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Exhibition: Holding the Pose: Portraits from the Collection, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown

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Holding the Pose: Portraits from the Collection

January 27 – November 27

Featuring works from the gallery’s collection by artists from across Canada, Holding the Pose demonstrates the complexity of interaction between artist and sitter in a wide variety of portraits in various mediums.

This exhibition presents a selection of portraits from the collection of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. Combining historical portraiture with contemporary representations of individuals and groups, it provides an overview of the genre in Canada, its many approaches and its transformation over time, with a particular focus on the way the subjects of portraiture have played a part in the resulting work-their attitude, their mode of address, their self-presentation, and the way their pose is as much the subject of the work as their physical likeness. Portraits are ultimately the result of an encounter between artist and sitter. The exhibition’s starting point is the work of Prince Edward Island artist Robert Harris (1849-1919), who was in the late 19th century one of Canada’s most prominent portrait painters. Harris’s portraits functioned in dialogue with the rapidly spreading phenomenon of commercial photography. His work showcased the artist’s brushwork and skill at capturing a natural-seeming likeness, adhering closely to longstanding traditions of the formal, celebratory depiction in opposition to the emerging, and increasingly easy availability of the photographic image. His pictures define subjects as enduring monuments. Composed, regal sitters emerge from dark backgrounds as volumetric, physically imposing images of importance, accentuated by gilded frames. The aesthetic of portraiture is one of elevation and solidity, likeness as preservation and celebration.

The marriage of naturalness and monumentality in Harris’s work was a response not only to the photograph’s documentary power, but also to the more openly artificial images of aristocratic self-presentation exemplified in this exhibition by the work of Thomas Mower Martin. In the century following the heyday of Robert Harris’s official portraiture, modern contingency-the uncertainty of the individual’s position in the world-invaded and transformed the portrait genre. In an era when anyone could and should be a worthy subject of an image, the recording of individual lives adapted by concentrating on the ways that individuals both defined and exceeded the conditions of their existence.

The identity of the sitter is central to the portrait’s function, as it strives to establish the uniqueness of the person and his or her place in society and history. In the past century, the celebratory presentation of individual identity has been targeted by a wide-ranging critique that has redefined the genre. From George Pepper and Kathleen Daly’s quasi-ethnographic paintings of people who are meant to define a multi-ethnic nation, to Barbara Astman and KC Adams’ pictures of subjects positioning themselves in relation to popular gender and racial stereotypes, it is clear that portraiture now functions as part of a play of representations of identity. In this context, the naturalness of the late 19th century pose can no longer be taken for granted. Even the celebration of historical figures can be represented as a highly mediated form of theatre, as in the prints of Rémi Belliveau, with their ironic golden frames.

The pose itself and its status as a record can be represented tragically, as a kind of habit or trap of seeing. Edward Poitras physically equates the hanging of Louis Riel with the production of his image as a national hero. Dan O’Neill and Stephen May present the seductive pose as a received image, the individual subject filtered through a layer of associations that complicate the sitter’s agency. In the work of Prince Edward Island painter Brian Burke, presented here as a counterpoint to the legacy of Robert Harris, the pose becomes vulnerable, the subject’s self-presentation and visual isolation deeply ambivalent, even oppressed by a flattened space that nonetheless leaves the position of the sitter open ended. Burke’s portraits represent the potential and limitations of contemporary freedom and uncertainty.

-Pan Wendt, curator

Exhibition: Views from the Southbank II: Moments, Reflections, Intervals at Surrey Art Gallery

Views from the Southbank II: Moments, Reflections, Intervals

Experience a fleeting moment in time through portraiture and landscape artworks in this second installment of Views from the Southbank.

Exhibition Details

Location
Surrey Art Gallery
Price
By donation
Date
Apr 11, 2015 – Jun 14, 2015
Hours
Tuesday-Thursday
9-9pm Friday
9-5pm Saturday
10-5pm

Sunday
12-5pm

We are surrounded by characters in the urban and suburban places we live. People—in their astonishing variety and complexity—show the different facets of what it is to be human. Places embody character too. We talk about an old house having “character” or the “face” of a building. Landscapes, just like humans, can convey emotions like boredom, uncertainty, or peacefulness.

Playing with an expanded idea of portraiture, the artists in Views from the Southbank II create representations or impressions of people and places, some working in traditional portraiture style and others using more experimental and collaborative methods. Their work is situated in context to the rapidly growing “South of Fraser” region of British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, comprising the municipalities of Surrey, Langley, Delta, and White Rock. In capturing the character(s) of a place that is constantly changing, the artists offer a brief interval in time—the present moment animated by the presence of individuals and places.

This project is the second installment of Views from the Southbank, a trio of exhibitions featuring 70 local artists celebrating Surrey Art Gallery’s 40th anniversary.

Participating Artists:

Matilda Aslisadeh, Richard Bond, Randy Bradley, Claude Breeze, Edward Burtynsky, Lisa Chen, Jennifer Clark, Barbara Cole, Gregory W. Dawe, Brandon Gabriel, Gabor Gasztonyi, Alex Grewal, Elizabeth Hollick, Evan Lee, Ken Lum, Scott Massey, Paulo Majano, Michael Markowsky, Sean Mills, Jef Morlan, Ann Nelson, James Nizam, Zoë Pawlak, Barbara Pratezina, Helma Sawatzky, Ikbal Singh, Jeannette Sirios, Ken Wallace, Stella Weinert, Kira Wu

Image credit: Lisa Chen, Time Reflects, clear vinyl (2012)

– See more at: http://www.surrey.ca/culture-recreation

Exhibition: Geometry of Knowing, SFU Galleries

Geometry of Knowing

Part 1: SFU Gallery, Burnaby, JAN 15 – FEB 28, 2015
Part 2: Audain Gallery, Vancouver, JAN 15 – FEB 28, 2015
Part 3: SFU Gallery, Burnaby, MAR 21 – MAY 15, 2015
Part 4: Audain Gallery, Vancouver, MAR 19 – MAR 28, 2015

Geometry of Knowing is a group exhibition that investigates approaches to the acquisition of knowledge in the full mind-body-spirit sense of intelligence. Organized in four parts and presented across two galleries located in a post-secondary pedagogical institution, the objective of the project is to investigate the way in which artists engage tactics of fieldwork, embodiment and materiality in a manner that reveals or instigates a process of knowing. In this moment of increasing standardization and specialization regarding how people learn, art is a space for innovative thinking and experimentation outside given frameworks.

Many works in the exhibition engage hybrid forms of fieldwork, borrowing methodologies and tools from anthropology, hunting, marine navigation, chemistry, herbology and horticulture. For example, Kika Thorne’s new sculptural work, The Question of a Hunch, extends her ongoing interests in geometry, the visible spectrum and magnetism as a field upon which to project questions regarding chemical composition and its political ramifications.

Knowing through embodiment calls into play the geometry of sense perception, communication and collaboration between artists and physical enactments. For example, Carole Itter’s 1979 photographic series, Euclid, documents musician Al Neil tracing Euclidean geometric theorems in the sand at Cates Park in North Vancouver. These images were projected as part of a collaborative live performance with Al Neil on piano, used on Neil’s Fog and Boot album cover, as well as existing as photographic works in their own right.

Manipulating materials, forms and images is a fundamental aspect of artistic production and transfigures how we experience, interpret and know the world. Camille Henrot’s 2011 video, The Strife of Love in a Dream, for example, composes a visual atlas of strategies to conquer anxiety and fear through mythology, medicine, religion, art, ritual and tourism.

At SFU Galleries, we understand the university as a site of knowledge production, dissemination and acquisition. Its architecture is spatial and social, formalizing communal inquiry, contemplation, critique and invention. Situated in this architecture, the exhibition imagines the open geometry of the gallery as a context to re-examine how the visual and material languages of contemporary art generate experiential, emotional, physical, environmental and intuitive intelligence. The exhibition Geometry of Knowing explores emerging and reclaimed forms of knowledge as tools to frame how artists consider ways of witnessing, being with, querying and generating.

The exhibition includes work by over thirty Canadian and international artists across the first three parts, including works from the SFU Art Collection. The fourth component is constituted as an SFU School for Contemporary Arts visual arts course in which students respond to the exhibition’s theme through archival research.

Part 1: Derya Akay, Eli Bornowsky, Neil Campbell, Julia Feyrer, Lawren Harris, Roy Kiyooka, Michael Morris, Gordon Smith, Frank Stella, Takao Tanabe. Part 2: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Michael Drebert, Jimmie Durham, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Sandra Hanson, Camille Henrot, Dawn Johnston, Brian Jungen, David MacWilliam, N.E. Thing Co., Kara Uzelman, Brent Wadden. Part 3: Josef Albers, BC Binning, Lee Bontecou, Brian Fisher, Carole Itter, Devon Knowles, Evan Lee, Bruce Nauman, Hannah Rickards, Kika Thorne, Brent Wadden. Part 4: Students from the SCA

Curated by Amy Kazymerchyk and Melanie O’Brian. Supported by a Project Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Events

Opening Reception and event with Jeneen Frei Njootli and Kara Uzelman
Wednesday, JAN 14, 2015, 7pm
Audain Gallery

Jeneen Frei Njootli will perform with handmade instruments crafted from female vadzaih (caribou) that embrace and disrupt the hybridity of the Athabascan fiddle in Vuntut Gwitchin culture. Kara Uzelman will provide hospitality with brews that she grew and wildcrafted in Saskatchewan following research into traditions of medicinal fermentation and psychotropic experimentation at the University of Regina.

Event with Derya Akay and Julia Feyrer
Sunday, FEB 15, 2015, 12pm
SFU Gallery

A walk, talk, soil to plow, sow, drink and wait… will explore cycles of harvest and hospitality with Derya Akay and Julia Feyrer in relationship to their works in the exhibition.

Opening Reception: SFU Visual Art 3rd Year Student Exhibition
Wednesday, MAR 18, 2015, 7pm
Audain Gallery

Exhibition presented by 3rd Year SFU Visual Arts students. Details to come.

Event with Kika Thorne
Saturday MAR 21, 2015, 12pm
SFU Gallery    

Extending from her work in the exhibition, Kika Thorne will facilitate a conversation with a scientist and a climate activist on the process of creating a carbon dioxide filter. Whether the process is one of reality or fantasy, the conversation considers engineering and activism in a long line of artistic gestures

Solo Exhibition, Monte Clark Gallery, 12 July 2014 – 9 August 2014

courtesy Monte Clark Gallery / David James / The Kreative

 

EVAN LEE

JULY 12 — AUGUST 9, 2014

TALK: SATURDAY JULY 12, 1PM
FOLLOWED BY OPENING RECEPTION: 2PM — 4PM

In Evan Lee’s solo exhibition of new works at Monte Clark Gallery, the artist recreates, transforms, and expands upon found news media images depicting protest and migration through sculpture, mixed media, and paintings.

In contrast to popular, ubiquitous images of revolution and provocation (such as Alberto Korda’s portrait of Che Guevara, or the graffiti works of Banksy), the found press images that Lee refers to are markedly non-iconic, from nameless and faceless Black Bloc protesters to migrants whose identities have been obscured by the press. Lee approaches these images from a perspective of speculation, creating artworks that either reconstruct or further obscure the subjects. This dual process amplifies the missing details and facts that are not included in the original press images or their accompanying news stories, pointing to an inherent confusion or lack of clarity surrounding the actual events.

This exhibition includes large-scale black and white paintings where silhouettes of marching Black Bloc protesters have been repeated in a motif that borders on abstraction; mixed media works where ink and gesture further obscure printed depictions of individual hooded and masked protesters; a 3D printed model of the Ocean Lady vessel which carried Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka to Canada in 2009; earth-toned, classical style oil portraits of the same migrants created in composite from blurry or pixelated press images and online searches; and a video that recreates the burning of a Danish flag, which was originally enacted by protesters in response to anti-Muslim cartoons that were published in Denmark. The works engage in a dialogue with news media images of protest, the interpretation of these images, their biases and their influence.

Evan Lee lives and works in Vancouver, BC Canada. He has been published in Canadian Art Magazine, Art on Paper, Border Crossings, Flash Art, Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and numerous other venues. Lee has recently exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Surrey Art Gallery, the Presentation House Gallery, and the Richmond Art Gallery. Lee is shortlisted for the 2014 Sobey Art Award and will be exhibiting with the other finalists at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in the fall.

For exhibition previews, please contact Matt McGale
[email protected] | 604-730-5000

For further press info and images, please contact Lindsay Inouye
[email protected] | 604-730-5000

Copyright © 2014 Monte Clark Gallery All rights reserved.

Our mailing address is:
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Vancouver, BC V5T 1E1

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News: Evan Lee Shortlisted for the 2014 Sobey Art Award

Sobey Art Award 2014 Shortlist Announced

June 4, 2014 – HALIFAX, NS – The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Sobey Art Foundation today announced the five artists who have been shortlisted for the 2014 Sobey Art Award, the pre-eminent award for contemporary Canadian Art.

The 2014 Short List 

  • West Coast and the Yukon: Evan Lee
  • Prairies and the North: Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier
  • Ontario: Chris Curreri
  • Quebec: Nadia Myre
  • Atlantic: Graeme Patterson

“The Curatorial Panel is proud to announce the 2014 Sobey Art Award shortlist. We would like to extend our gratitude on receiving a record number of nominations, demonstrating the vitality of the Canadian contemporary art scene. The five selected artists present a spectrum of practices that emerge from personal experience, ultimately addressing specific social and cultural concerns. We are confident that the work of these five compelling and engaged artists will leave a lasting impact on Canadian art.”

The Sobey Art Award has a prize value of $100,000 with $50,000 going to the winner, $10,000 awarded to each of the other shortlisted artists, and $500 to each of the remaining longlisted artists. The Sobey Art Award, established in 2002, is awarded to a Canadian artist age 40 and under who has exhibited in a public or commercial gallery within 18 months of being nominated. It was conceived to further the national conversation about contemporary art and is widely recognized as the most significant award for contemporary art in Canada.

Work by the shortlisted artists will be shown in an exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery opening on November 1, with the winner being announced at a Gala event on November 19.

The members of the 2014 Curatorial Panel are:

  • Jordan Strom, Curator, Exhibitions and Collections, Surrey Art Gallery, British Columbia
  • Paul Butler, Curator of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba
  • Srimoyee Mitra, Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario
  • Marie-Eve Beaupré, Conservatrice de l’art contemporain, Musée national des beaux arts, Québec
  • Pan Wendt, Curator, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Prince Edward Island

More information about the nominees is available at www.sobeyartaward.ca.