>>PREVIEW
SUNSCREEN 2006
Runs until August 25
DAVID ROBINSON: MAQUETTES AND LESSER DIGRESSIONS
Runs until September 30
Newzones
"It’s interesting to see a trend of artists’ stronger works showing up more often in Calgary," says Janet Naclia, assistant director of Newzones. "Calgary is now on the list for having artists who were previously seen only in centres such as Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver."
She is speaking of Newzones’ sixth annual group show, Sunscreen. Sunscreen’s purpose is to introduce Calgary’s art fiends to new art, and the new to Calgary art.
Featuring a broad range of oils, photography and mixed-media, Sunscreen 2006 is an exhibition that presents an invigorating diversity in artistic vision and media. Newzones’ approach to art is one of refined choices, reflecting variety as well as captivating art from artists across North America.
This year’s featured artists include Donald Sultan, Bill Fisher, Joshua Jensen-Nagle, Sarah Nind, Jeroen Witlvliet and Cathy Daley. Each of these artists is known for approaching their works with fresh insight into painting and the unexplored possibilities inherent in the abstract form.
Bill Fisher’s canvases are complex abstractions of urban experience. Placed next to the intense natural paintings of Donald Sultan’s Monarchs, and Joshua Jensen-Nagles re-constructed photographic vision in Nothing Left, Sunscreen is an exhibition of the art of stark contrasts. The viewer is invited to re-examine each of the pieces for layers of contextual meaning. The works of Sarah Nind, with their almost fetishistic layers of colour, is an amazing foil to the politically stark imagery of Cathy Daley’s black and white oils. This year’s exhibition is about constantly finding something new around the corner that makes the audience reflect on the sum of its parts as a greater vision.
Running concurrently with Sunscreen is the one-man show, David Robinson: Maquettes and Lesser Digressions. Canadian artist David Robinson’s sculptures are a modernistic appreciation of a classical theme, the male nude. The definition of a maquette is "art in embryo" – smaller pieces that may be rendered in larger scale before completion. Each of his sculptures featured in the exhibition are smaller studies of intimate detail. His Duolith, Nexus and Helix Operandi pieces are placed within the audience’s vision to be experienced simultaneously, all amazingly effective as a matched scenario of struggle and tension. One imagines themselves as a giant, wandering into a Dantean garden of punishment and irony. Robinson’s Contropposto is an ironic and even humorous deconstruction of the classical Greek figure standing atop a collapsing cardboard box, undercutting both the message and the medium.
Newzones gallery’s Sunscreen and David Robinson: Maquettes and Lesser Digressions are true to their purpose, bringing the new to an audience that is ready and hungry for bold art and vision. |
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