Collection Friday!

Jeff Thomas, Indian on Bank, 1999. Chromogenic print on paper.

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#ThrowbackThursday

Presented at CUAG in 2010, Four Ottawa Painters: Authier, Golland, Morrow, Schissel took the pulse of regional painting activity, presenting the work of ambitious young artists who are already garnering acclaim in Canada and internationally. The exhibition offered a unique snapshot of one aspect of the city’s artistic scene, featuring paintings made exclusively in 2010 and not yet seen here. It reflects and is shaped by significant developments in the city’s cultural profile, in particular the University of Ottawa’s recent establishment of a Master of Fine Arts degree program (Martin Golland is a professor there, while Amy Schissel and Andrew Morrow are recent MFA graduates). More broadly, Four Ottawa Painters signaled a revived interest in contemporary painting, here and abroad.

Melanie Authier is committed to total abstraction: her canvases manifest an intense push-pull between opposing forces of the artificial and the real, chaos and control, the sublime and the ordinary. Martin Golland takes the urban setting as his starting point, distorting real-world sources into imaginary spaces where entropy and enigma are the order of the day. In her densely-layered works, Amy Schissel appropriates dots, pixels, clusters, loops, and linear sequences from networked computing environments, pushing the language of abstraction to encompass contemporary understandings of space. Andrew Morrow’s work is rooted in the past but focused on the present. He revisits the conventions of historic pastoral painting, using graphic sexual imagery to disturb and transform its idealized landscapes while raising questions about contemporary attitudes to sexuality, masculinity, and gender.

For more info about the exhibition, click here.

Did you see Four Ottawa Painters? What did you think?

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Only TWO weeks left to see #DawsonGold!

Here’s an installation shot of Canadian-born, Brussels-based Zin Taylor’s movie poster for Put Your Eye in Your Mouth: A conversational documentary recording Martin Kippenberger’s Metro-Net Station in Dawson City, Yukon (2007). The installation also shows a hand-carved wooden claim stake and copy of Nook, edited by Reid Shier and published by YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto, and Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, edition 7/10.

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Deftly intertwining fact and fabrication, the actual and the staged, Taylor taps into Dawson City’s status as a contemporary art outpost while investigating the myths surrounding the frontier town and Kippenberger (Taylor’s video is titled after one of Kippenberger’s exhibitions).

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Collection Friday!

Norval Morrisseau, Untitled, 1979. Silkscreen print.

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#ThrowbackThursday

Frank Shebageget: Light Industry, which was on view at the Carleton University Art Gallery in 2010, demonstrated the continuing development of Ottawa-based Ojibway artist Frank Shebageget’s personal iconography.

His Flight Patterns drawings pay homage to the Beaver, the quintessential Canadian-made bush plane whose design is touted as a perfect marriage of form and function. Lodge, a jumbled pile of planes, flouts this idealised image while hinting at the power – constructive and destructive – of all dams and by extension, at attempts (human and non-human) to harness unruly nature. One of his newest pieces, the ambitious installation Cell, is comprised of nylon fishing nets hung systematically from a square aluminum framework, which metaphorically contains the mess and stink of fishing within the pristine “white cube” gallery space. The grid reigns supreme here, but it also governs such traditional First Nations practices as beadwork, basketry, and quillwork design.

Frank Shebegaget’s work ultimately speaks to his deep attachment to a place, a home, a landscape. As Hugh Raffles observed in In Amazonia (2002), “Nature is indissoluble from place. It resides in people as fully as people reside in it.”

Check out more information and images from the exhibition here.

Did you see Frank Shebageget: Light Industries when it was at the gallery? What did you think?

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Happy Mother’s Day!

Robert Sargent Austin, The Italian Mother, 1923. Etching on paper.

6Collection, Mother's Day,