Will Gorlitz: nowhere if not here
Through August 23
Guelph-based artist Will Gorlitz begins a painting by looking for
the telling detail. “When determining the actual subjects I wish to
paint, a crucial consideration is that the subjects present some
acutely visual feature,” he explains in an email. “Commonly, this
involves the tactile materiality of substances or some fleeting
perceptual conditions,” he continues. This is evident in, for example,
his paintings of rural roads in winter, especially one where the salt
fills cracks in the pavement; no doubt the result of long, close and
cold moments of observation. In “Grassfire,” he creates a strong
sensory experience and triggers a clear memory of what it feels like,
the fascination to fear, to witness a fire’s transformation. In another
series, leaves float on water, but the artist subtly arranges them into
numbers, in the same way we impose sequences or patterns on nature as
we experience it, or as we remember it afterwards.
Piles of Birds: The Folk Art of Barry Colpitts
June 24-July 26
Barry Colpitts is a wood carver from West Jeddore on the eastern
shore. This summer he mounts Piles of Birds at the Craig
Gallery, part of Alderney Landing, which celebrates its 10th
anniversary this year. The exhibition consists of eight new pieces,
including a full-sized throne made of seagulls, leaving little doubt of
folk art’s connection to the grotesque, or the gothic for that matter.
Wood carving, arguably more than any other folk medium, displays those
two traditions’ physical distortions, humour and fantastical forces at
play. There’s a sense of funhouse spookiness, akin to episodes of The
Hilarious House of Frankenstein or The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” episodes. Colpitts’ work is also featured at the
Nova Scotia Folk Art Festival in Lunenburg (Lunenburg Arena, August 2,
noon to 4pm) and on the festival poster. During the exhibition’s run,
Colpitts will work on the Dartmouth waterfront, call ahead for
times.
Angela Carlsen: No Vacancy: A disappearing history
July 1-August 2
Angela Carlsen appreciates abandoned structures. She’s documented
unoccupied, neglected houses. Now, she’s turned her lens on public
buildings, including Greenvale School, Shannon Park and the recently
vacated Halifax Herald building. “It feels exciting and depressing at
the same time,” she says of the impact shooting at these sites has on
her. “I definitely feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, but
I try to take in an entire room and then dissect it with my camera.”
Carlsen looks for “lines, depth and shape and I try to make a
photograph that has symmetry but also says something about the place.”
Though absent of people, their presence in and around these buildings
is implied. While she continues to deliberate on her own position on
heritage conversation, she applauds the refurbishment and reuse of
Greenvale School, “a beautiful old brick school [where the] interior is
being gutted and the facade kept intact.”
Kent Monkman: The Triumph of mischief
August 29-October 4
Kent Monkman’s work has wide scope. He’s a multimedia artist
(painting, performance, film/video and installation) and his exhibition
is coming to Halifax this summer. In The Triumph of Mischief,
which in name alone sends up the heroic in history, he re-imagines the
imagery, motifs and stories of first contact, or simply contact,
between First Nations peoples and European settlers. Monkman, a Cree
artist, takes a “Queer perspective,” according to SMU Art Gallery
information, on this major historical narrative in Canada. He questions
stereotypical figures and representations (of manhood, good and bad).
The romanticized landscape of Canada, as vast, empty and
undiscovered frontier, becomes the basis for Monkman’s
recreation in the 19th-century Beaux-Arts style of landscape paintings,
which hang in galleries across the country. A silent film plays in a
reinvented teepee and Monkman dresses in drag as Miss Chief Share Eagle
Testickle. What a way to close the summer season.
Susan Bozic: The Dating Portfolio
July 18-October 4
It’s said you can tell when two people are really and truly in love
by the way they look at each other. Vancouver-based photographer Susan
Bozic satirizes the look and existence of true love, as it’s popularly
understood, in her series The Dating Portfolio. She stages
scenes from a perfect relationship, casting herself (like Cindy
Sherman) as the perfectly content girlfriend to Carl. He’s
good-looking, statuesque, but a bit stiff—Carl’s a mannequin. “The
humour presented in this work is the first stage in reading the images
and is intended to draw the viewer in,” says Bozic in an email. “The
longer you look, the more psychologically complex they become.” The
artist frames love as just another product packaged and marketed for
mass consumption. “We’re constantly being sold on the ideal, whether
it’s projected onto people or things. The romanticized images in The
Dating Portfolio are a surrender to those ideals.”
invocation: Sculpture in Stone and Whalebone, Wood and Clay
by Linda Johns
July 24-September 6
In this retrospective of Linda Johns’s sculptures, guest curator
Jeffrey Parker gathers some 35 works together. Looking back at these
objects, one appreciates, for a start, the diversity of the material
used and the shifts Johns makes from one to another. “Bone and wood are
nearly the same process, but the tools differ,” explains Johns. “Clay
is an additive process, so you build your object rather than carve away
what you don’t want. These are two entirely different ways of seeing.”
Johns senses the form to invoke, while also forming a plan for her
approach in the studio. “Both processes are at work simultaneously,
especially with wood and bone because their inherent free form shape
evokes a natural expression. I (turn the piece) over and over to see
and feel its energy and what it has to say.”
Jack Bishop: Survey of works
June 26-July 10
While survey exhibitions are usually associated with older,
established artists, this show surveys work from mainly the last two
years by young New Brunswick painter and NSCAD graduate Jack
Bishop.
“The idea is to show the relationships between the different series
of paintings I’ve made: cars, shoppers and houses,” notes Bishop.
“Despite subject matter, a lot of the technical parts of my paintings
blend into each other, like the use of repetition, distortions of space
and different formulas I’ve used to piece them together through
drawing, tracing, photography or collage.”
For his houses and subdivisions, he’s used both collaged magazines
and photomontage for his foundation. Thematically, Bishop’s different
series together survey what he calls “social consumerism.” The viewer
can see how that activity creates and mediates landscapes and land use.
“I tend to paint in a serial manner, taking an idea and making
different variations, and then going back and re-trying things that
worked in other paintings.”
Sound and Kinetic Dimensions Class Exhibition
August 3-9
Halifax has its medical school and teaching hospitals. The city also
has its art college, or, officially, its visual arts university, with
its own network of teaching galleries, including the more recently
established Seeds and Port Loggia and the oldest and original, the Anna
Leonowens Gallery. NSCAD continues to bring in leading contemporary
artists, such as Montreal-based Jean-Pierre Gauthier, to teach and to
organize class exhibitions at the Leonowens. Gauthier’s moving (in both
physical and imaginative senses of the word) installations won him the
Sobey Art Award in 2004. This summer he guides students from conception
to exhibition of their sound and kinetic works. This art-making crosses
boundaries, offering not only an object to consider but also the
material or mechanisms used for its animation. To compare with, and to
prepare for, Gauthier’s class show, you could check out Sometimes
Always, presented by Centre for Art Tapes at the AGNS (on now until
August 30).
Nomi Chi
August 8
An illustrator, painter and tattoo artist, Nomi Chi says that shifting gears from art to tattooing, from paper to people, “can be a bit of a daunting task.” Her work suggests she’s up to it. (See it at nomi-chi.com.) No matter the medium, her style is consistent: fluid forms, weighted and curving lines and exploratory colours (turquoises, bright blues, dry and wet reds, clay-gray). Chi’s human and animal figures wear wounds and marks of decay, but they’re still very much alive and powerful. “My interest in animals, dissections, et cetera, is rooted in my childhood and an early interest in biology,” she explains. “I lived in Ontario when I was younger, and spent a lot of time outdoors hiking with my dad and studying nature.” Though she’s not spiritual—“not even a little bit”—Chi is “passionate” about science and describes herself as “a very conflicted person and I’m pretty sure that’s why my art is the way it is.”
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2009.