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PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS
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November 2011
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Ashleigh Bartlett : Something Like Gravity
Skew Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition of new small and medium format paintings by emerging artist Ashleigh Bartlett. Infused with synthetic colours, cartoon references and an exaggerated materiality, these paintings look to bring humour and representation into abstraction. The symbolic nature of the viscosity of the paint conjures visible associations to the real world, including edible matter. What appears to be slick, glossy, or has a false sense of light is a reference to artifice and plasticity. The excessive quality of the paint is alluding to the very nature of a cartoon, where shapes are simultaneously exaggerated and simplified. Mixing a loose configuration of image culture (video games, comics and cartoons) with the history of painting, a hybrid of forms is revealed. Languages of contradictions speak to one another to form a kind of painterly Esperanto.
Noel Bégin
Skew Gallery is pleased to present a site-specific installation accompanied by a selection of photographs by multi-media artist Noel Bégin. Originally commissioned by a local filmmaker, Bégin created the interactive piece utilizing slide film and projectors to present a photographic recombinant of lush vegetation, figures and still life objects. The viewer plays a critical role within the installation through physical interface that obstructs projected light while simultaneously revealing further imagery.
Bégin's pastiche, predominately references Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Swing . Taking nocturnal photographs utilizing complex flashes, Bégin recreates modern interpretations both literally and symbolically of the iconic painting. Like Fragonard's c.1767 painting, Bégin's collection of imagery reflects themes of contemporary hedonism, eroticism, and indulgence.
Kim Neudorf
Skew Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition Proximities comprised of seven new medium format paintings by emerging artist Kim Neudorf. In these paintings, Neudorf's gestures are made possible by proximity: crumbling edges, hit-or-miss staining, and the materiality of tone and colour in both dark and bright shapes. These are all co-existences made up of each other's proximal space. Gestural logic moves from the daily experience of shifting "baselines", "normalities", intensities, and affects, to the attendant thing-word-strings which make up attempts to find language within an inanimate objects ability to animate, to act and react, and to deliver both subtlety and dramatic effects.
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October 2011
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Natalie Clark, detail of the sculpture Flight. photo credit: Skew Gallery
Natalie Clark : Crystalline
Influenced by extensive travels around the world, Natalie Clark's art is a fusion of influences from modern design, ethnographic, and the organic form and colour found in nature. Whether traveling to Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg or the Outback in Australia, Clark recognizes the universal threads that knits together various indigenous cultures and their prospective landscapes .
Responding to her personal observations such as the Diamond Mines in South Africa, Clark incorporates organic and man-made materials into her work with a current predilection for steel to create polyhedron and crystalline forms. Clark employs her many original sculptures, inspired by straight-lined natural forms, to become components in her installations that speak to scale and mass. The individual forms are clustered together to resemble something totemic, or organic like a forest, iceberg or geological phenomena.
Clark draws her palette from the role colour plays in indigenous community and culture. Clark's range of pigment in Crystalline includes the symbolic colours of Prayer Flags as observed on her sojourn through Bhutan; red for fire, blue for air and green for wa
Image: Nina Rizzo: Ice Chunks, 2010. oil on canvas 48 X 48 inches
Nina Rizzo : Ground Cover
Inspired by how natural structures divide and create space, Nina Rizzo's paintings are an investigation of the intersection between representation and abstraction, image and physical reality. Gestural marks are the building blocks of the forms, constructing image from movements. They are open and fluid, at once adhering to spatial illusion and falling back to material presence. At once static and mobile, the work refers to the fluidity of our experience of place, as transformed by time and perception.
In the exhibition Ground Cover , Rizzo responds to the environment she encountered during her artist residency in Reykjavik, Iceland and the winter landscape of Chicago. Rizzo moves from iceberg filled landscapes to snowpiles removed from a paved street; from still-life's of glowing orange stones on a tabletop to the grandeur of the billions of glowing stars in the sky, skillfully employing broad sensuous brushstokes that engage the viewer as an individual mark in addition to their collective role of depicting subject.
September 2011
Image:Kristopher Karklin, Pingpong Room, 2011 digital print on watercolour paper, 36 x 54 inches.
Kristopher Karklin: Camp Life
Camp Life is the second solo exhibition at Skew Gallery by emerging artist Kristopher Karklin. In response to the artist living and working for the past 19 months in the Alberta Tar Sands of Fort McMurry, Karklin continues to explore his personal recollections on time, environment and experience, with this newest series focusing on the static quality of life in a Northern Canadian work camp.
Image: Leslie Bell: Sim 3, 2011. Oil on birch panel, 36 x 36 inches
Leslie Bell: Simulacra
Simulacra marks Leslie Bell's first solo exhibition at Skew Gallery. The site-specific Cosmic Wall installations of Leslie Bell explores notions of beauty and repulsion, growth and excess, but additionally serves as source material for Bell's future paintings, photographic works and animations. In Simulacra, Bell presents both her ever growing installation of vine-like and organic shaped material and a series of new oil paintings that directly references the previous incarnations of Cosmic Wall.
Image: Patrick Lundeen: Together Forever, 2010. casio keyboard, lightbulb, acrylic paint on rug, 60 X 45 inches
Patrick Lundeen : The Oblique Mystique
The Oblique Mystique is Skew Gallery's second solo exhibition for Patrick Lundeen. This multidiscipline exhibition includes video, recordings, and paintings that present Lundeen's fascination with the mask as subject and the various standpoints of obscuring authenticity. From Lundeen's video Piano Man, which taunts the viewer to look for the man just behind the eyes of the once outstandingly famous Liberace, to the Mad Mask paintings on the back inside cover of vintage "Mad Magazines" considered by Lundeen to be one-sided collaborations between himself and illustrator Al Jaffee; this exhibition explores facades as popular culture.
June 2011
Daniel B. Hutchinson: Black Mountain, Mountain 2011, oil and drafting film on panel, 20 x 48 inches
Daniel Hutchinson : Come and Go
The neat meticulous surfaces of the paintings and drawings in this exhibition hold similar objectives: drawing attention to conventions in painting and its codes of viewership; embodying circularity and repetition in the viewing experience; and seeking to express absence, despair, resilience and humour in the forms and implied dramatic experience. These reflective surfaces activate the viewing experience, revealing their images as you move around them. Like Beckett's characters, they are endlessly coming and going; revealing and concealing themselves in the deep shadows and reflective brilliance of dramatic light.
Drawing upon his interest in the architecture of the theatrical experience, Hutchinson continues to imagine less common examples of performance spaces, such as outdoor civic bandshell stages and natural amphitheatres. Paintings such as Fort City Bandshell depict the cohabitation of outdoor performance architecture with the landscaped natural forms that surround it. The boughs of trees interact with the architecture, overlapping and casting long shadows over the immaculate park lawn and bandshell stages. Paintings such as this one ask the viewer to complete the work through physical/optical interaction and the imaginative projection of activity onto its vacant stage.
Natural forms, such as trees and rocks, also take centre stage in these dark, monochrome paintings, sometimes occupying the stage space of a performer, shimmering in the gallery light and casting dramatic shadows onto their neighbouring forms. In other works, the trees take on anthropomorphic form, as in The Wonder Tree where two sides of the truncated stump of a dead tree are viewed on the same paintings surface, as if the tree were turning in space, or the viewer were walking in circles around a tall giant.
May 2011
Bill Rodgers : Majolica, 2011, oil, acrylic, paper,cardbord, on canvas andwood, 82 x 160 inches
photo credit: Skew Gallery
Bill Rodgers : Series M: Crazed
Skew Gallery is pleased to present its third solo exhibition of new work by Bill Rodgers. Following the successful exhibition Studies in Citizenship, the exhibition Series M: Crazed continues to follow Rodgers fascination with ryhparography (the study of ordinary things) as he directs his focus away from depicting historical books of self-sustaining knowledge to the minutia of ceraminc surfaces found within his home.
March 2011
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Erik Olson: The Woman, 2011, oil on wood, 60 x 48 inches |
ERIC OLSON : Out of India
A solo exhibition of paintings by emerging artist Erik Olson. This series of work was the result of the sights, people and architecture observed during his six month motorcycle journey through the diverse and rapidly changing urban and rural landscapes of India. His journey took him from Mumbai to the southernmost tip of the sub-continent, before heading north through multiple rural landscapes and cities to New Delhi. Finally, he travelled through deserts to the Himalayas and the most northerly city in the country. During his adventure Olson experienced personal highs and lows from the paradise of the artist residency at the Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi, to a 2 day hospital stay following a crash that totaled the artist's classic Royal Enfield motorcycle. Passing through ancient villages seemingly unchanged for thousands of years, past mounds of coloured plastic burning in the early day, Olson witnessed a landscape in the midst of massive change. This exhibition is comprised of paintings that depict Olson's experiences on this adventure of a young man's lifetime. |
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February 2011
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Berlin Studio: Hot Dog Day Chien Chaude Savvy To Rename Myself AA Aardvark photo credit: Maxime Ballesteros |
WIL MURRAY : Hate Your Language You Hate Your Language
"You're looking at striated surfaces, drawn surfaces, old paint skins that have been peeled off, folded over on themselves, turned into a kind of sculptural element. It's a new kind of management of painted surfaces that are certainly a kind of Punk version of the bourgeois paintings" - Richard Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art describing Wil Murray's paintings on Bravo! Arts&Minds. Skew Gallery is pleased to announce the return of Calgary's "hometown boy" Wil Murray to present a solo exhibition of his abstract sculptural paintings. Now based in Berlin Germany, Murray's interest in the radial view of his paintings propels the artist to create a cornucopia of layers in each painting, where paint itself serves as the subject of narrative. Murray assembles his paintings using acrylic paint-skins, brushwork, foam injections, and wooden appendages in an assortment of patterns and textures and forms. The resulting paintings are simultaneously garish in their excess, yet equally seductive in their unbridled vigor and skillful delivery; they are visceral both in the creation and the viewing.
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January 2011
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SHANNON PARTRIDGE : Behavioural Enrichment
Skew Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition of paintings by emerging artist Shannon Partridge. For the work exhibited in Behavioral Enrichment Partridge combines vibrant oil paint and intricately patterned Japanese rice paper to create beautifully crafted interior spaces that question the environments we construct. Partridge integrates the dramatically staged artifice of idealized interiors of mid-century modern interior design photography with constructed natural environments of wildlife enclosures. Zoo like bars and dramatic backdrops co-exist with sanguine interior spaces that include seemingly out of place depicted objects with references to behavioral enrichment. Behavioral enrichment, also known as animal enrichment, places objects in enclosures to stimulate confined animals in order to enhance their psychological well being. Much like the oft-desired perfect piece of furniture, Partridge dissects this staged artifice to remind us of the cages we construct through the objects that surround us. Within these richly hued interiors, Partridge creates inviting environments that dislocate the viewer through her use of well-placed objects and thoughtful process. Amongst the delicately patterned Japanese rice paper upholstery, curtains and lampshades, a miniature rhinoceros, zebra or elephant casually inhabits the space. A wild creature miniaturized and made domestic through the objects and environment that surround it. A sense of disintegration or decay is evoked through her use of paint washes, disrupting the inherent perfection of the image. By arranging these props and still life's into such perfectly assembled interiors, Partridge reminds us that it is an image we gaze upon, the appearance of depth with succinct reminders of the hard flatness that illusion creates.
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November 2010
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Jamie Vasta : THE HUNT November 25- December 18, 2010
“Jamie Vasta has a definite Midas touch with a certain crafty material. With a brush of her fingertips, glitter is alchemized from carnivalesque into uncanny and classic figurative paintings.”
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OCTOBER 2010
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ELISA JOHNS : Devotion is Enough October 14- November 13, 2010
Skew Gallery is pleased to present the Canadian debut of American artist Elisa Johns' newest paintings. With an ongoing interest in the idea of an influential contemporary culture heroin, Johns delves deeper into her ongoing subject of the mythology of Diana the Huntress; building upon Diana's mythos with Johns own embellishments of a tumultuous love affair and the epic adventure of the pursuit of the hunt. Through Johns fantasized depiction, the huntress sheds her chaste and virginal persona and offers a more complex heroine who is filled with modern contradictions; sexually empowered yet coy; dominant yet empathetic; a piercing gaze of strength and wisdom, yet is young and waif-like in stature. It is through Johns modern depiction of a Goddess worshiped in ancient times that recalls society's current obsession with celebrity and fashion and a need to idealize. Elisa sources ancient Greek sculpture depicting the powerful Diana the Huntress alongside contemporary fashion types found in magazines such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Elle to envisage her own mythological heroine set amongst a harsh landscape. A nature enthusiast herself, Johns gathers inspiration for the landscapes and wildlife she depicts, from her own photographs taken on backpacking sojourns. Johns paints landscape and figure without hard edges; with no clear beginning and end she often employs a white ground to define space; combining layers of delicate transparent washes and decisive impasto brushwork to depict the complexity of heroine and wildlife in the midst of the landscape.
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SEPTEMBER
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Image: The Magic Circle, 2010 (Installation view) By: DaveandJenn |
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The Magic circleDaveandJenn September 8th - October 9th Skew Gallery is pleased to present its second solo exhibition of new work by collaborative artists David Foy and Jennifer Saleik. In their ongoing narrative painting, the "not-so-alter" alter ego characters of Dave and Jenn traverse a world on a collision course with disaster. In this newest work David and Jennifer reinterpret our complex and troubled world, through the creation of a fantastical liminal space where protagonists Dave and Jenn, and the animals surrounding them are busy trying to fend off the worst parts of the cosmic apocalypse that is befalling their world, with all sorts of scratched together rituals and hopeless magic.
Gathering inspiration from a multitude of sources including John William Waterhouse's depictions of power, foreboding and dark sacrament in the occult paintings such as Consulting the Oracle and the Magic Circle of the 1880's, Dave and Jenn began examination of the human conditions need for ritual and folklore, an alternative belief system if you will, in the face of adversity, hopelessness and chaos. Indelibly connected to their own complex reality, The World Of Dave and Jenn is coming undone at the seams, torn apart by forces seen and unseen which are working to move it towards its own apocalyptic cleansing. In a last ditch effort to make sense of the chaos, the visual protagonists draw upon rituals based on crowns of antlers and dosing rods in order to navigate uncertain doom. Magic Circle includes small and medium scale paintings as well as sculptural paintings. This marks their second solo exhibition with Skew Gallery.
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JUNE 2010 |
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Image: Kristopher Karklin with Routine Reconstruction Installation at Skew Gallery, Calgary, AB |
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Routine ReconstructionKristopher Karklin June 17 – July 27, 2010 Skew Gallery is pleased to announce the solo debut of Kristopher Karklin's photographic art. Routine Reconstruction exhibits eight photographs created in 2009/08 that explore the artifice of both memory and photography. Karklin's ongoing investigation into the minds ability to manipulate memory of tangible events experienced by adding and subtracting details to our intangible memories of an occasion, are translated through the use of photography. Forgoing photography's traditional objective of capturing an exact moment for posterity, Karklin employs the medium as a tool to recreate a memory where details are distilled, altered in scale, or colours manipulated based on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the minds continuous recount of the conditions of an event. In the tradition of artists such as Thomas Demand or Diana Thorneycroft, Karklin skillfully and with meticulous precision begins his artistic process by constructing miniature models. Karklin's dioramas depict the environments of his selected experiences, as filtered through his memories. These dioramas are then illuminated accordingly and photographed. The introduction of the photographed figure completes the narrative. The work selected for this exhibition explores notions of isolation, displacement, identity, and the relationship between the urban living space and its occupant, where the exchange that occurs is intimate and secure; it is also temporary and homogenous.
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May 2010 |
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Barry Underwood, Parade Field, 2009, 30 x 40 inches signed and number #2 /10, inkjet with archival Ultra Chrome inks. |
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Summer nightsThree years of artist residency
Barry Underwood May 13 – June 12 With a profound respect for nature, Underwood does not disrupt or rearrange nature, but rather calls attention to the wonderment of nature by providing a more heightened or theatrical view of nocturnal, landscapes through the use of a large-format film camera. Photography allows Underwood to present extraordinary settings that are non-existent within nature. Creating light levels that do not naturally exist in remote areas, Underwood utilizes aperture and exposure to allow the viewer to partake in what the naked eye could not normally see. By morning all traces of Underwood’s enchanted light installations have dispersed like a dream, all that remains as evidence is his spectacular photographs.
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April 2010 |
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The Fifth World: An IntroductionMin Hyung April 1 – April 28
– Gary Micheal Dalt –art critic for the Globe and Mail, December 2008 Skew Gallery is pleased to present it’s first solo exhibition of gallery artist Min Hyung’s paintings and sculpture. This new work depicts the central characters of an imagined alternate universe filled with parallel human emotions of love, aggression, joy and passivity, and the collective life experiences that generate such feelings. Responding to the craze of the inter-active video game/world such as Second Life, Hyung invites the viewer into her imagination where paintings and sculpture serve as both artifact and gateways. Hyung’s work depicts a captivating journey into her fantastical Fifth World filled with unearthly primates of mythological proportions, visually describing their sexual energy, intense competition and the events that transpire as they navigate the depths of Hyung’s thoughts. Meanwhile Hyung’s work explores notions of obsession, escapism universality and human de-evolution.
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March 2010 |
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Perception and Endurance
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AMALIE ATKINSScenes From a Secret World In Conjunction with Exposure: 2010
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Skew Gallery is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of artist/filmmaker Amalie Atkins. Scenes from a Secret World includes two films and a series of photographs/film stills. This work delves into the life/death/life cycle of fairy tales while proposing re-imagined archetypal characters: a wolf that is not evil and a damsel who is not in distress. Set in a fictional world that combines the distinctive atmosphere of chosen locations with a lyrical soundscape, the film and photographs investigate the interconnectedness of humans and nature. Amalie Atkins work is inspired by the repetitive tasks related to her textiles work, such as cutting and stitching, during which subconscious ideas emerge into stories and eventually story lines. Having studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design, Atkins currently lives and works in Saskatoon. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and in 2009 debuted in Berlin, Germany. |
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Staged
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Skew Gallery is pleased to present in conjunction with the One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo a thematic exhibition of four artist’s painting and photography all informed by various elements of the theatrical experience. Theatre plays with our belief system, allowing us to experience the illusion before us; and through this ephemeral suspension of reality, we as the audience, are afforded the opportunity to alter our perceptions of reality. Collectively this exhibition, explores notions of transformation, illusion, the gathering of people and the architectural apparatus employed to suspend our reality in the flesh. ADRIAN FISH The large format photographs selected for this exhibition examines the venue of the theatre as a 21st century manifestation of Roman Empire-era structures. Fish directs the viewers gaze towards the spectator seating area from the vantage point of centre stage. Each respective environment is devoid of viewers, suggesting the pregnant moment before an anticipated spectacle. The weighty absence of an audience altogether nevertheless insinuates their presence. This inversion of the traditional role of actor-as-exhibitionist, and audience as voyeur constructs a quiet tension within the image. The lack of people within each photograph invites the viewer to contemplate the architectural aspects of the theatre environment, as well as the nature of entertainment in the present paradigm.
TIA HALLIDAY The photographic work of Tia Halliday, explores the nature of costume to enable the transformation of oneself into a characters. Drawing from her own theatrical background in dance Halliday strikes exaggerated poses that utilize scale and cropping to suggest the intimate or secret moments of acting out fantasies of an alter-ego in front of a mirror. Employing the creative process, Halliday is able to combine her interest in figurative drawing by cloaking herself in isolated body-part masks created from her own cut-out drawings and watercolours on paper. In essence, Halliday renovates her own image into something more larger than life, and explores a personal suspension of disbelief through disguise and movement meanwhile reflecting it back onto the viewer through the use of photography.
BARRY UNDERWOOD
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Patrick LundeenSin Will Find You OutExhibited November 19 - December 19, 2009 |
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Skew Gallery presents Sin Will Find You Out, its first solo exhibition by artist Patrick Lundeen. Through mediums of film and large-scale painting, Lundeen has developed a body of art comprised of strong symbols of religion and pop culture. With an obsessive attention to detail and an impulse towards colour, line and scale, the painted works present reinterpretations of the well-known mask of comic superhero Spiderman and the heavy laden symbolism of the cross. It is Lundeen’s ongoing interest in contradictions that moves his paintings away from the traditional format of rectangular paintings on canvas over stretcher bar – in favor of grommets and custom cut-out canvases that serve to sever the association of painting as a window into the artist’s viewpoint, and place it squarely as an object for which to contend with. Although these two symbols have associations of “good” Ludeen's formal treatment serves to suggest to the viewer a reconsideration of the predetermined associations of superheroes and religious iconography as an entity that can also incite fear and anxiety.
Drawing from personal reflection of childhood memories Lundeen constructs a new narrative of lust, fear, guilt and judgment following a less than heroic Spiderman in the video "Sin Will Find You Out". Patrick Lundeen’s creation Sin Will Find You Out follows the masked hero through the dark streets of New York on a quest to fulfill lustful desire and faces the internalized implications of his actions. Through the video, Lundeen confronts the role of religion as a source of guilt imposed through the omnipresence of a judgmental self-governing religious conflict. The use of masks draw into play the external power of protection by its wearer from being exposed, but also the risk of embodying the persona of the mask.
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BILL RODGERSStudies in CitizenshipExhibited October 15 - November 14, 2009 |
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Skew Gallery presents Studies in Citizenship by Bill Rodgers. This exhibition of new work consists of paintings with two mixed media companion series, and an installation of found objects. Rodgers investigates aspects of regional social history through the depiction of early 20th century books. Collectively these paintings of books propose a pattern for citizenship. They speak to the regions first settlers and their self-reliant way of living. A descendant from Manitoba settlers, Rodgers has a depth of interest in Canadian social history. Over the last five years, Rodgers has been collecting books published between 1900-1930's from local flea markets. These books were often commissioned by companies such as CP Rail and the Saskatchewan Co-operative. With titles such as Harvesting Your Milk Crop and Farm and Home Mechanics Guide, they were intended as a delivery system of information assuring better chances of survival for new Canadians in rural parts of the country. Rodger's interest lies in the book as a prime object and the relevancy of the information to people during different points of time. The book paintings are a 1:1 scale and are painted from direct observation , and set against a painterly white background intentionally revealing the artists brushwork. For selected book paintings , an echo exists; a smaller version of the painting placed behind tempered glass which serves to obscure or degrade the information. Also included, is a series of preliminary drawings that inform the painting process.
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KIM DORLAND view exhibition |
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MERGE 2 |
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Skew Gallery presented the second installment of MERGE, a group exhibition. MERGE 2 features the work of Tia Halliday, Kim Neudorf and Erik Olson, three young Canadian artists who represent the diversity of contemporary Canadian art. These artists now working and exhibiting internationally share a common local thread beginning in Calgary and will merge with each other in exhibition. These three innovative artists actively receive critical attention for their work dealing with the figure in highly innovative ways. Having studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design, Ontario College of Art and Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tia Halliday recently completed her MFA at Concordia University in Montreal. Halliday's drawings illustrate the many complexities of the female and it's relationship to technology and the everyday. Halliday allows humour and irony to play within each scene illustrating the characters desires for intimacy and detachment; conditions of the contemporary human condition. Halliday's characters created of collaged drawing and cast shadows appear at once disparate and yet full of expectation and idealization. Visual references echo that of cluttered lifestyles, stacking image on top of image amassing imagery to create each figural form. Kim Neudorf is an artist, writer, and researcher interested in the phenomena and pictorial spaces of images, film, and that which inflects and reanimates those spaces. She received her BFA in Painting from the Alberta College of Art & Design in 2005 Kim Neudorf is the local component of MERGE. Neudorf is a recent exhibitor with Skew Gallery at the internationally renowned art fair SCOPE Basel in Basel, Switzerland. Neudorf' utilizes digital media, photography and film stills focusing on close-up views evoking heighten emotions in a moment in film. This close-up view can play a role of provocation through their relation to physical spaces. The narrative role of these heightened emotional states of anxiety and dread are of particular complexity and are subject to Neudorf's additive and subtractive methods of application to the painted surface. She explores the individualized gaze and the physical spaces it can generate with the viewer. Erik Olson's recent paintings are fractured by precisely articulated brushstrokes, each a coherent component of a definitively figurative whole. Each work is expressive in movement and rhythm inspired by the resurfacing idealism in contemporary youth culture. Olson's portrayal of each of his subject's divulges the structure of expression by breaking down of the figure into the forms that articulate its significance. Even Olson's use of colour is defined by his environment; pronounced,, and an element of the paintings structure.
View Tia Halliday's Artist Page |
ALEXANDER CALDWELL Exhibited April 2 - May 9, 2009 |
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Skew Gallery presented its first solo exhibition for contemporary artist Alexander Caldwell. Impervious is an exhibition of six new wall-mounted and free standing sculptures. With an ongoing interest in notions of permanency and the ephemeral, Caldwell has previously created sculptures depicting temporal moments in nature frozen in time such as clouds, galaxies and fire created from enduring materials such as stainless steel, lead and rock. In Impervious Caldwell continues to explore enduring materials such as stainless steel, but redirects his focus from the organic temporal to forms that are devoid of nature's organic irregularities, the uniformity and flawlessness of this new work speaks to a built environment and desire for perfection, only associated with humankind. With materials as a starting point, Caldwell creates juxtapositions by taking his formalist sculpture and introducing another element with the use of colour. Utilizing state of the art industrial paint technology designed to withstand chemical spills, extreme temperatures and intense psi on oil riggs, Caldwell creates a "skin" of paint which encases his metal sculptures. Caldwell employs color as an element equally important to form, by selecting a colour palette which is associated with impulsive and directive situations in society such as temporary advertising, way-finding signage and construction site safety markers. These trigger colours reintroduce Caldwell's exploration into associations of polar opposites co-existing as one object; that which is perceived as permanent and temporary.
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Diana Thorneycrofta group of seven awkward momentsExhibited February 19 - March 28, 2009 |
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Known for making artwork that hovers on the edge of public acceptance, Thorneycroft has pursued subject matter that often challenges her viewing audience. In her new series "Group of Seven Awkward Moments" Thorneycroft explores the relationship of the Canadian geographical landscape and how it relates to Canadian's national identity. Particular to this series Thorneycroft utilizes reproduction prints of paintings from the iconic collective The Group Of Seven. It is through the use of these images of pristine landscapes from the early 1920-30's that have come to be the uplifting symbols of the Canadian land, combined with the diorama's of collected dolls depicting scenes of isolation, disaster, and ill-fated choices. It is Thorneycroft's combination of the traditional landscape painting paired with black humor that conjures a more topical landscape that is fraught with anxiety and contradictions the world over.
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Blake Seniniwe are all in the same airExhibited January 8 - February 14, 2009 |
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We are all in the same air: installation view |
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Skew Gallery presented its third solo exhibition of new work by Blake Senini. Through out his career, sculptor Blake Senini has continuously expressed his interest in duality. From the fundamental notions of a relationship between an object and positive / negative shape, to the multi-faceted interpretations of form, subject or even language, Senini has figuratively speaking, flipped over the coin to reveal both sides. We Are All in the Same Air is a collection of five new sculptures that expands on his interest in the relationships the sculpture takes on, within the physical space it occupies, by creating a dynamic within the sculpture between forms. Senini's use of two components further brackets the viewer to contemplate both positive shape of the object and heightens the perception of the negative space between and surrounding. Senini's sculptures are like a tip of a wedge and behind the line is an expanse of articulated ideas and influences. The object itself can infer a physical presence such as a person, gathering, landmass or structure, or it may infer the presence which is not tangible, such as religion, superstition, mythology or even paranormal activity. In this most recent series the peaceful demonstrations of Tibetan monks, the shape of praying hands and exploration of Buddhist mythology are translated into physical form. With a pursuit to make real objects of things that are not tangible yet are real beliefs none the less, Senini sourced internet imagery, further exploring notions of what is real and what is artifice. |
TERRANCE HOULE85.11.16November 20 - December 19, 2008 |
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Pray For Me. 2008. By Terrance Houle |
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Skew Gallery the first solo exhibition of artist Terrance Houle. Houle's new prints, drawings and photographic works explore the relationship of scale and setting to develop thematic conversations. Inspired by location and found objects, Houle stages scenes with figurines creating a cast of characters acting out associations of object and their surroundings. Terrance Houle is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary media artist and a member of the Blood Tribe. In 2003 he graduated with a BFA in Fibre from the Alberta College of Art and Design. He has developed an extensive portfolio that ranges from painting to drawing, video/film, mixed media, New Media, performance and installation
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DaveandJennIN WHICH THEY FIND THEMSELVES BETWEEN HERE AND THERESEPTEMBER 4 - OCTOBTER 11, 2008 |
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kristine moran- unraveling under conditions of uncertaintyJUNE 19 - JULY 31, 2008 |
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Kristine Moran's currant work references literature, film and mythology to help form the main narrative that runs through out her painting. Moran creates anthropomorphic characters comprised of fragments of shelter, transportation and animal parts, which she situates within a contentious site of struggle. Through paint, Moran reveals her fascination with human nature's innate region, from which comes the ability to transform oneself into something seemingly incomprehensible or violent as a need for survival. Responding to her investigation of the moment where one is pushed to the point of extreme reaction to ones own environment, Moran's paintings visibly express this struggle through communicative and the seemingly urgent quality of the painted gesture, manifested as an additive and subtractive process which is reflective of an internalized struggle while painting. Moran establishes calmness through the depicted large empty architectural environments, which recall a familiarity of public places such as airports, office towers lobbies and institutes that by design leads society to respond in an appropriate manner. Within these environments Moran unleashes a crescendo of energy by implanting her struggling creatures of teeth, fur, skin, part moving object, part shelter which exist as an isolated architectural element amongst the vacuous and unforgiving environments.
Kristine Moran graduated with a BFA from Ontario College of Art & Design in 2004 and will have completed her MFA degree at New York City's Hunter College this spring, culminating with a thesis show on May 2008. Moran has had two previous solo shows at the Angel Gallery in Toronto which both received wide critical acclaim. She has received numerous awards including the RBC New Painting Competition Honorable Mention Award, the Governor General's Academic Medal, the OCAD Drawing and Painting Medalist Scholarship and the 401 Richmond Career-Launcher Prize. Kristine has also recently been nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and has just been awarded the prestigious Mary Walsh Sharpe Foundation studio prize for the upcoming year. Her work is included in private and public collections across Canada and in the US.
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Matt Crookshank - cross-eyed |
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'Crookshank is like a benign Dr. Frankenstein, piecing together paintings from many ideas, creating scarred abstractions that are monstrous in their beauty.' -Travis Reynolds, The Calgary Harold - Swerve Magazine, May 2nd, 2006 'Crookshank's flamboyant, happy disasters demonstrate by contrast how bland and predictable most contemporary abstraction has become.' -RM Vaughan, The National Post, March 5th, 2005 ' Crookshank pokes conformity with a stick; he makes art that your Grandmother would hate.' - Bart Habermiller - artist Cross-eyed is a multi media exhibition of painting, animation and digital paintings by Toronto artist Matt Crookshank. In his second solo exhibition at Skew Gallery, Crookshank explores notions of duality. Operating from a place where he has visually conflicted points of view from being cross-eyed, Crookshank's art is a platform spawned by his artistic pursuit of the fine line between order and chaos. His approach to art-making is a metaphor for the world we live in, easily described as on the verge of synchronization or meltdown. In life and art Crookshank is liberated from conformity; he skillfully and fluidly moves between painting and new media. Less motivated by making beautiful paintings, Crookshank sets out with verve for the unexpected. Forgoing the typical approach of working within a controlled environment, Crookshank creates fertile conditions to provide for spontaneous reactions whether it is through oil and varnish or digital paintings responding to imputed information. Known for his frenetic paintings, which often incorporate the depiction of digitally produced mark-making, Crookshank forges on in his pursuit of dissipating the division between painting and digital technology. The results are three interconnected series of work that speak to contrary perspectives coexisting within one artwork; controlled yet organic, brazen and beautiful, digital and painted. Matt Crookshank has been an integral part of the vibrant visual arts community in Toronto, working as an exhibiting artist, gallery director, and curator. His work has been featured in several publications, including The National Post, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star. Receiving his BFA from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 2000 attended Centennial College where he pursued digital animation; his art practice includes painting, video and digital media work. Matt Crookshank will be featured in the soon to be published, vetted book of up and coming artists in painting, called Carte Blanche 2. He has exhibited across Canada and New York, Miami and Los Angeles.
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Jakub dolejs - in the headlights |
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In the Headlights presents a series of photographs about representation, context and reflection. In traditional photography, the strict division between the photographer, the camera, and the subject is a classic structure adhered to by many photographers. What happens behind the lens rarely becomes the image itself. In this series of photographs, Dolejs has deliberately made the viewer aware of this division; in effect the behind-the-lens paraphernalia becomes the narrative. Dolejs embraces objects as his subject, offering a narrative of the inanimate. His sets are complete only when the light is turned on itself in the reflective view of the camera. Scenes appear at first to be waiting in transition, as if the persons of subjective importance are about to appear. It is after the viewers accept their own assumptions that the story of the image becomes known. The objects, in a state on inaction communicate through materiality. Dolejs' placement and intention are linked through his object pairings of chairs, lights, mirrors and photographic set materials. The object qualities become background and subtext to absurd spaces of misunderstanding, open and yet inaccessible. Jakub Dolejs received his MFA in 1998 from the Academy of Art & Architecture in Prague. Dolejs has exhibited in the renowned collection of Montreal's Mois de la Photo in 2005. In the Spring 2006, Dolejs completed an artist residency in Paris funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. His work is included in a major survey of staged photography at the National Gallery of Canada entitled Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre. Jakub Dolejs lives and works in Toronto.
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TRACES- with guest artists: Tinka bechert, marcia harris & ehryn torrel |
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Installation View: Ehryn Torrel, Skew Gallery. |
A thematic group exhibition by guest artists Tinka Bechert, Marcia Harris and Ehryn Torrell exploring recent issues intrinsic to the co-habitation of two formidable forces; man and nature, The collected works of Tinka Bechert, Marcia Harris and Ehryn Torrell speak to an emerging visual dialog that reflects a society which grapples with the convergence of humanity and the natural environment. Historically Landscape painting, particularly Canadian, depicted the boundless; the insignificance of man in the face of the awesome abundance of nature. Yet in recent times a new awareness of nature's finite offerings, combined with mans insatiable consumption of natural resources and desire to be physically immersed within the landscape gives way to a new movement of landscape painting which depicts the fragility of nature when faced by the significance of man. Tinka Bechert's deconstructed landscapes evoke the disenchanted. Humanity's relationship with Nature is reduced to recreational activities and encounters at rest stops with picturesque viewing platforms. The natural landscape is utilized to suites our needs, creature comforts and lifestyles. Bechert's narrative and geographical paintings are telling of a collective fragmented view of our interaction with the landscape. In this context Becherts mapped frameworks of geographical locations suggest man's heavily trodden connection to the natural world. Marcia Harris evokes a deep sense of empathy for the landscape as it transforms. Visions of a seemingly fall-like landscape reveal rapid deterioration due to threats of human encroachment and unnaturally increased population of eco-dependant species such as the Pine Beetle. With the effects climate change has generated, Harris' imagery inquires as to the future of our environment, and thus, ourselves. Ehryn Torrell's poignant silk-screen prints depict the hollow structures of construction sites. Finding moments within the early stages of construction sites Torrell invites a free association, which in the case of the selected work for Traces, resonate situations found within nature. Torrell's bare skeletal formations recall images of landscapes filled with trees and water. Through architecture can be seen man's inherent desire to emulating nature, fabricating a relationship with nature that we can accept and understand. Tinka Bechert is a contemporary painter who lives and works in Silgo, Ireland. Raised in Berlin, Germany, Bechert moved to Ireland in 1996. Bechert received her BFA with First Class Honours from the Institute of Technology in Silgo, Ireland in 2003. In 2004 she was nominated for the Syrlin Art Prize in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2006 she was awarded an Arts Council Residency to the Leighton Artists' Colony at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Born in Gaspe, Quebec, Marcia Harris graduated with distinction from the Fine Arts program(with a major in painting and minor in drawing, screen-printing and photography) at the Okanogan University College, Kelowna, BC in 2004. Now based inn Calgary, Harris has shown extensively across Western Canada. Her work can be found in private collections across Canada, the United States, England and the Grand Cayman Islands. Born in Newmarket Ontario (1977), Ehryn Torrell is an artist whose work explores the visual and psychological impact of the built environment. In 2006, she was awarded the Joseph Plaskett Foundation Award for painting. She holds an Honours B.A. in Visual Art and English from McMaster University (2000) and an MFA from NSCAD University (2006). She currently lives and works in Guelph, Ontario.
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Laura Millard- glide |
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Laura Millard's large-format colour photographs are a continued exploration melding photography and mixed media painting. Millard takes her inspiration from the delicate and minute details of air and light as they play across the surface of frozen lakes, rivers and streams found in Banff National Park. Her bird's eye perspective of the effervescent nature of oxygen bubbles captured as water turns to ice invites the viewer to focus in on the beauty in the details of the landscape, adding a human scale to the viewing experience. She challenges traditional notions of photography as documenting reality, and through her manipulation and alteration of the image, presents a truth about the landscape in a more evocative nature. These painterly embellishments are both subtle and skillful, adding depth to the abstracted details of the elemental landscape. Laura Millard has an MFA from Concordia University and has exhibited her work across Canada and the United States. She has received numerous grants and awards during her career, including an Ontario Arts Council Visual Arts Grant and a Canada Grant. Her work is in both private and public collections across North America. Laura Millard is currently Chair of Painting and Drawing at the Ontario College of Art & Design.
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kim dorland- over the fence
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andy fabo -
queen street desperados |
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Drawing upon personal experience and identity, Andy Fabo's new series Queen Street Desperados portrays a rich history of infamous personalities from Toronto's Queen Street art scene. Both meditative and interpretive, this series of diptychs combine digital print and silk-screening processes, reflecting Fabo's immersed relationship with the Queen Street art community, and his apparent reverence for the individuals he portrays. In each of the works, the artist's hand employs expressive gestures and mark- making to provide a heightened sense of the individual, while the representation of spotlights underline the performative nature of identity |
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CURTIS CUTSHAW-
THE DOWSING ROD SERIES |
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Curtis Cutshaw has brought his ongoing interest in contemporary drawing to the forefront, merging the use of new technologies with printing techniques and traditional notions of artistic discipline. Using a conventional dowsing rod with string and pen attached Cutshaw undertakes a series of chance operations to produce line compositions on paper. The drawings are done on the ground as to respond to the waters below, pulling drawings from the ground. The drawings are then reworked in the studio and printed through Lightjet and Utrachrome process. Curtis Cutshaw graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design, and was accepted by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s New York Loft Program. In 1988, Cutshaw was awarded a scholarship to attend the esteemed Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, USA. Curtis Cutshaw currently works and lives in Calgary, Alberta.
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dan hudson
- The Myth Paintings |
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Part document and part fiction, Hudson employs a large vocabulary of painterly techniques in combining modernist aesthetic theory with narrative images that convey situations that are both familiar and exotic. The paint surfaces are lush and luminous. Throughout his twenty-three year career as an artist, Dan Hudson has expressed the everyday and the sublime in a range of mediums, including painting, drawing, photography and video. Hudson's current body of work marks a pivotal time in the artist's career, favoring a personal view onto the artist's culmination of observations, experiences, and memories.
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