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Past exhibitions at Art Mûr 2008 |
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The fourth edition of Peinture fraîche / Fresh Paint July 12 to August 16, 2008
Art Mur is very pleased to announce the fourth and largest edition of Peinture fraîche / Fresh Paint, a group exhibition of twenty-five up-and-coming artists from Ontario and Quebec, which provides an excellent overview of work from the next generation of painters. Each year we invite professors of painting from Canadian universities to select five students who stand out for the quality and originality of their work. This year we have decided to extend our invitation to Concordia University, Université du Québec à Montreal, Université Laval de Québec, University of Ottawa and York University, transforming this project into a major event and the only one of its kind in Canada.
Concordia University Courtney Burke, Carl Osberg, Vitally Medvedovsky, Megan Cameron, Marisa Hoicka York University Kristi Ropeleski, Shannon Moynaghan, Amy Shackleton, Alex Fisher, Angela Jordan University of Ottawa Andrew Morrow, Amy Schissel, Brittany Shannon, Isabelle Melançon, Mariel Kelly Université Laval de Québec Patrick Dubé, Harry Villeneauve, Carolanne Fournel, Benoit Blondeau, Isabelle Demers, Université du Quebec à Montreal Louis Bouvier, Isabelle Guérette, Isabelle Guimond, Marwan Karout, François Georget
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Andrew Morrow
Kristi Ropeleski l
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Past exhibitions at Art Mûr 2008 |
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Vignette The landscape tradition of Canadian Painting is recognized as the seminal art of Canada. In the wake of the Group of Seven, many artists have chosen to deal with the group’s iconic status as the Art of a Nation. Beyond the limitations and contradictions inherent to the Group of Seven, they have nonetheless acted as a catalyst of engagement to artists who work within this landscape tradition. Melissa Doherty’s new works seek to engage the viewer by invoking the history of landscape painting, but this engagement is determined to destabilize the gaze of a national construction. The title of the show insinuates the underlying tone of these works. The softening and blurred rendering techniques employed through the paintings signal a space of re-presentation, politically infused and motivated to activate changes of perception. Similarly to the shifts in perception that occurred with the advent of flight, where traditional views of the world were altered, Doherty’s work seeks to alter our understanding of the landscape in a Canadian context. Doherty comments that, as opposed to a manufactured heroism, these works display a manufactured intimacy. The downward aerial perspective seems to imply the artist has appropriated an almost omniscient point of view -which is inherently a place of uncompromised introspection- and pieces together a landscape of isolation, seemingly placeless in its rendering, but continuous in its construction. Formally, the works display a compositional quality drawing from abstract and minimal aesthetics. From a distance, the works can appear abstract, implying the flattened all over compositional style of formalism. As one approaches, the works open up to reveal a familiar distance, as if revisiting a lost memory. Implicitly, the works convey a serial narrative denoting a process-based deconstruction of the landscape. Each painting in its own right speaks to the next. The dissolved white background consumes the differences between pieces, as if erasures of detail could complete the borders of the imaginary community and thoroughfares that connect them. Highlighting the givens of the constructed narrative, Doherty has included a slight of hand; no road leads home, they only lead to themselves, and likewise, no home is connected, they are isolated unto themselves. As opposed to the continuity sought through early Canadian landscape painting, Doherty’s work invokes a notion of narrative, but it is a narrative constructed through a lens of critical distance with the cognoscenti in sight. Michael Rattray
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Melissa Doherty
Melissa Doherty l
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Cheese, Worms and the Holes in Everything May 9 to June 18, 2008 The Painting Pathogen: Recent Works of David Blatherwick "Colonisation or colonization occurs whenever any one or more species populates a new area. The term, which is derived from the Latin colere, "to inhabit, cultivate, frequent, practice, tend, guard, respect", originally related to humans. However, 19th century biogeographers borrowed the term to describe the activities of birds or bacteria, or plant species." David Blatherwick’s new paintings betray a polychrome profusion of sinuous shapes and invasive signifying units. Before we even know it, they have insinuated themselves inside our thinking. Like a virus that has performed a containment breach between painting and our own environmental (lived) space, having moved with alacrity outside both the bio-safe facility of the studio/lab and the Art Mur exhibition space alike, they overtake eye and mind before we even know we have been colonized. When I look long at the paintings of David Blatherwick, and then longer still, I don’t think necessarily of the work of his brave confreres, his peers, or even his predecessors, in painting, I see in my mind’s restless eye images out of supercomputing, wetware, wireheading, the whole biocybernetic software of mind – and, not least, bacteriology. Slippery like wetware, segmented like an Inuit hunter’s trap, with all the unfettered infinity-loop antics of a Fibonacchi sequence, Mobius strip, Mandelbrot fractal or viral code, Blatherwick’s recent paintings bleed full-frame in real space – and bring us to our knees. An infection is universally understood as the detrimental colonization of a host organism by a foreign species. In an infection scenario, the infecting organism uses the host's own resources in order to proliferate. However, in terms of experiencing Blatherwick’s wily abstracts, think of a symbiosis between parasite and host that is consummately thoughtful – and altogether benign. After all, most multi-cellular organisms are colonized to some lesser or greater extent by extrinsic organisms, and by far the better part of those exist in a commensual relationship with the host. The sheer virulence of Blatherwick’s paintings is noteworthy. Consider the symbiotic parasitism that is the relationship here of painting to host organism construed as exhibition hall, and proceed from there to what they are doing to the inside of your own forebrain. Blatherwick’s seizure of real space (the space outside of painting) is coextensive with that of cerebral space (the thought from outside) – but with an intent to influence, change, colonize. After all, colonization – coup d’etat of the viewer’s own thought waves, but in a good way -- is his avowed goal. If Blatherwick’s subversive works are akin to pathogens, they also find another analogy outside painting in programming, especially in Unix systems, where semaphores are a technique for coordinating or synchronizing activities in which multiple processes compete for the same operating system resources. Semaphores are one of the techniques for inter-process communication and every time the undulating shapes in Blatherwick’s paintings seem to morph and multiply, they are signaling their own mutations in real time as we absorb them. Quite suddenly, his paintings become something else. Their viral codes seem to constantly assemble, diassemble and reassemble and keep us on our toes. If symbols are traditionally been readily more associated with paintings while metaphors are reserved for poetry, well, Blatherwick’s work helps reverse this trend. If his desire as a wetware hacker of a painter has been to take advantage of analogies with a physical interface with the brain; he has pursued the pathways of visual perception to alter the mindset of his viewers, and lead them over the threshold into what were, just yesterday, tomorrow worlds, but are now more present than future. Blatherwick creates his own hot zones (1) and containment is simply not an option. James D. Campbell Notes 1. ‘Hot zone’ refers to an area that is considered hazardous owing to biological, chemical, or nuclear contamination. The "hot zone" also refers to the area in which dangerous biological organisms are handled, such as the Biosafety Level 4 of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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David Blatherwick, détail d'une vue d'installation
David Blatherwick, Indeterminist, 2006
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From March 29 to May 4, 2008 |
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Éden Text by Michael Rattray The biblical Garden of Eden was representative of a metaphoric existence without consequence or reality. The story of expulsion -a result of dabbling too deeply with what had been provided- has acted as a metaphor to many over the course of the 'common era'. Beyond the spiritual and religious connotations associated with a monotheistic parent figure expelling its creations as a kind of punishment, the warnings inherent to mutating forms and matters of existence hold a current to our reality. The new work of Nicolas Grenier examines the construction of life itself through painting. Using the color palette as a kind of DNA strand, each of these new works is the result of one base source, or code. None of the new paintings are in truth a realistic or authentic representation of an existent place, or person. They are representative of choices, the choices made by an artist defying standards and creating without consequence, and hold parallels to those who are currently unweaving the very strands of life to see what new combinations may become available. Eerily familiar in their rendering, yet completely void of actuality, they remind the viewer of what may be sitting behind closed doors, perhaps under lock and key in a room not unlike the one rendered in "painting name here". In our current time, running towards a future we can only speculate may resemble our present; Grenier's work is representative of a caring, well-planned ambivalence, and an ambivalence that questions without fear of judgment. For every warning, there is a beautiful fruit to bear in its consequence. Within the routes traveled in our quests for understanding what beauty could be, jumps, breaks and continuities of discontinuous repetitions remake themselves. While these works examine and look to an unknown future, they are routed and embedded in the traditions of the past. Rather than terming them a hyper, or super, kind of realism, as has been discussed with reference to Grenier's work in the past, these new works are perhaps representative of the future-real. It could be a future where mistakes will be made, and perhaps in our progression those mistakes will be frozen in time on a pedestal, but they will be foreshadowed by a landscape rendered timeless through our new lenses of understanding. But the rub of ambivalence holds the last word, as the artist has left the reality to show itself over time; a number of painted apples adorn the exhibition space, and while they hold an appearance of outward beauty, they are none the less, rotting from the inside out.
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Nicolas Grenier, Jumeaux
Nicolas Grenier, Pig Boy
Nicolas Grenier, Glow
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In the Headlights Jakub Dolejs's large-format photographs and sculptures are about the mechanisms of picture making and consumption. Born in Prague where he completed a Master's degree in Fine Art at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design, Dolejs has based his practice in Toronto, and has become well known for his works that playfully blend painting and photography. Dolejs's works tap into Western culture's obsession with the visual by engaging pictorial codes from a range of images throughout history, including eighteenth century French rococo paintings to contemporary cinema. Working as a painter, sculptor, and photographer, Dolejs builds elaborate stage sets, and also methodically orders furniture, lighting, architectural details, and minimal materials, into three-dimensional trompe-l'oeil that he then photographs. Rather than painstakingly arranging his interiors in order to recreate a sense of the authentic, his sculptures and staged photographs demonstrate the process of picture making and distribution. These works are thoughtful deconstructions of the manipulation behind image construction, and the historical legacy of their consumption. In works of staged gallery scapes Dolejs elicits conventions of authorship, illusionism, and commerce that have historically informed artistic practices. In his piece La Nuit Américaine (2007) Dolejs has built a stage set of a typical eighteenth century French salon, including replicas of paintings by rococo artists Jean-Honore Fragonard and Jean-Siméon Chardin. Dolejs's stage however unexpectedly depicts the bottom corner of the salon room, brutally cutting paintings in half and omitting elaborate architectural details from its scene. By imposing the violent cropping of the camera onto a three dimensional space Dolejs exposes the painterly conventions of illusionism that continue to inform contemporary practices of film and photography. The aristocratic air of his salon also brings to mind the eighteenth century's history of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism that Western modernity is based upon. Dolejs explores the fraught legacy of modernity in contemporary culture by distilling its historic visual strategies found in today's cultural products. The antagonism of modernity's dominant artistic model is playfully intervened by Dolejs through his photographs of dramatic orderings. A number of the artist's photographs include arrangements in his studio of black slats of plexiglass, shop lighting, rococo architectural details, and iconic modernist furniture including a Charles Eames chair and an Eileen Gray chrome side table. Undercutting tricks of illusion employed by photography and painterly effects, these photographs demonstrate the manipulations behind old and new languages of representation. Paying pointed tributes to, among others, supremitism in White Square (2007), eighteen-century connoisseurship in Display (2007), and cinema in Homage to Antonio (2007), these photographs are about the social, economic, and historical realities behind picture making. Dolejs reveals that the legacies behind Western culture's founding myths continue to haunt contemporary visual practices.
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Jakub Dolejs, In the headlights (detail)
Jakub Dolejs, La nuit américaine, 2007
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From February 21to March 22, 2008 |
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Story of a Global Nomad From February 21 to March 22, 2008 Nomadism is an abstract. It describes a freedom to potentially be anywhere at anytime, to take from whatever can be taken, and to leave whenever to be somewhere anew. Consistently, the nomad has occupied an anthropological distortion, where the term was perhaps applied too loosely and vaguely. The process of colonial appropriation distorted known territorialities to the principles of the nomadic; that of the landless, those whom move at whimsy, seemingly without place. While in the real, those who seemed to be without place were in fact patterned, their movements’ routine and contained within a perimeter defined through geographic constraint. The new works of Jinny Yu echo notions of the nomadic, in both misconceptions and concrete understandings of the term. Deleuze and Guattari have commented that nomads can be localized within monads, acting as singular nomads “that entertain tactile relations among themselves. ” The nomadic monad, or module, offers a parallel to Yu’s earlier works and relates to the artist’s understanding of the artist as a migratory creature, one who has the ability to shift between contexts and identities within the “increasingly liquid field of trans-global relations. ” Two visual systems preside over the majority of the new works. The systems are defined by an appropriated pattern occupying the underlay of the work, which appears to be static, while an appropriated overlay pattern juts out from the background, appearing to convolute, distort and haphazardly foray among the fluidity of the underlay. Each work, constructed with three sheets of aluminum occupying a space of six by six feet, built from a single set, or module, combine to make-up the finished piece. The works, while maintaining an appearance of fluid structure, upon closer inspection can be reduced to their singular parts, even down to an individual line of graphite. These monads that make up the greater whole, while at times appearing in a state that resembles something solid, can just as easily become anarchic, or nomadic in their associations to the greater field of view within the structure, as is evidenced by the repetitions contained within the work Multiple Trees. An invocation of the problematic nature of assumption, or definition, within a master or universal narrative construct is evidenced through the works contained in Story of Global Nomad. Whether the appropriated sources are eastern in influence, western in construction, southern in flavor, or northerly contained they represent a systematic awareness of the patterns of our current predicament within a trans-global world. While we may be free to pursue nomadic states of wandering within a world of accessible consumption, the structures, the modules and the maps that we must navigate our freedom within nonetheless contain us. Nomadism may refer to an abstract, but it is an abstraction still dependent on a system to understand itself within, therefore no more outside, or inside, a place than another. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. “The Smooth and the Striated.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (80). pg.493. Texte by Michael Rattray
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Jinny Yu, Story of a Global Nomad, Han Birds, 2007 |
Images troublantes d'un monde idéalisé... From February 21to March 22, 2008 For Melvin Charney the cities we inhabit are alive and well but they have morphed into vast regions while our grasp of urban phenomena is mired in cozy quartiers and driven by dated ideals of progress. Charney’s work seeks to redefine some of the fundamental values that have marked every form of human settlement. He is one of Montréal’s most influential artists, responsible for a variety of the nation’s well-known public artworks including The Canadian Tribute to Human Rights, Ottawa (1986-90), The Canadian Centre for Architecture Garden in Montréal (1987-90) and Les Maisons de la rue Sherbrooke (1976) that was part of the infamous Corridart exhibition taken down by city officials on the day before the opening of Montréal’s 1976 Olympic games. Both nationally and internationally recognized, Charney’s work has been in numerous museum exhibitions including, briefly, P.S.1 New York, 1979; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1979, 2003; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1982; Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1994. He represented Canada at the Venice Biennale on two occasions - the XLII Venice Biennale International Exhibition of Art,1986, and the VII Venice Biennale International Exhibition of Architecture, 2000. Trained as an artist and architect, Charney takes the city as the subject of his work, in drawings, photographs, montages, paintings, sculptures, and site-specific constructions that play on the spaces, forms, and cultural representations of our urban structures. Central to his art has been his photo-based work UN DICTIONNAIRE… (1970-2001); four hundred and twenty six reproductions of newspaper images are organized to examine relationships between people and their changing urban environment. Using this archive as a thematic and visual source, Charney’s works layer and juxtapose images unearthing in this way larger social, political and economic structures that engender public and private space. Built structures that we normally take for granted as neutral are revealed as the product of an urban consciousness that citizens both register and generate. Charney attempts to reveal human characteristics embedded in built form. In the series, ONE FIT SIZES ALL, he picks up on the total standardization and codification of the urban space. Charney sources includes the ubiquitous American skyscraper; or, for example, an overbearing façade of the Université de Montréal’s HEC (School of Business.) His preoccupation with wire-service photos published in the front pages of newspapers has recently given way to a concern with the back pages – the heady realm of sex-trade advertisements. The processes of the standardization of space is now applied to the human body, starting with critical components of reproduction and our potential for genetically modifying the size, shape and behavior of the human form so that it fits into the spaces that society is capable of generating. Iconographic constructs are fragmented; the size, shape and behavior of new urban creatures emerge from their fissures. Charney isolates codes from the spatial patterns of our lives in order to examine ideals behind their production. Clusters of cities that still thrive in urban zone are alive in his work, its transformation carried out by the daily compliance of its citizens who become the agents of their own destruction. Charney’s works remind us that material objectivity does not exist, and that in fact our production of the city is rooted in the logic of power. As we codify our public and private space according to illusions of progress, we codify our own experiences of the human body. We may not look like walking skyscrapers, but the absurdity of Charney’s metaphor reveals itself as not so absurd after all. Tatiana Mellema
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SPITTING IMAGE From January 19 to February 16, 2008 There is a vast amount of information one can acquire about the identity of a person or an individual from the image of the figure; from portraits, photographs to sculptural representations, we are conditioned to make decisions about identity based on the "book's cover." In addition to personal biases, the figure becomes a contemporary metaphor for "human"/humanity, as artists filter concepts and personal themes through the presence of the physical body. The Edward Day Gallery exhibition, Spitting Image , explores the multiple layers of the figure that reach beyond the realm of representation. Angela Grossmann, through her raw, strident collage imagery of the Alpha Girls confronts issues of gender and maturity as her young girls, on the cusp of adulthood, pose provocatively for one another and an all-to-eager society. Recent figures, such as her young boxers, shadow punch their way into masculinity, while others adapt to the landscape of the other; the landscape of transitioning. In direct contrast, Bonnie Lewis, through her Nasty Girls paintings, portrays animated young women kicking and screaming at a male dominated society, into which they are about to be thrown. Using large house paintbrushes to create ephemeral oil portraits, Heather Graham conveys intimate gestures of strangers from the Internet while David Pellettiers fibreglass Bridge sculpture conveys an eloquent dialogue of communication. A major glass artist, Mark Thompson, portrays the play of youth looking into adulthood through a portrait of his son gesturing as a young pilot flying into the future. Individual natures and personalities breathe from beneath the portraits of Dan Hughes while Sophie Jodoin, through her Diary of K series, portrays K's reality as a little person, representing her "monumentality, grandeur, fragility and vulnerability". Through her recent Errata series, Catherine Heard's sculptural busts with twining eyes, mouths, nostrils further her investigation of medical science, monstrous deformity and mythology while Dan Kennedy's new paintings from his Lost In The Echo series unearths ephemera from the past to depict a narration of archetypes investigating Darwin's Theory of Evolution . John Oswald's digital portrait, After Rembrandt , morphs contemporary 21st century society with classical, historic painting by seamlessly transforming the face of a young contemporary dancer into the visage of an elderly woman painted by Rembrandt in the 17 th century. The multitude of representational visual gestures provides much more than the book cover and reach beyond the pages of a novel to provide the very essence of human nature. Kelly McCray
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ABRACADABRA Deciding on a title for a group exhibition is always quite challenging. The word or the phrase chosen will dictate the selection of artists and the work that will be exhibited. The moment the concept is created everything else seems to fall into place. That's exactly what happened when I encountered the word "ABRACADABRA." It became obvious that this was the word we had been searching for. With this ancient magical formula we could now curate a surprising and colourful exhibit that would allow us to introduce many of our artists to the Toronto art scene. In ARACADABRA we gather works by 11 artists represented by ART MÛR. Some of them are already known in Toronto however most of them are to be discovered by a new audience. The selected works include painting, photography, sculpture & installation. We can say, to a certain extent, that these artists are magicians that use their ability to transform raw material into amazing art works. They have that magical touch that leaves the viewer in awe. How did they do it? How is it made? How does it work? In viewing their art we become kids again, intrigued by the secrets concealed by the work. For the true believer, magic is in the eye of the beholder. Works like Holly King, Guillaume Lachapelle, Dennis Eksted reveal worlds of fantasy. Playing with light and traditional notions of the still life, Holly King's photographic ménages reference the gothic fairytale and shadowy landscapes of a troubled wonderland. Guillaume Lachapelle's improbable maquettes deconstruct architectural expectations, confronting the viewer with castles incorporating mechanized oars rowing to nowhere. Science fiction and reality also merge in the work of Dennis Ekstedt, whose paintings of the cityscape at night resemble an urban matrix and bring to mind the futuristic landscapes constructed in our imaginations. In today's world magicians don't exist anymore. We call them illusionists, and art has a long history of conceiving illusion. Claude Ferland reminds us with his series 'The eye of the quattrocento' of that very important moment when the artist discovers the notion of perspective; the illusion of depth. On the same note Nadia Myre's 'Basket for My Love' also plays with the notion of illusion, a basket that can only exist through it's own shadow. In her work 'Everything I know about love' she refers to a snake's ability to shed its skin and leave old scars behind. Cal Lane's own investigation of the object is equally transformative. It questions the illusion of faith and the hidden objectives of politics. Beaulieu's mechanical works give life back to a collection of natural detritus in a frenetic cabinet of curiosities where feathers, butterfly wings, and leaves tremble and spin wildly in unexpected animations brought on by the trick of motion detectors. Using similar technology in her sculpture, the work of Lois Andison threads a narrative of possibility and belief in the investigation of the human/machine. Andison's exploration of the cyborgian hybrid in 'Iris' (2001), features a fibreglass version of a dressmaker's Judy with mechanically opening breast-plate armour which counters the inscription of woman as spectacle and object of voyeurism1. The spectator is captivated by the interactive movement and awaits final disclosure, ending with the smile of the one that just been caught. In another of his large-scale sculptural installations, emerging artist David Spriggs has used layering as a device to capture a three-dimensional image of a ghost. Monique Bertrand's sculpture 'Marionnette à Tige" brings us behind the scenes of a laboratory scene that shouldn't be witnessed. When observing, odd feelings emerge - maybe you shouldn't be looking. For Fabrizio Perozzi, (oil on paper), represents empty covered boxes and reminds us of the simple trick of making everything disappear. Together, these artists allow the viewer a moment of pause, of wonder, or of possibility - a moment of transformation. The spirit present in this selection of artwork is one of optimism and play, of fantasy and imagination, even of magic, as the title suggests. Carolyn Bell Farrell, Autobody, p.20
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