>>PREVIEW
ANDREW GABLE: ORDINARY NOT
Opens October 4
The Living Arts Centre
Students at Calgary's largest art institution, the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD), often jokingly refer to the building as a prison. It is in the collective studio spaces within the imposing modernist brick that these artists-in-training toil away on their various projects – drawing, studying patterns of light and colour, re-drawing, or snipping bits of film together – and finally tacking them up on the wall for review by fellow students and instructors.
Recent ACAD graduate Andrew Gable describes a "shared language that happens in the group environment" between himself and other emerging artists in the development of his recent works. Indeed, for those following ACAD's recent outpouring of emerging artists trucking down the hill and into various galleries throughout the city, Gable's new works are steeped in an esthetic style similar to that of his contemporaries, who are also working in a hybrid of drawing and painting.
He's just emerged from a self-imposed stint of three continuous months in his home studio. He describes this period as the "first chance to really investigate painting" since being a student. He refers to Plato's allegory of the cave as being one of his central ideas relative to his notions of reality, perception and ways of seeing or documenting the passage of time through painting.
"There's a lot going on around us all the time, and I want to create that space in my painting," he notes. The evidence of his goal to paint "what time really looks like" is in his changing cast of objects and characters that appear in his work – an interlocking motif lifted from the container of a growing houseplant, figures who are redrawn with each fidgeting movement, or a water glass which slowly empties as the afternoon wears on. Each seems to have a life of its own. His strategy is to use drawing as a helpful way to interrupt the careful process of painting. "The way I think when I am drawing is immediate," Gable says of the fast lines that help fill in a few panels of a doorway or map out a sense of space.
In one recent work, Three Drawings Framed with Still Life, a long canvas becomes the frame for three drawings on paper, set into painted "frames." Each one of the mounted drawings features a different figure study, joined by two more painted figures in-between. Together, the group becomes animated in this series of poses. They're joined by a still-life of plant, glass and fabric that is rendered twice. A group of three faces gazes through a portal into the distance of an open sunset. By painting sketchy figures that read as notations or shadows, together with "real" objects in a true-to-life mode, and landscape that recedes into the far reaches of the picture plane, he pushes the pictorial and the imaginary closer together to create short narrative sequences and a slowly unfolding sense of time.
Most of what we see in Gable's paintings reads as incidental subject matter on which to ramble around with light, colour, texture and line – the content of which is not ultimately more or less important than the perception of pure visual information – within his newly articulated painterly language itself. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.