Tag Archives: Niagara Artists

Discarded Beauty: Steve deBruyn

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There are some unexpected contradictions in the “installation of painted wooden sculptures” currently at NAC. Or, if I defer to his description of Pile On, the singular work, as Steve deBruyn intends the free standing and precariously balanced “pillars”, along with the wall works partly inspired by Kurt Schwitters’ assemblages, as a singular whole; an inclusive installation that envelops the visitor.

Many of the components were fashioned by deBruyn, with NAC volunteers, in the week leading up to the show opening, which adds to this interpretation. A singular artist, perhaps, but many hands in the making of the installation.

Many of the pieces have a ragged quality, a roughness, and may give you a splinter if you handle them (deBruyn wasn’t precious, at the reception, and both handled the works himself and encouraged visitors to do the same). But then you’ll notice delicate and exacting evidence of the artist’s hand (the colours and patterns and textures that unite all the components, subtle yet significant, or the cleanliness and perfection of some edges and lines, harshly contrasted to the ramshackle detritus within the same piece. One set of sculptures, flowing and bending with wainscoting, making them look like escaped, “wilder” house works, on the right side of the gallery, are delightful in this lively, almost jolly, manner. The repetition of the pink purple blue black crisscross pattern pieces in the wall works, the random – perhaps added after, perhaps already a part of the slat or chunk added to the works – splotches of paint that further make the pieces connect across and around the room).

The works presented here are very much “worker’s” art (like George Sawchuck): the materials from which they’re constructed, how they’re installed and the recognizable components (pressboard), have a proletarian – almost plebian, or common –  aspect. Its funny how some artworks inspire you to leave any heavier theory at the door, while other works invoke the same (often remote, often academic or irrelevant) ideas into a real, and lived space. It’s impossible for me to separate these works from my conversation with Steve in which he talked about working “at a lumber yard—and busy constructing a backyard deck when called to discuss his upcoming exhibit—deBruyn’s work responds to the common discarded construction materials he refuses to build his sculptures, echoes of the skateboard culture he was once very much a part of, and his own sensibilities about the narrowness of our perceptions of what is beautiful in our living spaces and built surroundings.”

There’s an interesting contradiction, if you’re familiar with Kurt Schwitters’ Construction for Noble Ladies (1919) and the almost overtly masculine (yet not as the pillars tilt and the pressboard looks cheap like an overtly macho poser) pieces from deBruyn. He pointed out how some of the works, with mouldings and finishing you’d expect in any good suburban bathroom had gouges and breaks in their making, a hand less concerned with making a “perfect” object than exposing the ludicrous nature of it all (like Schwitters’ mocking of “noble ladies”….)

The back gallery at NAC is installed in a manner that spaces the wall works out at regular intervals – all are relatively similar in size, and all share not just colours, but also are constructed from shared pieces of wood (evidence of repurposing) that further unify them, as a perimeter around the room, defining the space. Fragments are arranged in an orderly manner to form the whole: whether this is “modernist” or more about crafting a seamless suburban renovation is debatable. All property is theft, comrade, and maybe I’m talking about the wealthy, ignorant suburbanites or how I hope that some of the source materials were “liberated and secured” for these alternately bright, or blighted, wall works.

The pillars lean in a way that suggest they’ll be coming down soon, and you might not want to be under them when that happens. They’re painted in the same colours that unite many of the works – there’s the small painting card sample, near the comment book: Peach Brick, Lotus Petal, Copper Trail, Green Grey Mist and Northern Landscape (I still wish I’d somehow gotten a job naming paints, but I’m sure I would have lost it, in the beige, impotent spaces. I’d go slowly crazy, calling things Arterial Spray Red or Leprosy Grey or Gangrene Green…this might seem like an indulgent tangent, but deBruyn and I also talked about work and trying to do what you want while having to pay for what you need…). All of these scream inoffensive interior design, and all – on their own, if you painted a room and not a work of art made from cast offs and crap that sat in your backyard for months – would suit any bourgeois bathroom.

The six columns are generally one solid paint chip colour, whereas the wall pieces have flat shapes in variable samples from this selection, often arching up from the bottom of the “plane”, in geometric shapes (trapezoids and pyramids – once again, a reference to building or construction, perhaps?).

To return to the statement for the show: “[H]is objective is only to have audiences reconsider the environments that we spend our lives in and possibilities for greater aesthetic pleasure from them.” In that respect, deBruyn succeeds: these pieces are fragments, discarded or torn, it seems, from the houses and rooms that we build – or have others build – for “us.” With current debates regarding houses, whether the cost or who gets to own, and who never will, I see these as something that my generation and those after us might consider as future (or current) housing.

Its not coincidental that as I wrote about this work, I spoke with a friend who does street photography and he mentioned a squat under one of the bridges that had been burned out in the past week. There is a stronger conceptual connection between that now discarded, abandoned space and deBruyn’s backyard, where some of the elements of these works in Pile On were subjected to the elements, than the suburban spaces the colours and finer details allude to, obliquely. 

 Steve deBruyn’s exhibition Pile On is on display until Saturday 22 July. 

Denouement (the outcome of a complex series of events) / Rodman Hall

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Camille Paglia once very caustically (and astutely) observed that many “still regard abstract painting with suspicion, as if it were a hoax or fraud. Given this lingering skepticism, it might be wise to admit that there is more bad than good abstract art, which has been compromised over the decades by a host of inept imitations.” The same can be said of artworks in the realm of new media, whether moving or still: in fact, sometimes these can be even worse, as they combine a navel gazing discourse that is more about “how” something was made, rather than why, and much new media work has also bartered aesthetics for ideology, being so focused upon “personalism” that it becomes more of a soliloquy – or narcolepsy inducing lecture – than anything else.

But all that means is that any gallery visitor needs to be discerning: and sometimes gems can be found in unexpected places. It’s always difficult to gage what to expect from a BFA graduating show, just like with an MFA show: these days, with institutional cronyism and ponzi schemes giving us “visual arts PhDs” in Canada, it’s only likely to muddy the waters – or more exactly, add more urine in the artistic pool. But there are interesting ways in which this can be challenged. I’ve always felt that having Brock BFA grads exhibit their works in Rodman Hall upped the ante, presented a real challenge to the students, and gave them a true first step into what a considered – and qualitative – practice must be, post university.

The current slate of graduates, showing in Denouement at Rodman Hall, is an eclectic mix. Several works are quite good, several others fall short. The intricate detail of Taylor Umer’s monochromatic pieces, the “landscapes” of Robin Nisbet that fracture space and time but still offer enough “ground” for the viewer, or the exploration of memory in a personal motif as in the works of Becca Marshall are diverse in concept and execution.

The work that I’ve been back to see several times, and spent the most time with, is that of Kylie Mitchell. Multiple interlocking works, with simple titles like something, august 12, doll or burn it which belie their evocative suggestion of an intense story we must hear…It is also the work that personifies the title of the show the best; not in terms of finishing a degree or this exhibition as an “end point” but in the “complex events” she hints at, or the stories she alludes to, obliquely and directly.

There’s several reasons why this is the work I’ve chosen to highlight, to spend time with and try to articulate its attraction, that intersect with each other: the installation benefits from being in a separate room, allowing the projections, images and monitors to converse with each other, without interference from other work, and thus invites our contemplation as we stand within the environment. Perhaps it’s also that Gunilla Josephson’s works were recently here, too, and my mind is on how video can be a space, not simply a wall work. But perhaps it’s the way in which one of the works (august 12) both embraces the machinery that defines it, and yet also offers a very personal and immediate bridge across what can be distancing technology.

As you enter her space, along the left hand side of the wall are three monitors, all at the same level, seemingly identical in size and form. Each loops: words are typed, corrected, brief statements that are as terse as they are uncomfortably personal, and then an invisible hand “backspaces” it all, unwriting unmaking unsaying it all. Only to do so again, and erase again, and type again, for ever and ever. Charged phrases: I should have said something, or she’s dead, or equally cutting snippets of conversations that are painfully real. Small bites of speech that are hard to swallow, and perhaps we sick back up, and then swallow again. Another loop, like trauma in memory (“Do you really think there is a real point where then stops and now begins?” Maggie had asked him. “Don’t you know that down deep the things that happen to you never really stop happening to you?” (Peter Straub, KOKO)).

Mitchell’s words: “The premise of this series of work is based on three students from Brock, who agreed to meet with me and discuss moments in their lives that have deeply shaped them today.” She went on to shape and mold these, but I’m loathe to add more than that. There’s a gravity to the room, and the images and objects within it, that facilitates personal interpretation and projection of one’s own moments and histories where everything changed, and was never the same again. Something that might be awkward is incisive: and the universal nature of stories that might be despairing, regretful or that simply remind us that we are unified by that which we have experienced transcends form and technology to be about communication, that often failed and failing attempt to know another person, and their life. 

Denouement, the Brock University Department of Visual Arts Honours Exhibition, runs until April 30th at Rodman Hall Arts Centre.

The image above is a video still from Kylie MItchell’s bracelet, 2017.

Shimmering Details: Lauren Regier

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Lauren Regier is one of numerous artists (emerging and established) whose practice and development is tied to Rodman Hall. Unsurprisingly, I first met her there, when we had an enjoyable conversation about Shawn Serfas’ solo exhibition Inland. Her experience also acknowledges the unique educational value of Brock and Rodman: “Like many in the Niagara Region, I was introduced to visual arts through the children’s art classes at Rodman…What started me on a path of art-making was…a first-year art history class I took at Brock University. I was so excited by the notion that art could be a catalyst for change and discussion, not just politically speaking, but socially, culturally and even scientifically.”

Before exploring specifics of Regier’s practice, her most recent works, The Fantasy Fleur series, can be seen here. A selection are also currently on display at Malcolm Gear’s studio / gallery space in Welland. Oyster Mystique or Flower Biscuit betray a certain “scientific” looking, but the sensual metallic surface offers a grounding to the scenes Regier depicts, that stretch from seedling to decay, in this series. Dandelion Meadow has a delicacy that matches its subject, with clean details on shimmering metal.

Lauren’s words are more suitable than mine, here: “For the last ten months I’ve been researching the functions of botany & human/animal anatomy …The Fantasy Fleur series began as a bit of a breakaway from that particular project. Something that seems to run through much of my work is the notion of functionality. My research over the past year has allowed me to consider this idea not only in individual plant specimens, but also their functional role in an ecosystem and even how we as humans perceive some plants as more ‘valuable’ than others.

I approached the [Fleur] project with these ideas in mind…I was drawn to the intricate microstructures that make up the entire specimen, and the transitional evolution that occurs in their life cycle. The only thing that was important for me was that I avoid collecting samples from plants that were “untouched” by their environment.”

A recent exhibition at NAC (Twenty Three Days at Sea) illustrated how residencies – specific locales and time set aside to create / research – can be indispensible to artistic development and production. This is also true for Regier: “…the past year [was spent] developing a body of work…inspired by a residency in March on Malcolm Island, BC. It was a wonderful way to spend the last couple of months, being outdoors all morning and just rediscovering an environment to which I had become so accustomed. There’s also a bit of humour in the works, as I used overly lavish wallpaper names [Marilyn’s Teaparty] to title my own images. It was very refreshing to shift gears and be spontaneous and careless (in my own very controlled fashion).”   

“I’ve always been very interested in the integration between the industrial and natural world, so these images were commercially printed and titled with overly lavish names taken from floral wallpaper samples. Idealized beauty is something we typically see in the final stages of production, but before that point there are rough versions, broken or barely functioning prototypes that are crudely designed. Personally, I find that there’s a strange aura in hurried, makeshift creations so that’s typically the place where I want my work to end.                                                                                                                                              

The images are printed on a highly reflective surface so when the lighting hits the work properly (and when the viewer is standing in the right position) the plants become illuminated. This also breaks the viewer from receiving an “instant payoff” and hopefully entices them to interact with the work. If it’s hanging in a naturally lit room, the lighting will shift throughout the day and the illumination of the images will respond to its changing environment (similar to plants that bloom at specific times of the day).”

When I asked about a favourite artist, or artwork, right now, Regier offered two pieces by the famous installation / sculpture / interventionist / environmental artist Richard Serra, Tilted Arc and Shift. “Both pieces are inserted into vastly different environments and the disruption of these landscapes have very different results. I just find it fascinating that in Shift, the topography of the earth slowly changes with the wall, and in Tilted Arc the sculpture was ultimately rejected and removed (almost like a human body rejecting an organ transplant). Both pieces are bigger than their physical form because they’re interactive, and have changed overtime.” Arc is still a flashpoint for art in the public sphere, and its rough modernist aesthetic both appealed and annoyed.  It’s easy to draw a correlation between the play of environment / construction in Regier’s works and those of Serra, and even a superficial connection in terms of media (burnished industrial surfaces appearing in unexpected ways, or in unexpected tandems).

Regier says her work “usually starts with a question based on some sort of curiosity…like noticing a strange glimmer in a rocky shoreline. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I investigate by unearthing stones in order to find the spark that first caught my eye. When I find the initial answer, it typically only raises more questions. During this process I try to navigate a path of understanding; something that can be challenging because I usually don’t know what I’m actually gravitating towards. So I establish “decisions” in my work. These are pivotal answered questions that direct the evolution of a project. As for the materials that are used, it’s typically the idea that dictates the medium.”

All images are courtesy of the artist, and are part of the Fantasy Fleur series: more images of Lauren’s work can be seen at her site.

Regier’s Fantasy Fleur series was on display in Welland, at Malcolm Gear Studios, in early 2017. 

 

Amber Lee Williams / “Embracing Randomness”

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When I attended the RHIZOME activities at MIWSFPA during the 2016 In the Soil Festival, I strayed from the designated areas, as I often do. I found myself in the studio space where Amber Lee Williams was “inviting participants to pose for a blind contour drawing [for] her interactive exhibit. Each drawing will be done individually and privately but the drawings will be connected through medium and drawing surface.” The rooms had the drawings arranged on the walls, and you sat / stood /acted among them as Amber rendered you in a similar manner.  I was trespassing during “down time” of her performance, but she was gracious enough to answer my questions then, and talked about both process and portraits. Blind contour, for those unfamiliar, is when an artist draws a subject without looking at the paper (often considered a “warm up exercise”, with the intent to loosen the hand and encourage creativity, but like any medium, can be different things in different “hands”).  

When I sat down to talk with Amber again, her work in Devolve: Creation/Movement/Fluidity at Niagara Artist Centre had just opened, in the Dennis Tourbin space. Her encaustic works are lovely in texture and tone and mark a further exploration and refinement of her use of this often difficult medium of wax and pigment.

We talked about her practice – which exists in a threefold manner – and the ideas that have informed her artwork over her artistic career. Her work is likely familiar to you if you live in the STC area, and seeing some of her photographs in a show nearly a year ago makes me pleased to feature Amber Lee Williams as the latest instalment in The Sound’s ongoing local artists series.

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As mentioned, Amber works in three different “areas” of art: encaustic painting, photography (a more recent practice), and the blind contours. These are very different and unique media, with distinctive history and baggage. None is the “favourite”, but wanting to work on them all together or have them influence each other, is an aspect of Williams’ art. But they’re “all different” and Williams says she can’t speak of them as one “entity”. I might posit that her practice is an umbrella and these are all under that arching cover.

A term she used often is “embracing randomness.” Williams spoke of process as “a vessel for the creativity of the act, and sometimes even in the selection of the works, to see what’s worked, and what has not.”

Her works in the NAC embody this: rich encaustic abstraction, the generous application of colour, the use of a blow torch, then repeating the wax and the pigment and the melting and seeing what colours come to the fore. There’s a slim vertical triptych, mostly black, mimicking wood grain or veins that “flow” like pencil marks through the wax. This blackish web “sits” on top of the oranges and off whites: there’s similar depth to others, at NAC, such as two small works on the back wall. Primarily whitish, the small dots and blots of colour in them make these encaustics resemble mould or colourful lichen. Another triptych have wax and colour like icing or fudge, slathered on a form and now cooled and hardened.

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Returning to Williams’ contours, another sentiment that informs her work takes shape: that the process is not so much about control, but about setting up a framework (some rules, a specific technique) to get to the end result.

This returns again to “embracing randomness”: Williams expressed a dislike for very “formal” drawing, with the pressure of intention in a “final result.” With blind contours, if she looked she’d want to make it “perfect”, remove and erase any marks that aren’t “good enough”, with over determination ruining potential creativity. She prefers “taking chances, embracing the questionable nature of the outcome, and the process that defines all” (there’s a similarity to William Griffiths’ ongoing painted process where a work is never truly “finished”).

encaustic8 encaustic10If she’s unhappy with a piece, it’s recycled, or discarded: “fearless creativity. Step up to the edge and take the chance of destroying the piece if there’s a chance you can make it better.”

The break from one process to another fosters continuous work (“encaustic painting day”, as it takes four or five hours, but contours are fast and more social. This was clear with In the Soil, as it became a social performative space, of the drawing with participants and collaborators).

Photography is perhaps the most technically formal of Williams’ work, with f stops / light readings, focal lengths and such. But in creating multiple replicated images, it has an element of experimentation where you can discard or repeat. When asked about her “most significant piece of the past year”, Amber indicated that being introduced to photography as an art form was notable. She’d always enjoyed taking pictures, but with the influence of a class taught by the fine artist Amy Friend (an excellent artist / educator) she’s begun exploring analog, film, lumen prints, pinhole and “hasn’t felt this obsession since discovering encaustic”. It’s a medium that she can see working with for some time. She mentioned  an artist whom she’s interested in right now, Joseph Parra: a young, Baltimore-based photographer who produces CMYK screen prints of photographs printed by hand, or photos that are sanded, cut, braided and that represent more than just the physical identity of the subject. This is similar to what Williams wants to do with her blind contours and photography. She also cited the necessity of it being tactile and that it has that immediate physical connection, both to her and viewers.

If you missed Devolve: Creation/Movement/Fluidity (all the images in this post are from that exhibition), Amber will be exhibiting more photographic works at NAC in November, and more of her work can be seen here.

 

Grimsby Bi Annual 2016 / Regional Contrasts

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I’d never visited the Grimsby Art Gallery before, but unlike many arts writers, I have a long history with smaller galleries, whether community oriented, more “museum” focused, or spaces – like GPAG, or a favourite of mine in Saskatchewan, the Mann Art Gallery – that offer an intersection of regional and wider artistic concerns, whether provincial or even national, in their tone. Sometimes these spaces acknowledge their role very actively, as when the Godfrey Dean was a venue for The Paradise Institute, as it toured the country, allowing many to experience it that wouldn’t be able to, otherwise. 

The latest incarnation of the Grimsby Public Art Gallery Bi – Annual Juried Exhibition opened on the 5th of August, and it seemed a perfect opportunity to explore the space for the first time. With just short of forty artists in the exhibition, it guaranteed to offer an interesting cross section of art in Niagara.

The gallery space – like many in Canada – is housed in the library, and this is something I always find interesting: the Dunlop, in Regina, is similar, and this has been a primarily positive experience, though intersections with civic spaces (like libraries) and the attendant political framework can be both edifying and degrading, in terms of audience. This is not different from how university galleries can also find themselves negotiating with the institutions they must interact with daily, and their respective ideologies and biases.

The exhibition was curated by a trio. Ingrid Mayrhofer (described as an artist, curator & educator), Mary Reid (the Director / Curator of the Woodstock Art Gallery) and Gerrie Loveys (Assistant Curator, Peel Art Gallery, Museum & Archives). The gallery is quite full, not quite salon style in terms of installation, but it is a safe assumption that the curators brought a sense of inclusivity to their task. When you visit the gallery, there’s a small pamphlet that lists off the works / artists, but also has more in depth descriptions of the curators.

Carrie Perreault’s Untitled (For Elizabeth) (rice, plastic, metal) is easily the best piece, not just for its uniqueness among the works here, but that it seizes your attention immediately and then precedes to define how you negotiate the room. The disembodied “feet” – whitish, formed by the grains of rice that cover the “socks”, walk into the gallery space, ahead of you: there is a “break” between one set of “feet” and another, but this is a work that strikes me as genuinely contemporary, and that is exciting both in a formal manner (non traditional material, installation in a manner that questions / challenges the space of the gallery and the visitor, pushing interaction) but that also offers conceptual questions. As a somewhat indexical sign of another person, aspects of absence are a consideration – you could ask who “Elizabeth” is – or was – or you could consider these as being a variation on footprints that suggest a lack as much as a presence. Untitled invites you to construct a story around the elements Perreault provides. (The image below is NOT the install at GPAG).

Perrault, Untitled (For Elizabeth).

Carrie Perreault, Untitled (For Elizabeth).

Synchronized Flight and Nesting are two works further back in the corner, like rewards you’ll have to traverse the room and the corner to enjoy. Veronika Beaulieu’s works have a delicacy of form and construction that remind me of some of Zachari Logan’s drawings: these are paper collage on wood panel, deep black backgrounds and with a minutiae of form and finesse.

Lisa Skog’s Landscape, in clay, is one of a number of fine craft works of quality and interest: multiple reddish brown works of varying heights that suggest a ragged city scape, or perhaps a rough interpretation of an Emily Carr scene. The “poles” are textured and incised.

Anita Granger presents a diptych, in a manner, of two “pears.”. One of these, Repaired (the other is titled Non-Perishable) sports a zipper on its front, but this is more amusing than macabre. Its funny the same way that, of course, as these are made of bronze / stone, that they’re both “non perishable”. I resisted the urge to touch them both, though I wanted to, very much. Malcolm Gear’s Stripped Jar (stoneware clay) has a simplicity but also a touch of absurdity with its strong diagonal, straddling art / art object, as you could use this fine craft piece or just appropriately declare it art and display it. Sandy Middleton’s Dreamwalking 2 is another of her haunting photographs, an unpeopled landscape that’s sparse in its tonality and that is atmospheric, suggesting a site both familiar and foreboding.

Arnold McBay’s Glyph (acrylic, plaster on panel) may be my favourite painting of the exhibition, with the cleanliness of the black symbol on the white thick surface. It’s a small work, so you can appreciate how the plaster sits on the panel, as sculptural as it is painted. Glyph is a fine successor to the history of hard edge painting / pop art appropriation of known symbols / the everyday street sign designated as “art” by its placement in the refined gallery air. Less can be more, and that’s something that several of the pieces here, in the Bi Annual, should consider and perhaps incorporate. Many works are too busy, too frenetic, and exhaust the eye rather than reward it. Tina Newlove’s Self Portrait is scratchy linear simple (very atypical of oil painting), no excess of line or colour here, and suggests a surety of hand. All brown rusty beige, she looks askew at us, eschewing eye contact from this slender canvas.

Returning to three dimensional works: Nikola Wojewoda-Patti has two works in clay and mixed media. The titles suggest a larger series that these are sampled from, as we have The Gatekeeper, Ally to the Weeping Queen and The Concubine, Ally to the Mute Queen. Both sit on plinths so we have to look up to them. In William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive, Slick Henry is an artist (loosely based on Mark Pauline of SRL) “who lives in a place named Factory in the Dog Solitude; a large, poisoned expanse of deserted factories and dumps, perhaps in New Jersey…[where he’s creating] large robotic sculptures”, with names like “the Judge, the Investigators ….the Corpsegrinder and the Witch”. He can’t explain way, but there is a logic to it, to him, and a suggestion of a larger story that these characters inhabit, and that by giving them physical form he frees them, and gives them life. Wojewoda-Patti’s characters imply an external drama: I’d like to see more, and know the story within which they exist. 

Linda Ruscio McIntosh’s SPIRIT TREES also presents engaging texture and colour, being mixed media on rusted steel (the rusty blood palette, with whites and greys, balances the sheen of the metal). The title is a bit heavy handed: the ethereal nature of the scene is obvious. Robin Nisbet’s Light Rail in acrylic, looks best from across the room, where the marks and darkness blend and meld to create a wet dark scene from a lost night highway. This is next to Peter Adams’ Red River Series #1: Yangtze, which is very red, very blotchy, and has a redeeming quality in the black scratchy lines that try to offer some shape and order to the loud colours.

Janny Frazer’s Dwellings Light Sculpture is the only other “floor” work, besides Perrault (others are mounted on plinths). It’s a bit haphazard, like a light table with small structures, the glow of the table alternating with the black lines of the tiny domicile structures atop it. A bit of a noisy piece after the cleanliness of Perrault.

There’s a divisive quality to the show: some of the works are definitely contemporary, and would work at Rodman or at Niagara Artists Centre, displaying a level of conceptual and formal execution that is praiseworthy.

Others manifest that compromise that community gallery’s often must make, in representing a community with artworks that have more of a value in terms of regionalism than in representing quality work. I’m reminded of how the aforementioned Mann Gallery in Prince Albert, with its annual Winter juried show, has attempted to expand and push what Art is, and can be, in that small city.

Conversely, I’m also hearing the words of Robin Metcalfe, who spoke of how when you run a gallery in a regionalist space in Canada, you must respect that area, as your role is to serve alternate and sometimes disparate stakeholders (I once wrote a long piece for FUSE Magazine about the political waters and partners that the second Joni Mitchell exhibition served, at the Mendel Art Gallery, and how public galleries must be inclusive, but also diverse).

The 2016 Bi Annual Exhibition is very dominated by painting, and this is unsurprising: and many of the works (like Maureen Paxton‘s Séance has fun with the picture plane and where we are positioned as the viewer, and Samantha Goeree’s Transcendance I, II and III bring together texture and photography with an able, aesthetic hand) display a subtlety that merit your attention. Others do not, and suggest a certain banality and safety that any large, local exhibition has to negotiate. Ignore these pieces, and consider that there’s some quality work in this space that bridges a variety of media.

The 2016 Grimsby Public Art Gallery Bi Annual Exhibition is on display until the 11th of September.

 

Artist Profile: Matt Caldwell

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The latest in The Sound’s series highlighting local visual artists in Niagara looks at Matt Caldwell: I first encountered his artwork  in Million Dollar Pink, in the Dennis Tourbin Gallery at NAC. His works alternate in size, but are immediately recognizable: the subtle, almost bland, tones suggest an industrial aesthetic in his abstracted, roughly geometric works. Their hypnotic monotony is broken by running dabs and scratches of bright colours; these “appear” to you, after you’ve “watched” these drawn / painted pieces for a while….

MC: My studio practice has definitely changed recently. It’s more fluid than ever and it definitely tends to my focus on painting…there’s a lot of automatic decision making but also too much hesitation and internal processing of how I imagine a work’s outcome. If I had a studio to myself, I think there’d be lots of screaming. Just a routine release of extra energy.

BG: Why do you make art, how did you begin, and why is making art important to you?

MC: I’m not actually sure how many kids enjoy drawing at a young age but I will assume it’s a fair amount if not the entire sum of them. Is that when I started making art?  There really isn’t a starting point for me but looking back, say fifteen years ago, you don’t consider the standards of the art world. The funny thing is that the academic aspect might deprive artists of some original or pure ideas for work resulting in something may have been more interesting than what they’ve decided to pursue after education. In short, I find my interests lean towards a person’s raw capabilities of thinking and problem solving. Not that I only find interest in abstraction or mark-making, but I find it to be the most natural path for me at this time. There’s something thrilling about a few strokes of a colour and a month later you may hate that decision. It’s a fun and miserable experience all at once.

BG: Who is your favourite artist right now and / or the most significant artist (contemporary or historical) in relation to your practice?

MC: Paul Kremer’s colour-field paintings are both impressive and influential (for me) in his style of composition, using just three colours and the white of the canvas to create illusions of shadow and three-dimensional form. The banality of it really captivates me as it rides a line of simplicity but seems to rely on the pull of the eye through his use of tonal value. This keeps me considering my own work as I often have a disregard for major contrast.

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As for the most influential artist right now I’d chose a personal favourite, Mark Bradford (probably because he’s currently showing at Albright-Knox in Buffalo in Shade: Clyfford Still / Mark Bradford. Still [a significant abstract expressionist who passed in 1980) is also a favourite. I enjoy Bradford’s process and intuitive thinking when creating what he considers paintings. His use of found objects (old signs, advertisements, posters, etc.) from lower income urban zones create works rich in history through the items but also through his experience of retrieving the items and living in the areas. I like the idea of scavenging / recycling the old to create a further existence / experience for “loaded” objects as their “meanings” are edited or shifted as they’re collaged together. There’s great attention to detail in his work and it says a lot about his conceptual path as he spends his life tending what could be considered trash.

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BG: What’s a highlight of your practice, from the past year? What do you have coming up that we should know about?

MC: I graduated from Brock University as a “studio art” major ( a great feeling to be finished school – for now – and that  I’m no longer a “student artist.”) CASE CLOSED, at the Niagara Artists Centre in May where I showed with my “colleagues”(Alex Muresan, Katie Mazi, Jenn Judson) was something of a nod to our exit from Brock. It was truly exciting to see how well the show meshed. I have a collaborative work with Marissa Tomlinson at the Niagara Falls Art Gallery, with local artists exploring interpretations of “portrait”. Beyond that I’ve been doing a lot more drawing and photography until I get a larger space to work on some bigger paintings.

BG: What’s a significant piece you’ve made recently and why?

MC: A work that’s still in progress, an incomplete piece, is my current favourite: it was something of a breakthrough piece for me. I’ve been happily stuck painting rectangles /squares, re-painting layers / being tedious with my process, but in this new piece I broke free from some of the restrictions I put on myself and too often struggle to lose. There’s a habit involved in my work, not a bad one, but one that prevents me from picking up new ones.

Matt Caldwell’s work is on display until September 29th, at 8058 Oakwood Drive, Niagara Falls, ON, as part of the juried exhibition “Are You Looking at Me?”

Familiar Spaces / Different Work: The Jordan Art Gallery

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In a recent conversation, the idea that “Niagara” is an artificial construct that’s grafted unsuccessfully onto different regions, ignoring their uniqueness and difference, was raised. It’s worth considering in terms of the diversity of works that you’ll see at the TAG Gallery, or at the Riverbrink, or at the Jordan Art Gallery in Jordan Village (you may be wondering why there’s no images to accompany this article. Go to their site and explore there, as there’s more images there than I could ever post here…but I do give a teaser of the work of Melanie Macdonald below).

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Part of the motivation to highlight this space is that two of the JAG artists (Mori McCrae and Will Griffiths) have exhibited in the Dennis Tourbin gallery at NAC in the past year, and the quality necessitated a “follow up” to see more by these artists – and their peers – at the JAG. Hopefully you had a chance to see Griffiths’ exhibition DIG there, this June, or McCrae’s earlier exhibition, On Site, an integration of image and text, having its genesis from her residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland.

The gallery blurb is as follows: ”Jordan Art Gallery has been promoting original work by Niagara makers since 2001. The eight Jordan Art Gallery artists/proprietors are recognized as dedicated and respected artists whose creative output individually, spans decades of art making.” It’s worth noting that Janny Fraser and George Langbroek, among the eight JAG artists, are also founding members of NAC. Its also a space, that like the Thunder Gallery in the Falls, is attempting to carve out a more cultural, and less “touristy”, niche.

If I was looking for a thread to run through the practice of artists like Fraser, Diane Slaight, Darlene Monroe, McCrae or Griffiths (not ignoring artists like Eugen Schlaak’s sleekly “modernist” turned woods, or the “works in steel” by Floyd Elzinga, that contrast nature and industry, or Suzi Dwor’s fabric works that bridge utility and artistry) it would be a privileging of materials. Sometimes that appears in abstracted works, such as Griffiths (Pyramid, Epworth Circle or Vacant Lot). Monroe’s Beyond the Wall, where texture and implied tactility dominate, is a frame of rough blue (like the slats of blind gone askew) ensconcing a “window” of brownredtawny dirtyyellow offwhite, both angular and ragged.

Diane Slaight’s Public Spaces, Private Lives series which embraces the history of painting capturing / creating moments that invite us to inject a narrative (one is a city scene at night, with bare trees and flares of street / headlights make the street glossy wet darkness).

Kathy McBride’s practice more directly evokes memory: hence the dominance of figures, often singular, often children, in picture planes that become wilder (Time of her Life) or more minimal (Water Wings) to foreground the “subject.” Alternately, Frazer’s objects can both be smaller, intricately decorated / textured pieces and larger installation works whose materials (everyday objects like mirrors and magnifying glasses, but also porcelain constructions and and photo collages) fill a room as easily as a wall.

The JAG is a bit remote, not as immediately accessible as Rodman Hall: it’s been open since 2001, and does play upon not being “Big City”, whatever that means (a recent fluff piece in Canadian Art was all about TO galleries you “might not know about”, because we all know that TO doesn’t get the coverage it deserves, cough, cough). The Jordan Art Gallery, like the TAG and Thunder, is a worthwhile space you’ll have to seek out, with a diversity of quality in the artists there that merits the effort.