Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Paul Carr
This exhibition-specific series of small watercolours finds it’s genesis amongst some fairly basic epistemological concepts and obliquely associates them with imagery and narratives conjured up by the title The Dead. Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai and Haruki Murakami’s novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World both feature the setting of a village prominently in their respective plots. In the former, seven hired warriors are charged with fortifying a village, training the members of the community to be soldiers, and co-ordinating the defence of the village against an ostensibly insurmountable force of perennial marauding bandits. In the latter, a protagonist finds himself sealed within a mysterious village for a an eternity—the longer he remains there, the weaker his resolve to leave its confines becomes as he is assimilated into the community. In each case, the village is presented as an organic entity that requires insulation for the maintenance of cohesion and the prevention of intrusion. In order to exert and simultaneously preserve it’s existence, the village must be belligerent in it efforts towards self-definition. Paul Carr’s series of works on display in this exhibition considers the process of painting under a somewhat similar light. For Carr, painting as procedure is an organisational act comprised of technical and aesthetic operations. These are utilised in the construction of conceptual entities. By exerting planned control over the application of watercolour—a medium easily prone to chaos—the painted image as physical object becomes organic. Insular and epidermal, the contained aesthetic arrangement makes sense of the physical image, ordering it into existence as something rather than anything or everything else.
The Dead survey The End of the World. Weaknesses and easy points of intrusion are assessed. Preventative strategies begin to take shape., Watercolour and Gouache on Paper
Jordy Hamilton
Photography is of importance to my painting practice as it is most often the starting point for the image. It functions not as an image to copy but rather as the theoretical and formal undercarriage that the painting develops around. I am interested in images and publications that represent our constant drive toward progress, expansion and the control and mastery over both our own experience and the surrounding environment. In this way the paintings aim to explore larger questions of human ideology and progress all the while questioning the authority of both the original image and the paint. The painting, as a process, becomes increasingly important in relation to these ideas in its own questions of control and disintegration.
“Vacation can pay at Paradise Island Resort and Casino for gamblers who get lucky at the gaming tables or for the canny bettors who bone up on tax law in the hotel pool before crossing the bridge to Nassau and its money houses.”- NG Sept 1982, Acrylic on Linen - 150 X 150 - 2007
Phillip McCrum
I am a multidisciplinary artist. My practice has included painting, installation, multi –media, digital, and video projects. My interest in art making revolves around material and construction as an entry point or viewing device towards the deciphering of sub textual content. Material is represented by a variety of media, such as paint, found object installation, and other forms. The aesthetic acts for me as polemic in that the anti-aesthetes of my work is in reference to my understanding of the hierarchical ideas of beauty and my relationship to an aesthetic of working class or ‘other’ notions of beauty/value. This content ranges from the layering of meaning as it is contained and contextualized by an ‘artwork’. I mean by that the experience the viewing has on the viewer and the culpability the viewer has to the object and the space the object inhabits, materially as well as theoretically. It, my work, hopefully proposes systems that are deconstructed with the execution of the artwork, the formal aesthetic and logic dissolves into a tropic miasmic swamp. A catachresis. In other words it’s pretty funny stuff!
Alicia Munro
Alicia Munro’s paintings explore the complex relationship between media and memory. Through the act of painting, source images ranging from personal snapshots to film stills and news photos are reduced to their most basic forms, and any sense of the photograph as a ‘true’ document becomes compromised by the subjective exploration and reinterpretation of its formal elements. The personal and the mediated collapse and become indistinguishable, and memory constructed through image and referent triumphs over objective or coherent history. What remain are dreamlike and often arbitrary landscapes that float between realism and abstraction, depicting the fluidity of space and time.
Kevin Murphy
Kevin Murphy’s cloud paintings attempt to navigate the space between romantic projection and int ellectual closure. Re-imagining the romantic cloudscape as an abstract colour-field, the paintings examine the vocabulary of the absolute within an appropriated and monumentalized indexical or reference document. Strategies of definition and documentation become unfixed by an all-too-earnest engagement in traditions of subjective experience and the sublime, while any transcendent qualities become grounded in scientific jargon and textbook descriptions. Parabolic stretcher frames complete a theatrical catachresis of mutually contradictory tropes, leaving the works to hover somewhere between banality and self-importance, cynicism and sincerity.
Polar stratospheric cloud (white) with other clouds colored by a sunset. This is a nacreous or mother-of-pearl type of polar stratospheric cloud (PSC). PSCs are high-altitude icy clouds that are found about 24 kilometers/15 miles up in the polar atmosphere. They form only during winter when the temperature drops below around -112ºF/-80ºC. PSCs play a key role in the destruction of ozone by chlorine. They convert harmless forms of chlorine into highly reactive forms. Chlorine is carried into the stratosphere in CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons), gases used as refrigerants and during foam plastic manufacture. Photographed over Swedish Lapland in early January, Latex on Canvas, 104” x 84”
Ryan Peter
Ryan Peter’s paintings borrow from the history of photography—the daguerreotype, aspects of Pictorialism, and more recent phenomena such as x-ray and satellite photography. The techniques Peter employs in the application of paint, such as pouring, pooling, and spraying, create the potential for multiple readings of his work. This slippery representation undermines the apparent aspirations of the work to photographic distance and mimesis, re-situating the work in the sphere of bodily and lived experience.
“Last Snow”, Ink, acrylic, and spray-paint on plywood, 60″ x 72″
Byron Peters
Sometimes, in between sanitary design-chic and overblown psychedelia, clean rational thought is torn from positivist diagramming under the inevitable acceptance of material failure. Here lies an appreciation of topological complexities and material simplicities.
Marina Roy
In the pile-up of language and spectacle of our amnesiac present moment, one role for art is to create a clearing within this growing wreckage-heap, and, through a reordering of all this new and obsolete stuff, through bricolage and idle play, construct new meanings, new conceptions of reality shot through with skepticism, historical memory, and utopianism.
Andrew Salgado
Although humorous and vibrant, Andrew’s work is as polemical as it is tongue in cheek. Salgado transforms the banal and commonplace into analytical, contemporary allegories. His portraits of friends and acquaintances are elevated to a new level, charged with sentimentality as well as critical, underlying meanings. His subject matter is at once personal and universal, subverting traditional portraiture and challenging ideas of youth and beauty with a distinctly un-romantic approach. Salgado’s constantly changing style borrows from contemporary figrurative work and abstraction, and concerns itself with the process of creating meaning and narrative through technique and the deconstruction of an image. Andrew has been accepted to do a Masters program at the internationally renowned Chelsea College of Art in London, where he will graduate in 2009. Andrew currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC.
