>>PREVIEW
CITIES
Runs until August 25
John Hartman
MAP OF THE CITY
Runs until August 25
Nelson Hendricks
Art Gallery of Calgary
Appreciation of beauty in landscape involves the rapid, yet unconscious, assessment of complex environmental factors that would have been of importance to our palaeolithic hunter-gatherer forebears. John Hartman’s thick and juicy oil paintings, applied with a very delicate and assured hand, create succulent landscapes that have a contemporary, as well as palaeolithic, appeal. Cities, on display at the Art Gallery of Calgary, offers an artistic vision of cities as living organisms, deeply intertwined with the natural terrain of geographic sites. The plan of the city is like the human circulatory system, with a heart and major roads as arteries.
The exhibition of 18 new Hartman works combines environmental esthetics with fine art sensibilities. Luscious passages of paint mingle and combine with figurative elements, blending the abstract with representation, in a very natural way. Great gobs of oil paint represent rocks, seas and clouds. For Cities, Hartman has painted port cities from Parry Sound, Port Severn and Owen Sound (on the shores of Georgian Bay), to London, New York, Toronto and Glasgow. Painted from an aerial perspective, Hartman combines his own memories of cities with the rhythms and intensities of city life. Mapping not just geography, but a pulsating social history as well, Hartman seems to find a beauty in urban complexity, a beauty that equals his earlier landscape paintings.
On view within the AGC Media Gallery, the landscape and the notion of the journey continue with Nelson Henricks Map of the City. The dual-projection video piece is described in the artist’s words as being "a cross between rock videos and poetry." Looking at the city as a kind of library or travelogue, Henricks explores the correlations between architecture and text through addressing issues of communication and identity. In Map of the City, objects are each imbued with rock-star status as embryonic, raw, industrial beats grow in accordance with the visual pacing of the film. The video piece itself is a complex blend of wordplay and images where mundane objects take centre stage, grow and multiply, creating small evanescent worlds for the viewer to actively consume. Encoded in the text is the message "every person or object you meet is a possible entry" that leads to other paths, or entries. This directive strongly invokes the city as a library metaphor that Henricks and Hartman both utilize in their work. If Hartman’s topographic paintings are a macrocosmic look at our complex city structure then Henricks’s archival view is microcosmic. In both cases, the artists uphold the view of the city as an organism that breathes alongside other living cultures. |
Copyright ©2007 FFWD. All rights reserved.