewer is still aware of where the figure's face is located and in which direction the figure is focusing its attention, easy consumption of the face/personality of the subject is obstructed. Such pieces work through psychological issues of observation – wanting to be seen versus hiding oneself from scrutiny. Recently, Kiernander's work has become increasingly focused on medium. Paint is no longer a tool for creating imagery; it is a subject/character itself. In a transcendent blend of the abstract and the figurative, paint takes on a life of its own. It seeps from areas of the canvas, shows through the clothing of certain figures, interacts with other characters in the tableau, and morphs from the body parts of figures. At times, chalk outlines are left “unfinished,” rendering artistic methods visible and making the process of painting yet another entity in the work. Trevor Kiernander also works as a DJ/Producer of House music. The sampling and remixing inherent to electronic music production parallel the process of Kiernander's painting. He selects ideas and images from many different sources in order to construct fresh, innovative compositions. Like his music, his works create a cutting-edge vibe by assimilating fragments of our culture.
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D'autres folies
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April 26 to August 11 , 2007 |
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Room 3 The Paradox of Power Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular. Umberto Boccioni David Spriggs' large-scale sculptural installation, The Paradox of Power , is an investigation of rapid change, deconstruction and symbolic revolution. In the same vain as the Futurists, Spriggs is interested in the representation of time and motion in the sculptural form. Using layering as a device, Spriggs has developed "an environment that breaks free from the laws that constrict both two and three-dimensional materials, bringing together painting, drawing, photography, digital-modeling, and sculpture, to create a spatial topographic system". Spriggs airbrushes two-dimensional images onto multiple sheets of transparent film, which are hung together in horizontal cuts to form a three dimensional object. Here, the exhibited form is without edges, dismantling itself and coming together again in an act of cinematic play. His amorphous objects have the appearance of being suspended, contained and locked in a frozen moment, where time becomes a stratified cartography. The forms are illuminated and encased in museological terrariums-like scientific specimens of movement on display, becoming "alienated from the outside environment and open to observation and interpretation". For the exhibition of his graduate thesis at Art Mur, Spriggs has installed of a life-size model of a stratified bull, cut in two, with each end displayed in two adjacent cases, each a sublime eight feet high and ten feet wide. Spriggs' investigation of the multiplicity of time and its relationship to the sculptural form is here transcribed in his an analysis of the bull as a semiotic agent. By literally deconstructing the bull through a layering of transparent stratum, the mythologized 'power' the bull represents is "fragmented, and reconstructed in an alternate reality." The bull is rendered immobile, flipped upside down, legs in the air. The form is further transformed in the plastic anaglyphic binary colours of each half -- a paradox of red and blue. This binary references not only the deconstructive possibilities of vision itself, but also an antithesis of power in the corporeality of the bull contained, divided and sacrificially immobilized. Like Muybridge's running horse, Spriggs uses the representation of serialized time to suggest a paradoxical ordering of symbolic power. David Spriggs was born in Manchester, England and currently resides in Montreal where he has just completed his MFA in Sculpture at Concordia University. Spriggs' recently participated in the Public Art and New Artistic Strategies program at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany and has exhibited his work in New York, Toronto, London, Calgary, Vancouver and Germany. Text: Andria Hickey
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x of David Spriggs, The Paradox of Power, 2007
David Spriggs, The Paradox of Power, 2007 00
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April 26 to May 26, 2007 |
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Cal Lane In his essay "Ornament and Crime," architect Adolf Loos helped usher in modernist trends with his infamous statement: "the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects." Although he wrote this in the early 20 th century, Modernism's fear of "degenerate" embellishment and "feminine" excess has had long-reaching effects. But, New York-based artist Cal Lane has been able to turn such rhetoric on its head. In her multi-layered pieces, Lane covers objects normally associated with work and utility such as shovels, wheelbarrows, and car parts with intricate lace-like patterns through the use of an industrial blow torch. Like an illuminated manuscript, decoration overwhelms the surface. Ornamentation becomes one with the object, rendering it functionally useless yet aesthetically valued. With layers of juxtaposed binaries, Lane's work is paradoxical: feminine and masculine associations play against each other; the techniques of industry and handicraft meet; delicate designs overtake durable materials; and positive and negative spaces create a beautiful play of light and shadow on the surrounding floor and walls. By merging the high art connotations of sculpture with the aesthetic of craft, Lane plays with gendered assumptions. She says: "I am a woman and that is a certain category that comes with a certain social history and stereotypes...I like to work with and against these social/cultural expectations." By performing through such conventions, her work shows the possibilities of visual language when materials are manipulated in uncharacteristic ways. For example, in her installation "Filigree Car Bombing," the viewer is confronted with the aftermath of an explosion. Car parts are torn, smashed and burnt, but they are also delicately pierced with intricate floral designs. The play of light through the warped shrapnel makes it appear more like draped fabric than metal. The gentleness of lace covers the violent incident, and the 'beauty' of design merges with the 'ugliness' of debris to create a contrast that disturbs the viewer's expectations and requires a questioning of supposedly 'automatic' symbolic associations. In her rug pieces, Lane sifts dirt through lace tablecloths onto the floor to leave behind ephemeral creations that originated in memories of her grandmother decorating cakes by sifting icing sugar onto them through dollies. The delicacy of the designs is amplified by the fragility of the material. It could be blown away or smeared at any time. In performing "women's work" writ large (and dirty), Lane reclaims the value of the "simple" act of beautification. In Lane's work, ornament is no longer a crime; it is a testament to the possibilities of art. Text by Katie Apsey |
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Room 2 Moments périssables
Referencing a heritage of gardened landscapes, ancient Roman structures, and a variety of other engineered environments, Judith Berry's Perishable Monuments are compositions of a temporal, ambiguous nature. The combination of organic compounds and architecture has a long history - with rooftop gardens, and multiple manifestations of garden cities - here, however Berry has incorporated notions of the perishable, and biodegradable as an unspoken potential threat to her structures. The unknown purpose of the displayed structures heightens uncertainty. Construction could be complete or still in progress, and disintegration has yet to run its course. These crafted landscapes are caught in a static, intermediary moment. Viewers' attention is free to wander between the seemingly infinite building blocks, and the forms they make-up. In Seasonal Change , the unknown purpose of the tunnel is made even more alien by the soft, plush texture of the flooring. Indeed the textural element is strong throughout the works and one cannot help but be aware of how this sensual aspect adds to the pieces. Of the many unanswered questions raised by these images, the foremost would be who created them? What purpose do they serve? And, if they do serve a purpose, how long will they be able to do so? These structures present a simplified, more immediate version of the world in which we live. Initially playful in their ironic choice of building matter, one may begin to see environmental concerns in pieces such as The Unravelling Hills , where the hills indicated by the title can also be read to look like the aftermath of clear-cutting. The reddened stump/hills, with unravelling spirals (not concentric rings) against an earth toned ground where there is very little growth and water sits on the surface. These are light, fantastic images that can just as quickly turn into images which comment upon our own temporality. Text: Lizz Dunlop
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March 22 to April 21 |
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eau de brume
Luc Bergeron's work comes out of landscape, bisecting and incising it at two vital points: by tracing and removing the figure, and by cutting a new horizon. The absence of the figure is, in fact, made present by a silhouette, which is suggestively outlined by the artist. This outline splits the landscape in half. These acts disrupt the painted representation of space and the natural world. Bergeron's images appear to be undulating, pulsing, falling out of focus. Lying in play between the microscopic and the landscape, these works disrupt suppositions about both of these categories. Referencing biology and conventional representations of the countryside and distance, Bergeron's source materials are as diverse as academic painting and popular imagery. His reconfigurations of these references present an uncertain proposition of the natural world that is contingent and full of uncertainty. These are projected proposals for unknown outcomes rather than observable static situations. Collapsing the massive with the miniature, Bergeron causes his viewer to consider the subjectivity of scale. This work also questions nearness: the distant [landscape] becomes remarkably close, while the immediate [cellular] recedes. Countering the objectivity of science with the subjectivity of figurative representation, the artist's recording is cellular, representing a fictional, presupposed space. Might Bergeron in fact be offering the viewer invisible bodies, transparent bodies, spectral bodies? Does Bergeron displace the figure, and if so, what takes its position instead? What remains is an anonymous subject. What remains from his cutting-out of the figure is the gallery wall itself, and this reveal is a salient addition to the ongoing conversation of painting today. Luc Bergeron has shown extensively in Montreal. His work is held in several public collections in Quebec and Ontario. He was educated at Atelier Stéphane Mocanu, Paris, France, and completed his Baccalauréat en Arts plastiques at Concordia University. Text: Mark Clintberg |
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Room 3 Prêt-à-porter Since his first exhibition at Galerie Art Mur in 2003, Guillaume Lachapelle has continued to manifest the absurd and unexplained in his intricately carved small wooden sculptures. This new series of sculptures is markedly different, incorporating the possibility of mobility by making these new works wearable art objects. Prêt-à-porter features a series of sculptures carefully constructed from found pieces of wood and attached to leather strapping to resemble back packs, holsters, portable stools, even musical instruments. Each object incorporates the decorative wood characteristics of antique furniture presenting a traditional domestic aesthetic with the finish itself giving the appearance of an elaborate old-world object. Yet, despite each object's similarity to something one might use, Lachapelle parodies the frivolity of the art work by intentionally evading the its potential for utility. Within each piece there is an allusion to function: the object with shoulder straps could be a cabinet, its detailed circular edges, a makeshift seat; the holster strap could contain a weapon, a carving tool or a toy. These possibilities become functions of fiction as each object eludes its task: if these are vessels there are no lids or openings, if these are seats they are imbalanced, the instrument is mute and the weapon, docile. While Prêt-à-porter is a departure from the miniature worlds and impossible structures that characterized much of Lachapelle's work, these new sculptures continue to imply the same potential for imagination as the small fantasies he creates in his other works. These objects at once embody utopic promises and experiments with failure. Like a game, Prêt-à-porter invites the viewer to participate in the production of the art object. The wearability of the sculptures presents the possibility of a performative relationship, where the viewer is transformed into a participant responsible for navigating the reception of the work. As a mobile mediator, the viewer, or wearer, ultimately becomes an integral part of the effect of display, providing a personal narrative of the object for curious onlookers. As objects located beyond installation on the gallery wall, these sculptures become fictional interventions into the everyday. The focus on imagination and narrative potential that is so central to Lachapelle's work here transitions from the gallery into public space. The viewer's impression of the objects become aspirations for their function, imposed narratives of almost, left slightly twisted by Lachapelle's brooding reference to fantastical worlds where bridges go nowhere and portable cabinets of curiosity retain their mystery within sealed and hollow interiors. Text: Andria Hickey
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February 17 to March 17, 2007 |
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Glass is often relegated to the realm of craft or material arts. As a material it is a romantic, paradoxical and complex. As both subject and object of metaphor its qualities make it a potent medium for contemporary art production. With complicated chemistry and obvious fragility, it is also technically difficult and aesthetically challenging. In this unique exhibition curator and artist, John Paul Robinson, has grouped together five artists whose works demonstrate the ability of the medium to negotiate important dialogues that span such contemporary social issues as identity and perception, the environment, utopia and fantasy. Showcasing selected works from artists Tyler Rock, Jeffrey Sarmiento, Michèle LaPointe, Orest Tataryn, and Robinson's own work, Content Driven demonstrates not only the skill of the craft of working in glass but also the relationship between explorations of medium and discourses surrounding the contemporary art object. Neon artist and member of the guerrilla art group Skunkworks/Outlaw Neon, Orest Tataryn investigates light and shadow as a sculptural and painterly medium attempting to reduce material environments to their simplest form. Michèle LaPoint is best known for her monumental installations and her investigations of integrated site specificity and the "imaginary archaeological process which excavates dreams and time". Curator and artist John Paul Robinson's works create and mix symbols to develop connections between physical and the metaphysical, the body and the subconscious. Jeffrey Sarmiento incorporates images and text with glass to communicate new visual narratives of identity and ethnicity that revolve around the artist's exploration of language and translation. A senior glass blower, Tyler Rock's work explores the notion of the vessel and its conceptual relationship with luminosity and the sculptural form. Robinson, one of the first artists in Canada to build his own glass studio, has noted how technological developments in the production of glassworks, in addition to training programs, have allowed artists to master the techniques needed to work in glass. This has subsequently opened the possibilities for contemporary artists to work in glass and traditional glass artists to react and contribute to emerging trajectories in contemporary art practices. With works in the exhibition incorporating glass as lens, sculptural form, intervention and metaphor, this content-driven shift is reflected in the abilities of the artists to use glass as both device and strategy while combining the mythology of the material with its unique attributes in forms that communicate symbolic meaning in unexpected ways. Text: Andria Hickey
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The authors of Still-Life arrangements have always sought to impart some message to the viewers. Whether it was an itemization of knowledge, activities, or societal values- the intent to share knowledge was present. Another common thread in this genre, was the underlining of the temporality of life. Perhaps this was to make viewers aware that the sharing of information can transcend the grave- even if human life cannot. In Backpages , the lineage of the Still-Life is apparent, a quasi-cabinet of curiosities is displayed, made up of select objects found within the artist's studio. Frames, glass, mirrors, and walls comprise the majority of the pictorial space, with interjections of the figure. Abstracted by cropping, grid-like windows mingle with defined abdominal muscles, producing an echoing of form. Tangible and intangible visual elements are layered. Light and reflections in glass and on mirrored surfaces is captured in photographs, later transferred by the artist into paintings. The views of the exterior and interior worlds, in the studio paintings, focuses heavily on the varying degrees of transparency within the individual, depicted layers. The inclusion of the human form thus draws clear parallels to the varying degrees of transparent (or public) and opaque (or private) layers possessed by the individual. Windows also gain a second dimension here, as permeable portals to the outer world, allowing the filtration of light and form to imprint upon interior surfaces. Just as the immediate exterior world of the studio influences the interior, so too do we the viewers share in an animation of the surface in an impermanent way. In our mental reflection upon the painted product, we are both bringing life and death to the image. By our movement through the space, there is a reiteration of the temporality of experience, so central to the purposes of this genre. Text: Lizz Dunlop
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January 11 to February 10, 2007 |
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uffle Movement and life are intimately intertwined notions. Survival in the wild can hinge upon the simple ability to detect motion. With the loss of life, also comes the loss of self-propelled action. Fragile and inanimate, the object’s new state of being is at the mercy of its surroundings.
Text: Lizz Dunlo |
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Jakub Dolejs' images rely on ambiguity. Simulations of a sort, Dolejs' photos contort baroque imagery using simple techniques of mise en scene: mirroring, reflection and cropping yield a visual space that skates an edge between artificial hyperbole and stark reality. More than just a drive for simple aesthetic lyricism, the artist's aim is to provide a disjuncture in our experience of a flat photographic plane. Visual literacy is a salient issue for Dolejs, who suggests that most citizens today have the interpretive savvy to decode on some level the dense field of images we encounter in print media, billboards, the internet and so on. He claims, "We can read photographs, we can distinguish a holiday snapshot from an advertising pitch, we can easily decipher most Photoshop tricks - we are in control of images." The subjective power of this 'we,' however, is pointedly destabilized when confronted with Dolejs' suite of images. The viewer is left in a position of uncertainty: what are the conditions under which this photograph was produced? Is it staged? Belief, even the capacity for certainty, the artist says, is suspended. Dolejs' images arrest because of their reassessment of 'real' space. Rather than giving patent illusionism, he leaves small methodological clues for viewers to uncover upon close examination of the work. Seams reveal themselves, and irregularities in recessed space subtly challenge what we perceive to be the situation at hand. "Suddenly the existence of a real space beyond the trompe l'oeil fiction of the photographed painting becomes critical. It's this space between the narrative of the painting and its anonymous surroundings where my images acquire their meaning," he explains. Locations become difficult to pin down, spatial situations are fragmented. What rests beyond the borders of the image entices speculation, developing tension in the viewer, who must "deliberately accept the fiction, knowing that it would disappear if the photograph was cropped just few inches larger." These images call into question the mapping of dimensionality. This capricious play leaves the viewer in the grip of an aesthetically polyvalent situation. Dolejs' situations cleverly manage to cast aspersions on the spatial, proving our provisional understanding of visuality in the everyday. Text: Mark Clintberg
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Room 3 vedute di venezia Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. Walter Benjamin The ground upon which Venice lies has become a worsening threat to a fragile and fading historical city. Meditating on the ephemeral nature of Venice, Montreal-based photographer, Ewa Monika Zebrowski is interested in exploring the ways in which memory is embedded in the landscape. Seduced by the mythic city, her images ruminate on the "lives lived on the watery firmament" and the current perilous existence of an endangered Venice. The exhibition at Art Mûr is anchored with an elaborate and empty gold frame, accompanied by a fragment of conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan from Italo Calvino's, Invisible Cities . Like much of Zebrowski's work, her interest in Venice is deeply tied to literary texts. Her first exhibition of Venetian photographs, remembering brodsky , a visual translation of Joseph Brodsky's book, Watermark, explored the relationship between the author's experience of Venice, the photographic document and memory. In this incarnation, Zebrowski has returned to Venice to record the fragility of a city haunted by its own marked immortality. Taking a cue from Benjamin's notion that the camera reveals unconscious optics, Zebrowski has used her camera like a sketchpad, allowing it to capture images unfettered by the manipulation of the photographer's hand. Shooting as much as possible from the vaporetto , nothing is staged and it is the camera lens itself that reacts to the movement of sea legs and the twilights of Venice and all its palazzi . The effect is haunting. Apparitions appear in the shadows distorted by light and movement. The past and the present merge together allowing the photograph to trace the imprint of time in a place that has become a living museum. With references to other inspired visitors, from eighteenth and nineteenth century landscape painters to contemporary tourists sipping coffee, Zebrowski has set up a dialogue of fragments and moments layered together in the reflections of mirrors, windows, picture frames, water. The exhibition features a series of photographs printed as inkjet prints on etching paper, itself a testament to fragility. Accompanying the series of images, Zebrowski has produced an artist's book in a limited edition of 50. Working in collaboration with an invited scholar, Zebrowski has combined her own photographs of the city with an essay by Princeton History Professor, Theodore Rabb. Like a travel document, the images become visual quotations and intuitive responses. As a conversation between Zebrowski and Rabb, both image and text work as incantations of Venice's precarious and layered history that is profoundly altered with each season of rising water, or a cqua alta . Part of the proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to Save Venice , an organization that has restored some 300 works of art and architecture since the flood of 1966. Text: Andria Hickey
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