>>PREVIEW
CHORUS (AFTER MONTREAL)
Runs until June 23
Chris Cran, David Hoffos, Luanne Martineau, Evan Penny and Ryan Sluggett
TrépanierBaer Gallery
Albertans unable to visit the Biennale de Montréal (until the Alberta Biennale) should see TrépanierBaer’s Chorus (After Montreal), an exhibition that examines work by the five artists featured at the Biennale de Montreal (the exhibition Crack the Sky, curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, director of the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, located in the Alberta College of Art and Design). Chorus includes new and recent work by artists Chris Cran, David Hoffos and Ryan Sluggett, and includes a spectacular new sculpture, Back of Danny by Evan Penny, and the monumental Parasite: Buttress by Luanne Martineau.
Toronto artist Michael Awad and Calgary's Evan Penny showed a new collaborative work at the Biennale that is a bizarre coupling of photography and sculpture titled Panagiota: Conversation. Awad took a series of time-lapse pictures of the head of a talking woman using a specialized camera modelled on aerial reconnaissance cameras from the Cold War. The sitter's movements give rise to gross distortions to her physiognomy as the camera tracks her. Penny then distilled these time-based images into a single static sculptural form engendering a cubist sense of motion.
Penny’s realist sculptures are presented with such microscopic acuity that it is easy to forget that the objects on display aren’t human. Penny presents his new sculpture, Back of Danny #3, in addition to photographs and other sculptural works. Penny’s unparalleled talent at representing the human form questions the legitimacy of our perceptions.
David Hoffos, master of the mirage, contributes Japanese Cooking #1 through to #8. Hand-altered digital coloured prints of Japanese cuisine are whimsically contained within shadow boxes equipped with a lenticular lens. At the Biennale, Hoffos’s fifth instalment of his Scenes from the House Dream series are on display. They’re meticulous mini-installations of urban and suburban scenes in which we discover (among other things) vignettes that are pre-digital tricks of illusion that reveal uncanny, secretive model worlds.
At the Biennale de Montréal, Calgary artist Ryan Sluggett is showing Tyranny, a suite of three videos of stop-motion photography – 9,000 digital stills that run at six frames per second play while a swing pendulum/speaker attached to the end sounds out percussive beats. These fast-morphing narrative fragments are elaborated in paint, photography, collage and bricolage. This, in addition to Sluggett’s drawings presented at TrépanierBaer, are art-historical filches from Picasso, Matisse and Rubens to 18th century perspective studies. Works entitled Judges and their Pedestals, Course Not, Snow over Limousine, are each fashioned with a figurative exuberance and technical facility that record salient aspects of urban life in the 21st century.
In Crack the Sky, painter Chris Cran exhibited the Cartoon Globe Camera Obscura, a camera obscura that functions as a projector in which a motorized globe turns while a cartoon face placed on the screen of a projector is projected onto the globe. Cran’s signature pop style is self-evident with his five new circular Chorus paintings.
Luanne Martineau creates hybrid hand-spun wool sculptures that explore the places in between art genres and engage in a long tradition of social satire with contemporary art, combining labour-intensive traditional female handwork with questions about the politics of the body. Her piece Parasite: Buttress (2005) is a monumental work made of hand-punched felt, measuring 6.4 metres in length. |
Copyright ©2007 FFWD. All rights reserved.