A coast-to-coast survey of new Canadian painters
Painting News a collection of works that surprised curator Arlene Stamp
EXHIBIT PREVIEW
PAINTING NEWS
Curated by Arlene Stamp
Runs until November 10
Art Gallery of Calgary
Artcity has invigorated the art community once again, bringing an amazing focus onto projects, artists and exhibitions that emerge and enrich us right here at home. Now, to continue the celebrations, Art Gallery of Calgary will inaugurate its freshly renovated main space with a new show exhibition by Arlene Stamp. Painting News complements AGC’s atmosphere of change and excitement perfectly.
When she was selecting the final works for the show from more than 70 submissions, Stamp realized that the generative force behind the exhibition was work that surprised her.
"Despite the divergence in appearance of the works included, links exist.... Gaps, both physical and abstract, require viewer-participant negotiation," she says. The surprising element of the selection process came when Stamp realized the works that resonated with her actually represented a coast-to-coast survey of new Canadian painting. Contributions from six different institutions and cities in Canada connect the dots, each reflecting new ideas, innovations and ambitions.
The exhibition features six emerging artists whose works experiment with their own personal curiosities and foibles. Painting News finds influences anywhere from art history to criticism, pop culture, theoretical platforms, the environment, memory, excess and the gallery as a site for exploration and negation. Painting News exhibits a glimpse of what painting is now, and what it could be.
Scott Bowering is a master's of fine arts graduate from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. When Stamp described the recent state of renovation at the Art Gallery of Calgary, Bowering was apparently thrilled to hear that the space was under construction. He finds interest in materials such as two-by-fours, drywall and plastic sheeting, and even attends to the dust and installation debris on the gallery floor.
Nicole Lebel completed her graduate work at the Université de Quebec, Montreal. She presents a meticulous but celebratory handling of form in what are likely the most theoretical paintings in the show. Her exercise in complexity approaches the dynamics of interaction and exchange – line and plane, circle and square, white, black and grey – articulate a rich incompleteness. The spaces in between the works become as important as the works themselves. The interspersed forms create an eerie silence, or a visual harmony – the visual language that Lebel allows to resonate is beautifully complex.
Melanie Bois graduated from the University of Guelph in 2002. In her work, she substitutes a computer code where we might expect to read a pictorial code. Essentially, she allows characteristics of paint to complicate, undermine and enrich the monotonous surface of code.
Stephen Walters graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design with some very cheeky ideas about painting and photography. Traditional still life has no seams, but Walters expands on the genre to create an in-between space. His photography is not refined – the sets have plywood edges and curling tape is evident. Work of this nature is often dubious, but Walters’s attention to lightness and application of paint are visually convincing.
Stamp admits that she "stretched the definition of painting" to include Wendy Welch in Painting News, but Welch's work is just too eccentric and whimsical to ignore. Welch has exhibited extensively during her studies at the University of Victoria, but her work begins outside the gallery with natural and artificial found materials, which she often paints. She parallels her art-making process to gardening, wrapping, and binding objects into a knotted "sculptural field," not unlike a roaming and exploding Jackson Pollock canvas. Rather than working within the boundaries of the canvas, the work fills the gallery, framed by floor and ceiling.
Stamp attributes the diversity in emerging painting practices to the way art is taught, in art institutions themselves.
"Art students today are being exposed to a wider range of media, and a more integrated approach to technologies," she says. "Young people today are taking another look at Modernism."
These inquiries add layers of complexity to the images. Still, the results do not come down to mere mockery or even mimicry. What Painting News does, however, is show an awareness of the flexibility and quirks of historical methods, and bring that learning up to date. |
