Exhibitions: Current - Upcoming - Past (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2005, 2004, 2003)
Past Exhibitions: 2006 To view a complete list of past exhibitions, click here.
Glass of Water and Lakeshore
John Armstrong and Paul Collins
November 15th, 2006 - January 27, 2007John Armstrong has made three sculptural installations based on eighteenth-century Meissen porcelain from the George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art collection in Toronto.
Glass of Water is an installation based on a Meissen covered urn used for serving hot drinks. The historical vessel has two incised quatrefoil shapes or "areas of reserve" that each contain an image: on one side a landscape, and on the other, a picture of tea or coffee being served. The artwork includes seventeen slightly enlarged and simplified replicas of the urns in bronze. There is one area of reserve on each urn, and in each of these quatrefoil shapes Armstrong has painted a glass of water in oil-based enamel. There are seventeen different cups and glasses represented: some are treated in a cursory, suggestive manner, and others are more highly finished. Although Armstrong depicts glassware for the most part, he also includes plastic, paper and Styrofoam cups. As models, he used glasses in his own home — which he drinks water from on a day-to-day basis. These glasses could be easily found in many North American Homes, family restaurants, cafeterias and thrift shops: the glasses are the inexpensive, moulded variety.
For the past eight years, John Armstrong (who lives in Toronto) and Paul Collins (who lives in Paris) have been collaborating on painting, photography and publishing. Their collaboration predominantly takes place over the Internet, by telephone and by using a courier service to send works back and forth from Toronto to Paris.
Armstrong and Collins’s current work is Lakeshore, an ongoing series of colour photographs on which they paint words and images. The photographs depict urban and rural settings, interiors, and a variety of other subjects — principally in Canada and France.
In their painted photographs, Armstrong and Collins portray the lakeshore in a figurative, personal and often oblique manner. Although some of their images do depict actual lakeshores, most have to do with their routine comings and goings, artistic and quotidian. The shore is metaphorically presented as a threshold, a place of contemplation, departure or arrival. The idea of a lakeshore as a poetic space of transition is an established genre in romantic art (and in Canadian painting in particular): Armstrong and Collins both recall and temper this by painting on images that are more often prosaic than wistful. Their painting interrupts the photographs’ surface and the reading of the picture as a direct seamless window onto reality: the photograph becomes the painting’s ground. This emphasizes the photograph’s plasticity and creates a greater plurality of readings.Another component of Lakeshore is an ongoing series of short, anecdotal texts in both French and English that, like the photographs, recount the artists’ quotidian experiences. Armstrong and Collins are planning to publish an artist’s book with reproductions of their painted photographs and these texts, and they will project a DVD version of the texts in the SWGC exhibition
John Armstrong has exhibited his work in Toronto galleries such as The Robert Birch Gallery, YYZ and Cold City. A 1998 survey exhibition of his artwork from the 1990s, titled Sanguine, was organized by Cambridge Galleries, and toured to the Owens Art Gallery, Sackville, New Brunswick, and Plug In ICA, Winnipeg.
Paul Collins, originally from Toronto, has lived and worked in Paris for 20 years, and has exhibited both in Canada and internationally. He has shown in Toronto at A Space, YYZ and Mercer Union, and in Paris at the Fondation Cartier and CREDAC as well as at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Mulhouse.
Installation view of Twenty Glasses of Water
at Kunsthalle Erfurt in Erfurt, Germany, 2003
This Area is Alarmed 2005
Grumble 2005
Traditions in Transition
Contemporary Hooked Rugs of Newfoundland and LabradorJune 29 to August 19, 2006
Guest Curator: Gloria Hickey
Exhibiting artists:
Wanita Bates, Sheila Coultas, Janet Davis, Laurie Dempster, Andrea Ennis, Frances Ennis, Maxine Ennis, Margaret Forsey, Niki T Hollohan, Kathleen Knowling, Christine Koch, Catherine McCausland, Libby Moore, Carolyn Morgan, Shawn O’Hagan, Heather Reeves, Trine Schioldan, Anita Singh, Susan Stephen, Elizabeth Dillon Tucker, Molly White
Sir Wilfred Grenfell College Art Gallery is pleased to present Traditions in Transition: Contemporary Hooked Rugs of Newfoundland and Labrador, accompanied by an opening reception on June 29 and a day of presentations and demonstrations on June 30.
Traditions in Transition, organized and circulated by the Grenfell Gallery with Gloria Hickey as guest curator, is a collection of more than 30 works by 21 women artists who have been inspired by the hooked rugs of Newfoundland. The hooked rug as a fine craft medium is undergoing development and transition. Its defining characteristics are changing. Unconventional materials and processes are the hallmark of this transition, as techniques and materials are re-worked to incorporate a fine art vocabulary. Hickey’s curatorial essay documents and interprets this transition. It also examines the hooked rug as a cultural icon or marker of identity and identifies the reasons why it appeals to visual artists who do not regularly practice in the textile media.
The hooked rug is a cultural icon in Newfoundland and Labrador. Usually made from recycled cloth rags and brin or burlap from food sacks, it represents the outport woman’s ingenuity and perseverance in the face of the harsh circumstances of poverty and climate. Hooked rugs provided warmth, colour and personality, turning a bare floor into home. In the hands of today’s textile artists, the hooked rug is no longer functional but is a potent metaphor with many overlapping meanings. It allows artists in this province to reflect on where they have come from and what are their aesthetic possibilities today.
Gloria Hickey
Shawn O’Hagan, details from the Meditations series: sixteen rugs, 8” x 8” each, recycled jersey on burlap, 2006. Photography by David Morrish
The range of current practice in the hooked rug medium moves from non-traditional exploration of colour and design to non-traditional subjects (especially portraiture), social commentary and text, and continues with mixed media exploration. Certain artists integrate new materials with hooked rugs: organic materials (bark, fleece), synthetic materials, photographs, and found objects such as jewelry. Others make use of transplanted process, such as painting combined with traditional hooking, or hooked process using wire with perforated sheet steel or screen mesh.
Examples of this integration of materials include the work of Wanita Bates, whose project Vintage Flower Garden is a multi-media piece that incorporates found vintage brooches from the 50s and 60s and photographic elements from a magazine advertisement of the same era. Janet Davis’s installation Salt Fish is constructed from one large, assembled piece of burlap with hooked images of salt fish laid head to tail on its surface – a reference to the traditional Newfoundland flake used for drying cod. To bring alive the texture of the flake, Davis weaves small pieces of wood, twigs and bark into the burlap. The “rug” is displayed on an actual reconstructed flake structure, eight by ten feet in size.
Margaret Forsey’s Give Thanks for Your Charmed Life is a series of portraits of her friends, made in the traditional way, hooked with found fabrics on a burlap backing. In her artist’s statement she writes, “I am attracted to the deep roots this tradition has in our province. I create rugs in the same way that a woman living one hundred years ago would have worked. The fabrics consist of old clothes that belonged to me and the people in the portraits. I enjoy juxtaposing this traditional craft with bold, modern forms. Often the cloth is metallic, sequined and brightly coloured. The images in the rugs are based on wild crayon drawings from my sketchbook.” Catherine McCausland’s I Dream of Purple to Tint the Night, Myrna’s Chicken and Tell Me Again are examples of her enigmatic approach to the hooked rug format, incorporating whimsy with lively, provocative imagery.
Libby Moore’s A Recipe for Comfort and Joy draws from a jewel-like palette in a representational, graphic format that also incorporates text. Carolyn Morgan’s installation Peace is a hooked rug of copper wire and plastic coated electrical wire hooked through a perforated metal sheet. Provoked by the changing role of the hooked mat from functional object to art, Morgan uses traditional craft techniques with new, synthetic materials; the work an exploration of texture, light and shadow, installed across a light box raised from the floor. Shawn O’Hagan’s Meditations, a suite of sixteen eight-inch hooked mats arranged in a forty-inch square grid, is inspired by her deepening interest in Vietnamese Buddhism.
Heather Reeves’ multimedia work integrates maps, photographs of flowers and knit fabric hooked through screen mesh. The maps refer to the topography of Trout River, the Tablelands and Woody Point in Gros Morne National Park. Anita Singh’s Large Block Hook is a design based on her recent landscape prints and paintings. Singh is a “gardener” who organizes landscape into busy rows and blocks with vibrant colour, stripes and swirls. Elizabeth Dillon Tucker’s distinctive style, with its recognizable imagery in bold, authoritative colours framed by medallions or lozenges of reds and yellows, has influenced many regional rug hookers.
Traditions in Transition incorporates the resources and efforts of three partners: Sir Wilfred Grenfell College Art Gallery, The Craft Council Gallery of the Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador and The Rooms Provincial Museum. Traditions in Transition opens on the fourth floor of The Rooms Provincial Museum in October, 2006 where it continues through January, 2007.
Laurie Dempster, Yellow House - Brigus, 2005
Margaret Forsey, Mama and Her Little Blue Boy, 2005
Catherine McCausland, I Dream of Purple To Tint the Night, 2002
ASSEMBLY REQUIRED
April 21 to June 17, 2006
The Visual Arts Program’s annual fourth-year students exhibition, Assembly Required, will be held at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College Art Gallery from April 21 to May 20, 2006. Assembly Required presents new work in a variety of disciplines by 14 fourth-year students of the Visual Arts Program at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University’s Corner Brook campus. Grenfell College offers the only BFA (Visual) degree in Newfoundland and Labrador. The Visual Arts Program is a professional program intended to educate and train students in the history, theory and practice of the visual arts. The four-year BFA (Visual Arts) is an intensive studio program incorporating a balanced mix of theory and practice. In the early stages of the program students work in a variety of media to express their artistic ideas and personal vision. As their skills develop, the program places an increasing emphasis on conceptual and theoretical issues. The fourth-year students exhibition is a valuable opportunity for students to exhibit their work in a professional gallery space, and to benefit from public exposure.The artists exhibiting in Assembly Required are: Ken Butler, Brent Coffin, Janis Coombs, Jamie-Lee Cormier, Anne Downton, Kristen Doyle, Meghan Flight, Candace Fulford, Krystle Hayden, Jackie Lambert, Jillian Parsons, Rodney Russell, Jodi Simms and Jennah Turpin. Artworks in the exhibition include photography, painting, sculpture, printmaking, installation, performance and video. The artists’ conceptual concerns reflect the variety and scope of current interests in contemporary art.
For example, painter Kristen Doyle’s work incorporates oil, acrylic, watercolour and spray paint as well as found objects such as ribbon, buttons, wax, gum, string, wire and nails. Her paintings are constructed on found wooden panels pieced together to create an irregular, uneven structure. Her imagery flows freely from one panel to another. “By using a wide array of media, both found and purchased, I can create a variety of honest and intuitive markings which merge the imaginary, abstract and figurative elements within. A button reveals a nipple and neon pink string easily outlines the grotesque forms of my often distorted female bodies. The materials I choose often bridge the gap between everyday objects and fine art.”
During her past four years at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Anne Downton’s work has been primarily concentrated in the media of printmaking and painting, but she has also explored digital video, photography and mixed media. Her fourth year work has explored the idea of layers of history and memories revealed in various ways: through architectural surface deterioration and her use of painting, serigraphy and video projection to express these concepts. More recently Anne’s painting has shifted toward large scale, monochromatic portraitures to represent history, memory and emotion exposed over time.
Poster and Photography by Jodi Simms
Photography credit: Jon Janes
Ken Butler, Brent Coffin, Janis Coombs, Jamie-Lee Cormier, Anne Downton, Kristen Doyle, Krystle Hayden. Photography credit: Jodi Simms.
Candace Fulford describes herself as a hopeless romantic, whose work “lingers on nostalgia, memory association and personal experiences.” Candace has been interested in a variety of media, but she is currently focused on mixed media painting, drawing and sculptural installation. For Candace, repetitive actions, list-making, accumulating and documenting objects, information and materials have become more than an art practice. “They are daily habits; routine tendencies that initiate and become my artwork. Creating art out of a response to my day-to-day living is born from a strong desire to process and sort my thoughts. It acts as a therapeutic practice, enabling me to more fully understand and categorize information. I have discovered that the meditative act of producing one piece can aid in the creation of another. Being able to clearly analyze myself in connection to my external environment allows me to focus on those things which are most important to me.” Her art practice has become a catalyst, enabling her to more clearly comprehend and categorize her personal history and interaction with her surroundings.
Krystle Hayden is originally from Cape Broyle, a small community on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland. Krystle’s work is multimedia, ranging from video, dance, and performance to installation, interior design and fashion design. Most recently she has been investigating the spirituality present in the "rave" and club scene. This work has included an interior decorating project at a local Corner Brook club as well as performance-based work at the club that incorporates the act of dancing and DJ performance. “Music is my ultimate source of inspiration, as it is a form of energy and vibration aiding my communication on a mass level with others.”
Jamie-Lee Cormier became interested in working with the visual arts after a youth summer program at the Grenfell College. “It started off with drawing, then painting and slowly I found my own approach to art. My work in painting and sculpture merges into sculptural collage, where I explore my interests in pattern, texture, and materiality.” Jamie-Lee’s work is process-oriented, incorporating the time and activity of layering materials and objects. “My sculptural works are meant to be approached by the viewer because of the many details you can’t see from a distance. Something that interests me very much is printmaking on fabric and other materials. I will most likely pursue textile design following this degree.”
Jennah Turpin enjoyed a brief stint as a realist in her early years of art school, but eventually developed an undeniable passion for expressive abstraction in black, white and red. Turpin works in a variety of media, but most often chooses photography, silkscreen, and paint. She draws inspiration from punk rock music, her classmates and friends. “My photos, paintings, and silkscreen prints are glimpses at moments in my life reduced to their skeletons, then rebuilt and reconstructed using my style and interpretation of the moment’s potential. Before my reconstruction, these moments existed as pictures of drinking, smoking, dressing up and rock and roll, which is the top layer of their truth. Now they exist as documentation of their depth potential using spray paint or operative text, or whatever else is necessary. I am trying to find the connection between living for the moment -- in the moment -- and self-destruction.”
Photography credit: Jon Janes
Photography credit: Jon Janes
Meghan Flight, Candace Fulford, Jackie Lambert, Jillian Parsons, Rodney Russell, Jodi Simms, Jennah Turpin. Photography credit: Jodi Simms.
Jodi Simms adopted photography media as her major practice at Grenfell College. “Looking at the majority of my work, it would seem to the viewer that I am my favorite subject matter. However, though the photographs are of me I do not consider that I am the subject matter at hand. They are not self-portraits of any kind. I see myself as a type of performance photographer.. Through my exploration of today’s media-driven culture, and with a sense of self-discovery acquired from the various personas I have assumed, I have targeted issues drawn from popular culture and image, issues we may ignore on a daily basis. The preparation and acting out my creations are the work and the photography is the documentation. Labels given to a selection of my work: humorous, spunky and narcissistic. Labels given to me: workaholic, crazy, humorous. Labels given to my art-making process: planned from start to finish, organized, humorous.
Ken Butler believes he has led an interesting life and has seen a lot of things that many people have not. He was raised in small-town Newfoundland, joined the Royal Canadian Sea Cadets at the age of 12 and gained experience traveling across Canada and though much of Europe. Since Ken enrolled in the BFA program at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Ken has focused his studies on the fields of photography and sculpture. Ken delves within his mind to create works that question not only his past, but also reality itself.
Meghan Flight was born in Edmonton Alberta and grew up in Labrador City, drawing lipstick grapes and balloons on her mother’s walls until age 5. At 15 she opened her own studio and taught lessons to students of varying ages to supplement her income and pay for the space.
“I have a tenacious streak in the formalism of my work. When doing work considered more conceptual, still I am seduced by the pure form and all of its associations. I allow myself to be guided by instinct, suggestion, and that which is more visual. My work leads me around by the nose; I am the medium by which it grows—because it does grow, it isn't manufactured, or synthesized. I love reacting to things, being attracted to things, and finally playing with them.”
Jackie Lambert has focused primarily on printmaking, painting, video and bookmaking in the last two years. “Although I have never been formally trained in photography, I recently learned a bit about processing and have become very interested in pursuing this avenue as well. In creating my work, I am mindful of the viewer and how it affects them and how they perceive the work. I try to foster an experience between the work and the viewer, which is part of the reason I love to make books, to create an experience of interaction and tangibility. I gain inspiration from pop culture, viewing others’ work, conversations with people, and my classes. I am aware that no opportunity for learning is ever too small.”
Jillian Parsons grew up in Little Rapids, just outside of Corner Brook. Her love of art and the natural environment were fostered early in life. “My experience of living on the West Coast of Newfoundland while it has undergone a period of intense growth and development has turned my current artistic motivations to looking at the relationship between the individual and the effect that their actions have on the environment.” While she considers herself a multi-media artist, Jillian's current work is made primarily of recycled or natural materials.
Reception will be held on Friday, April 21 from 7 to 9 p.m. Members of the public and family and friends of the artists are invited to attend.
Photography credit: Jon Janes
Photography credit: Jon Janes
Photography credit: Jon Janes
BONNIE BAXTER: Rewind
February 9 - April 1, 2006
Curator/commissaire: Andrée Matte
Organized and circulated by
the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides,
Saint-Jérôme, QuébecBonnie Baxter's evolution as an artist might best be described with the phrase “punctuated equilibrium” where steady aesthetic and technical development is marked by sudden radical shifts. Around ten years ago one of those radical shifts saw the highly respected and successful printmaker begin to experiment with video and performance. Rewind represents a decade of transformative exploration in multiple mediums. Baxter’s process links her to a generation of artists exploring a way to connect with the digital world - observing with the objectivity of the camera eye and simultaneously becoming the object of the “gaze” - embracing the immediate, the experiential. Atmospheric, haunting and a little humorous, her investigations in new media are rewound for the viewer, deconstructed and re-established in her most recent bodies of print.
Bonnie Baxter: Rewind charts a progression of ideas that are neither static nor strictly linear. By artful slight of hand, Baxter creates profound connections, seamlessly layering disparate content and tactile experiences. Her subject matter reveals not only a profound involvement with world events but a personal vision that refuses to see any aspect of life as less important than another. Her finely honed printmaker's ability to produce imagery in complex layers allows her to relate the most mundane experiences to the most exalted and profound. There is an inevitable existentialism in her work where the transcendent and the terrible are arbitrated with humour. Even the work which confronts the most hostile acts of humanity is mediated with the perspective of time implied by the combination of print techniques she applies - each eliciting their own tactile memory of historical place - the pixel precision of the digital now - the etched and ragged lines of simpler pasts.
Rewind will be focused through a single mystical sculpture reminiscent of Peter Breugel's Tower of Babel. The artistic achievements of a decade are presented as a sculpture out of which small video monitors peer – “rewinding” fragments of past works. A sound installation will audibly mimic the babel of images through a ferment of sounds.
Images of entrances and exits created from video stills taken in Hagia Sophia and the Topkapi Palace of the Ottoman sultans in Ístanbul are enlarged to a pointillist pixilation and transferred onto transparent Lexan. Appearing, life size, throughout the exhibitions space, they create a dreamlike illusion, suggesting the artist’s own passage as she continues to look for ways to understand and describe her world.
Contributing to the theme of ingress are the often door shaped prints selected from Baxter's various series. Synchronized video footage collected over the years from various parts of the world including Istanbul, New York, and Montréal will be projected on the wall. The sense of perspective and psychological complexity are deepened through the mytho-historical and socio-political references that suffuse her work. Small sculptures of her Chi-chi doggie will companion the audience as the Chi-chi has come to companion the artist in her exploration of difficult subject matter. Like a film run backwards, the images of this exhibition rewind the course of a decade through the eyes of the artist. Through passageways - real and imagined - of an intimately lit exhibition space, we are reminded that nothing has been lost but simply deconstructed to create a rich diversity - not a Babel, but rather nations of thought, languages of expression which enrich each other through their differences and the insights which their juxtapositions elicit.
The history of printmaking is revealed in the layers of her newest prints. Techniques and imagery that are ostensibly incompatible find common ground. Her images push the technical boundaries of print using digital processes, UV inks, large scales and unorthodox surfaces. At the same time she layers this work with the most ancient forms of the printmaker's art with stamps, and woodblock printing. Through the correlation of objects, prints, and video images, this show bridges the gaps between traditional and experimental mediums. It mediates the boundaries between objective and subjective representation, the mundane and the transcendent, gravity and humour, the artist’s commitment to social engagement and the need to find comfort and reason through aesthetic expression.
February 11 at 11:00 A.M.
Open Portfolio with Bonnie Baxter in the Art GalleryVisual artists from the community are invited to bring portfolios of their own work for discussion with Bonnie Baxter. Coffee will be served.
Designed by Ashley Neville
Bonnie Baxter, Reine Mouchetache, 2005
Bonnie Baxter, Blue Room Suite, digital prints, 1992
Bonnie Baxter, Rouge vif, 2004
FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY FILM & VIDEO
NOVEMBER 21 - FEBRUARY 3, 2006
Sir Wilfred Grenfell Art Gallery is pleased to present a varied contemporary film and video festival and exhibition series which will support the creation of a "film culture" at Grenfell College.
The festival begins on Tuesday, November 22, when the gallery celebrates the simultaneous opening of a video-based exhibition and a three-month film festival. Pierre LeBlanc, visual arts instructor, said that in terms of visual culture, film offers its viewers the possibility of seeing a work the very way it was intended by its author(s).
"This is important in regions where galleries and venues are not numerous," said Mr. LeBlanc. "It offers instructors a unique tool to discuss and critique the creative process in terms of both aesthetics and process in a manner that is difficult to achieve with photographic reproductions of artists' work."
The recent movement towards establishing a film studies program on the Grenfell campus makes this festival a timely endeavor.
"The most important part of establishing a film school anywhere is the creation of a 'film culture'," says Mr. LeBlanc. "Though students are well versed in wide release Hollywood cinema, it is a treat for them to experience more challenging expressions from both contemporary and traditional artists. These works provide a platform to discuss and reflect on narrative structure and the various processes that intervene between an idea and its realization."
Gallery director Gail Tuttle says the Art Gallery at Grenfell College serves as catalyst for the dissemination and interpretation of cutting edge contemporary art.
"Film, video and new media are important avenues of expression for artists, but they are forms of visual art that may not be well understood or appreciated by the community," she says. "It is part of our mandate to provide the public with opportunities to consider art they will not see elsewhere in the region. The gallery prepares program notes, video synopses and catalogue essays for distribution during the festival. In addition, outreach activities bring the public in touch with the artist's meaning and purpose for creating their work. We offer recent historical context for the festival with a series of Canadian films from the 60s and 70s. And, unique in the western Newfoundland region, we continue to offer our program of talks, tours, activities and gallery visits to special interest groups and high school art classes."
Installations
Sandy Amerio
Hear me, children yet-to-be-bornJanuary 10 to February 4
Shot entirely in Death Valley, Hear me, children-yet-to-be-born splices a strange contemporary narrative with the majestic, timeless environment of the American desert. A journey through the valley, at once harsh and cinematic, lets the arid wilderness unfold slowly to the voice of a manager telling a fictitious assembly a story that occurred during his last business trip to the Dead Sea. Following an anecdotal start, the tale soon reveals the manager’s intent to lay off the employees who listen to him.
Hear me, children-yet-to-be-born bridges a notion of the American collective unconscious with a fascination for narrative, drawing from such seemingly diverse sources as the business world, the Bible and the events of September 11th 2001. Particularly, it investigates storytelling in the corporate environment, a practice used by managers in some large companies such as Nike, Adobe or Disney, who tell tales to employees with the aim of generating or influencing their behavior and feelings. Such storytelling, heavy in metaphors and analogies, has multiple applications, from personnel conflict management to finding some explanation for downsizing, lay-offs or increase of production.
Hear me, children-yet-to-be-born is 45 minutes in length, an experimental video co-produced by Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, AFAA residency program, 18th Street Arts Complex, Los Angeles 2003, the French Ministry of Culture, CNAP, Research Grant in France and Abroad (video section 2002).
Sandy Amerio is a video artist, photographer and writer. She was born in 1973 in Paris where she lives and works. She studied fine arts in Nantes and Le Fresnoy (International Studio of Contemporary Arts) and has worked with curators such as Jean-Charles Massera, Catherine Francblin, and Michael Nurdidsany. She has participated in screenings at many international venues including the Kyoto Art Festival in Japan, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, the International Film Festival of La Rochelle and in cinemas like the Brotfabirk in Berlin and the MK2 Bibliotheque in Paris.
In 2002 and 2003 she was awarded two grants from the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the production of Hear me, children-yet-to-be-born. The video was entirely shot in the Death Valley and featuring Nancy Ferguson (who worked with filmmakers such as Paul Verhoeven and David Lynch) during her residency at 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica. In 2004, both the Espace Paul Ricard and the underground Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers organized solo exhibitions of Amerio’s work. In the same year she also published her first bilingual book of storytelling (with contributors of American thinkers of management such as Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Diana Hartley and Doug Stevenson). Her latest film screening took place at the Festival de Cannes 2005 as part of a special screening of artist’s films.
Philip Jonlin Lee
Long Ride Home
November 21 to December 31, 2005
In her essay about Philip Jonlin Lee's installation, independent curator Rhonda Corvese writes: "Long Ride Home is a profound visualization of the experience of trauma. Šthe viewer encounters a conversation between two people on a car, driving at night through an urban landscape. The viewer is aware of the male protagonist driving the car, only by way of the conversation. Lee isolates the nuances of subjective perception by focusing the camera solely of the female protagonist sitting beside the driver, thus structuring the work to expose unsettling moments of personal trauma."
In addition to Long Ride Home, the installation includes a continuous screening of videos selected from recent works by Philip Jonlin Lee. This installation will continue until December 23.
In 2006, Long Ride Home will be replaced by Sandy Amerio's Hear me, children-yet-to-be-born, an installation and video series in the gallery, January 9 to February 3.
Hear me, children-yet-to-be-born is a new experimental work shot entirely in Death Valley. The installation splices a strange contemporary narrative and the majestic, timeless environment of the American desert, drawing from such seemingly diverse sources as the business world, the Bible and the events of September 11, 2001. Sandy Amerio is a video artist, photographer and writer who lives and works in Paris. The production of Hear me, children-yet-to-be-born was supported in part by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French Ministry of Culture.
Designed by Matthew Hollett
Still from Jeremy Bailey, Strongest Man, 2003, 4:33
Still from Daniel Cockburn, Stupid Coalescing Becomers, 2004, 2:31
Designed by Ashley Neville
Still from Sandy Amerio, Hear Me, Children-yet-to-be-born, 2004, 45:00
Still from Sandy Amerio, Hear Me, Children-yet-to-be-born, 2004, 45:00
Still from Philip Jonlin Lee, Long Ride Home
Photograph by Jon Janes
Still from Nelson Henricks, Satellite, 2004, 6:00
Film and video screening series
In conjunction with the opening of Long Ride Home on November 22, the gallery held the first of eight film screenings, Deserted Streets at Midday. This screening consisted of eight films by contemporary Canadian film artists - Leslie Peters, beautiful lies; Daniel Cockburn, Stupid Coalescing Becomers; Jeremy Bailey, Strongest Man; Deirdre Logue, That Beauty; Jennifer Norton, Excess; Steve Reinke, Anthology of American Folk Songs; Benny Nemerofsky Ramsey and Cooper Battersby, Untitled; and Emily Chhangur, Quenched.
The final film screening on February 3 will be the gala closing event - the presentation of a Student Film and Video night, featuring films by Grenfell students. A closing reception will be hosted by the gallery.
This installation and screening series is made possible through collaborations with the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Vtape, a Toronto-based distribution, exhibition and resource centre with an emphasis on contemporary media.
Film and Video Screening Schedule:
Designed by Matthew Hollett
Long Ride Home
Philip Jonlin Lee
Installation and video series
Continuous screening in the gallery
Designed by Matthew Hollett
November 22 at 7 p.m. in FC2014
Deserted Streets at Midday
video program by Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak
Designed by Matthew Hollett
Reason over Passion (1968-69)
Joyce Wieland16 mm film, English, colour, 80 minutes
Designed by Ashley Neville
Hear me, children-yet-to-be-born
Sandy Amerio
Installation and video series
Continuous screening in the gallery
Designed by Ashley NevilleThe Hart of London (1970)
Jack Chambers
Designed by Suzanne van Niekerk
Circle, Mosaic and Hybrid
Jack Chambers: 3 short films
Designed by Ashley Neville
312 OnScreen
National and international video art series (including Grenfell graduates)
Curated by Mark Prior
Reception to follow
Designed by Ashley Neville
Paul Wong Presents
A video series of works by 12 artists
Curated by Paul Wong
Wavelength
Michael Snow
Student Film and Video night Reception hosted by the gallery
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