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Past exhibitions at Art Mûr 2010 |
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To Build a Home May 1st – June 19, 2010
Text by Sarah Wilkinson
‘Home’ is a concept that carries different weight and meaning and may vary based on individual perception. For some, home is that house on a particular street that embodies all the best memories of childhood. For others, home represents not one particular structure, but a set of complex relationships with various geographical locations. How can one maintain a sense of home whilst continuously in motion? Kiernander’s 2009 work Treehouse provides evidence that various forms of architecture have the ability to function as ‘home.’ This work plays on the nostalgia associated with what could be considered one of the first autonomous spaces of childhood experience. The artist’s geometric dispersal of light blues, brown and white, offers the viewer a visually tangible memory of childhood days in the backyard, glancing up from the security of ones constructed environment. Kiernander is successful in creating images that are familiar yet exist independent of visual references. His ability to evoke emotion through the use of color and various materials illustrates one of the most interesting aspects of this work. His work Things Fall Apart (2008), offers a scene of disarray. The incorporation of various animal forms and falling boxes provides the illusion of movement. However the lifeless rabbit and swan complicate this reading by remaining static. These elements allude to a deeper underlying experience, one that speaks of disconnect. In The Garden (2009), the artist combines abstraction and foreign materials including oil and acrylic paint, charcoal, and vinyl tape in order to create non-representational imagery. The rigidity of the orange object provides disjuncture in what appears to be an otherwise serene landscape. This type of juxtaposition relates the viewer to the experience of displacement from ones comfortable environment. Despite the title’s association with a serene space, this work illustrates how our relationships with particular spaces can also inform our reactions and experiences with others. The works in the oeuvre of Trevor Kiernander act as palimpsests. They maintain a surface layer of unity while simultaneously offering a narrative of dislocation. Upon first glance they appear to be abstract, though after closer examination they entice the viewer by offering fragments of something vaguely familiar yet foreign. Once the viewer begins deciphering the layers of these palimpsests, the various conceptions of ‘Home’ and the attachments associated with imagery that reflects everyday lived environments, become apparent.
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Trevor Kiernander
Trevor Kiernander
Trevor Kiernander
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Frontier May 1st – June 19, 2010
Text by Amber Berson
It is often easier to understand history as a clear and simple division between right and wrong, good and evil, black and white. Tyler Rock’s latest series Frontier challenges the viewer to consider the shades of grey contained within a particular historical event - specifically the ‘Almighty Voice’ incident, which refers to a young Cree man’s struggle with the North-West Mounted Police in Saskatchewan in 1893. Almighty Voice supposedly butchered a stray cow without a permit to feed his family and was arrested. Believing he was to be hung, Almighty Voice escaped from jail, eventually shot and killed an officer searching for him and became involved in one of the biggest manhunts in early Canadian history. Diverging versions of the story continue to divide communities, although all agree that the incident had a major impact on the Riel Rebellion and the shaping of Saskatchewan. It is a history always being retold, pivoting between readings of the same story.
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Tyler Rock
Tyler Rock |
Patient May 1st – June 19, 2010
Text by James D. Campbell
Julia Reimer's glass works wed refreshing simplicity with exquisite formal refinement. They possess a beguiling eloquence that is at once the product of her imagination and the landscape she grew up in. Her work is infused with a specifically Prairie light and have a reductive ethos. Seldom, if ever, baroque, her forms bespeak a stoicism that is more ecstatic than pragmatic. I mean, they have pure joy in them, even as they inspire reflection. Reimer is a true savant when it comes to seductive forms that are imbued with a luminosity almost magical in its mien. This luminosity is inborn and reminds me of nephrite mutton fat carvings dating from the Chinese Qianlong Dynasty (the 1780s). But, notably and remarkably, her creations are made out of glass, not jade. Furthermore, her works have a minimalist tendency very much in keeping with the landscape she knows best. She has often spoken of how her designs are directly inspired by the landscape of her childhood home in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in southern Alberta. She has said: "That's where I acquired an appreciation for the crisp prairie light, and the undulating hills and grasslands carved by wind and water that influence my artistic vision". Born from nature, nurtured in memory, fired in the alembic of her imagination, her glass inventions are overwhelmingly seductive. So her stoicism also has its sensuous counterpart. She has said: "My love of the landscape has led to an aesthetic based on beautiful simplicity of form and light." This aesthetic is wholly and uniquely her own. She is a magician in capturing light, and making the glass that its vessel and conduit modern in design and almost primordially tonal and expressive in material presence. Indeed, these phenomenal creations in blown glass find worthy antecedents in stark bronze Tibetan singing bowls and 14th-century Vietnamese celadon glazed bowls. It has been said that when Julia Reimer was first initiated into the craft of glass blowing, she instinctively knew she had discovered the ideal medium for expressing her creativity. She says, “I was always drawn to the muted luminescence of river ice on bright brisk days in winter. So when I had a chance to combine the essence of light, color and movement with a material, it was a perfect fit.” A perfect fit, indeed, for she has become the foremost magician of light working in the medium of glass. Her original design sensibility and technical virtuosity have been recognized through several awards and scholarships and general acclaim, but is demonstrated, above all, in the works she is showing now at Art Mur.
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Past exhibitions at Art Mûr 2010 |
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The Golden Cupcake March 6 - April 24
Text by Erin Silver
WILLY WONKA: But Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted. Cake, candy, sweets, treats: all are meant, as a general rule, to incite pleasure. Typically, these edibles are decorated, displayed, and consumed in acts of celebration or repose, are given, and received, as gifts or rewards. Few would argue that unabashed delight is not to be found in the consumption of the sugarcoated morsel—happiness reverberates with every saccharine crystal that is licked from every finger. Through touch, through taste, the object, once only seen, is now possessed. How perfect is that small, fluffy nugget—that which some might regard as happiness encapsulated within a ruffled paper cup? Those attempting to improve upon the cupcake’s heavenly formula know that they are doomed from the start, and so they develop new ways to express reverence. Knowing that those, too, will never be adequate substitutes for the original, they construct their false idols, nevertheless, but bear in mind that, in striving to surpass the happiness that is within reach, one risks forfeiting happiness altogether. A parable fit for this lesson seems to pervade Cooke-Sasseville’s storied installation; indeed, The Golden Cupcake contains the elements of its own demise: the once-toothsome treat is here transformed into a metal sculpture of silver and gold, garnished with a frosting of garish gemstones—cold and hard to the touch. Sylvette Babin reminds the visitor to take heed of the Cooke-Sasseville plot: “Their installations, consciously paradoxical, are inevitably putting us in ambivalent situations.”1 The golden cupcakes certainly elicit this response—like the touch of King Midas, the desire to make the object more beautiful has the undesired effect of denying the object its function; the promise of its tasty rewards remains forever just beyond reach. Surely, value shifts—the vernacular becomes the venerated—but the cake’s shiny new coat of jewels detracts from the core of the problem: the beholder of the beautiful thing is conflicted by the thought of what can no longer be obtained. Cooke-Sasseville’s imitative gesture may appear an ode to pleasure, in the many forms in which pleasure might be found: these treats will never be peeled from their shiny foil, but, to most, the thrill of a perceived “greater” value will eclipse previous gastronomical desires. Indeed, visitors might salivate over the embarrassment of riches that lie before them. However, they may also silently mourn the simple pleasure to which they are denied; the viewer’s eyes, upon sight of the brilliant object, might briefly bulge at the thought of what they can no longer stomach. 1. Sylvette Babin, “Cooke-Sasseville,” Cooke-Sasseville, http://www.cooke-sasseville.net/.
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Cooke-Sasseville
Cooke-Sasseville
Cooke-Sasseville
Cooke-Sasseville
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Tout chaud / Red-Hot March 6 - April 24
Texte de Ève De Garie-Lamanque
Red-Hot gathers the works of seven young contemporary artists who work in glass. Dominique Beaupré St-Pierre, Vincent Chagnon, Melanie Lambert, Marie-Pierre Daigle and William Ruppel cultivate a close link with nature, its components, its vitality and its textures; David Goranitis revisits the long tradition of glassmaking in his native Czech Republic; and Sébastien Duchange brings out the extraordinary in everyday objects – presenting us with a playful point of view. This is not our first encounter with this medium. In the winter of 2007, we invited Master-glassmaker John Paul Robinson to curate an exhibition of contemporary glass that would challenge popular prejudices towards glass art. This collaboration generated several other presentations of glass and since 2008, we have been hosting Espace Verre's annual graduate exhibition. Thus, when we were invited to participate in the Montreal City of Glass: A Tale of Innovation event, organised by the Board of Montreal Museum Directors, we were very enthusiastic to introduce a series of four exhibitions dedicated to glass to our 2010 exhibition schedule. Come discover some original new work from artists working in the creative medium of glass. Come and see them while they are Red-Hot!
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Dominique Beaupré St-Pierre
Vincent Chagnon
Mélanie Lambert
Marie-Pierre Daigle Will Ruppel
Sébastien Duchange
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Past exhibitions at Art Mûr 2010 |
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Révélations January 12 - February 27, 2010
“The object is here, but its outline is uncertain.” (Alexis Pernet, Révélations, 2009) In Revelations, Beaulieu presents an installation of moving shadows that seemingly want to extract themselves from the objects that retain them. Flooded with light, the animated sculptures and digital images of landscape fragments reveal their fleeting shadows. Observing the shifts in location, form and meaning that the landscape undergoes as a result of his various manipulations, Patrick Beaulieu attempts to affect the very nature of objects, putting their frailty to the test. His work involves multimedia techniques (sculpture, photography, video, Web) as well as live interventions directly inspired by the communities where he chooses to enact his poetic gestures. Beaulieu’s installations have been shown in Singapore (Plastic Kinetic Worms, 2001 and 2006), Korea (Gwangjiu Biennale, 2002), Mexico (Nina Menocal Gallery, Centro de la imagen at the National Center for the Art, 2004 and 2006), Belgium (Experimental Intermedia vzw, 2005) and in several exhibitions in Canada (CIRCA exhibition center, Art Mûr Gallery, Darling Foundry and others). He is currently working on The Monarch Vector, a multimedia expedition exploring the notions of migration and transmigration, portions of which was presented in 2007-8 at the Banff New Media Institute (Alberta, Canada), at the EstNordEst artist-run centre (Québec, Canada), at the University of Nashville (Tennessee, U.S.A.) and at the Alfredo Zalce Contemporary Art Museum (Morelia, Mexico) in 2009.
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Patrick Beaulieu
Patrick Beaulieu
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Aniconia January 12 - February 27, 2010
Text by Sarah Wilkinson
Colleen Wolstenholme’s work has the ability to engage and provoke viewers by piquing the social conscious. She’s a prolific artist with of an impressive oeuvre of intriguing art works ranging in mediums including jewellery, painting, sculpture, embroidery and digital collage. She is perhaps most well known for her jewellery and oversized plaster cast sculptures of pharmaceutical drugs. Her 2003 work entitled Spill commands attention both because the plaster casts are large (19" x 12" x 9") and because the artist utilizes recognizable forms. Their sheer size addresses the stigma attached to anti-anxiety and antidepressant medication. Narcotics are omnipresent within contemporary society, and are a politically charged topic, a fact the artist makes no bones about. In Spill, the pills first appear minimalist, however upon further inspection one is able to discern otherwise. Each piece is imbued with the personal act of labour. It is easily recognizable in the way each curve and shape is painstakingly rendered with such attention to detail. These works challenge the way that drug companies market pills to solve everything while side effects often leave their consumers numb and emotionally inept. In the past, Wolstenholme has been ordered, by law firms representing pharmaceutical companies, to cease producing these works due to trademark infringement. However there appears to be a larger issue at stake than design appropriation. Wolstenholme is an artist who is treading into a territory that is thought to be exclusively for the scientific elite. These attempts to regulate her work can be seen as evidence of its powerful effect. By offering up larger than life pills to her viewers, she is forcing the viewer to contemplate the pills’ substance before swallowing. This tactic is sure to elicit a provocative dialogue about the way in which these pills are so readily available, and perhaps more importantly, how these pills are being prescribed at disproportionate rates to women, a fact that may allude to the dominant structures’ desire to suppress and numb women in today’s society. The oppression and subjugation of women by culture, religion and state is an underlying concern in all of Wolstenholme’s works. This underlying power structure is often dictated by men. This male dominance still exists even in the so-called post-feminist era. This and That (2003) juxtaposes the figures of a nun and a woman in a burqa. These particular miniature casts illustrate fashion’s contribution to the oppression of women. It remarks on concealment in society which results in a suppression of the individual for the sakes of the collective identity. The artist utilizes camouflage to allude to this type of societal concealment rather than disguise it. Wolstenholme’s works are a tangible and non-apologetic thrust of relevant social issues from behind a veil. This veil of secrecy operates on a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ basis. Not only is this artist telling all, but she opens up a dialogue and encourages everyone to participate. http://www.colleenwolstenholme.com/
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Colleen Wolstenholme
Colleen Wolstenholme
Colleen Wolstenholme
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La fin d'un arc-en-ciel January 12 - February 27, 2010
Text by Mike Patten
All that glitters is not gold The song Over the Rainbow (1939), from the movie Wizard of Oz, was considered an anthem for hope after the great depression but in recent years an increasing number of people have lived beyond their means and lost faith in this American Dream. From housing boom to subprime bust, the whirlwind of the current global financial crisis has reminded us of the shaky ground our financial institutions are built upon. These events relate well to Simon Bilodeau’s installation in the gallery window. Surrounded by white plaster diamonds and debris, his work features a broken rainbow, left in ruins, like a fallen city or empire, devoid of color. The interior however shines brightly with mirrored glass, which may signify that happiness comes from within and not from some faraway place. This could also be seen as an ornament to celebrate the true spirit of the holiday season.
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Simon Bilodeau
Simon Bilodeau |
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Invitation
David Goranitis
