>>PREVIEW
PRIDE & TRIBULATIONS
Runs until July 1
QUAB Gallery
What is the state of art in Calgary when a young patron tells the manager of QUAB Gallery, "My God. I didn’t know art could be cool"?
Calgary’s QUAB Galleries is a collaborative effort to introduce Quebec art to Alberta, and Alberta’s artists to Quebec. Found in Calgary’s Art Central, QUAB manager Jim Jewitt says their main focus is to bring "much-needed controversy back to art."
Celebrating Gay Pride in Calgary, the pieces featured this month should have no trouble in this respect. Entitled Pride & Tribulations, QUAB’s show is presenting the provocative, the erotic, the sensual and the political visions of three artists, Montreal’s Yvon Goulet, and Martin Douvil and local artist Mychael Maier. The show is a multifaceted examination and exposure of gay male desire and the gaze of modern societies’ last outsiders.
Pictorial art featuring gay sexuality, fetish and sensibility has traditionally provoked a galvanized frog-kick of ire and offence in the mainstream, which is just fine by the artists at QUAB.
"Only a couple of people have been angry or disgusted by this month’s Pride show," says Jewitt. "By far the reaction and support for these particular artists’ pieces has been fantastic." Jewitt laughs about the marked shock and surprise of two young men who "had to run off and recover their sensibilities with some hockey therapy."
QUAB’s growing success is built on its stance of covering provocative topics in all art, and the growing number of regulars has started to give them a cult status. "It’s a very exciting time for art in Calgary," he says.
The three artists featured in Pride & Tribulations approach their subject matter from diverging traditions, but are united in this show in contextualizing gay male desire, sexuality and the concept of distance from enforced sexual norms.
Goulet’s inspirations are drawn directly from Montreal’s life in the gay village. His works display the power and beauty possible in fetish and iconic sexuality, infused with a fierce political stance.
The balance between the sensual and the provocative meet in Douvil’s works. His Le Voyeur is a study in repression and naked hunger. His matched paintings, Hurt Me and Don’t Hurt Me, expose the tension between vulnerable need and a longing for something unspoken and terrible.
Mychael Maier’s paintings are infused with an obsession with the tactile eroticism inherent in the flesh, married to an invocation of the mythologies of the Renaissance. It is a marriage of potentials and a visual sense both moving and erotically charged. |
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