There are a couple of art exhibitions opening today, Saturday, Feb.15.
Two new exhibits open at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.
Toronto based artists Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have been working together for over a decade. They unveil “The Collaborationists” beginning Feb. 15 at 8 p.m. This exhibition is their largest solo show to date and includes major installations and kinetic sculptures, paintings and multidisciplinary works. They transform art historical tropes in a refreshing and playful manner by drawing from aspects of modernist art, with a focus n abstraction and contemporary information technology as a subject.
In Black Boxes, visitors enter an austere room, indistinguishable from so many other office spaces but for a row of large, faceless servers humming ominously, caged behind wire mesh and churning endless data.
The operations these monoliths perform are entirely unknown, hidden behind a minimalist façade, however in light of recent controversies surrounding the leaking of confidential information by figures such as Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, one might suspect a host of sinister activities. For Marman and Borins, the work in this exhibition signals an urgency to reveal as much as it conceals and not repeat our mistakes as suggested in their work Input Output, where the secrets held within its black shell are spit out at us and regurgitated over and over in ceaseless futility. This exhibition is curated by Ryan Doherty, Melissa Bennett and Linda Jansma.
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have practiced sculpture, installation and media art in Toronto since 2000. Marman is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario. Borins is a graduate of McGill University. Both Marman and Borins graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2001 - where they first met and began collaborating together. They have exhibited widely including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, Galeria OMR, Mexico City; and James Cohan Gallery, New York.
The other exhibition opening at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery is Nova Scotian artist Sarah Cale’s “Petrified.”
"Whenever I have put the paint down on plastic rather than directly on a painting, I've felt there is some kind of paralysis that takes place where the paint is fossilized in an in between state. It’s caught in time in some way, or perhaps caught within a stage of my process.
When wet paint is applied directly on canvas, it feels on the one hand, where it belongs, but also in service of building an illusion or creating a flowing composition. When put on the plastic, it seems to me more in service of being captured as it is, isolated from all the other brushstrokes that make up a painting. Its character and personality assert the moment it was made, rather than being just one of many,” she said in a press release.
Cale's artwork departs from traditional modes of paint application using what she describes as 'second-hand brushstrokes.' In this process, paint is applied to a plastic surface where it dries and solidifies into physical form.
The brushstroke is then carefully removed from the substrate and collaged onto a wooden, canvas or linen support. Paint sits on the surface, engendering a pronounced foreground-background relationship, as both planes exist as parallels, never intersecting. By isolating production into foreground and background their relationship becomes self-conscious and results in a representation of the brushstroke as a form of rhetoric. These works seek to represent the process in which they are made rather than a space in which to reproduce, re-design or express something actual or imagined. What appears on the support is not a picture, but an event of the making.
For her exhibition at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Cale will create a large-scale work specifically for the East wall of the upper gallery. The piece will follow a similar approach to that of recent paintings, presenting a work that highlights its various stages of production. In moving past tidy, stretched canvases and formal supports fit for gallery presentation, Cale explores the relationship between spontaneous creation and formal presentation.
Sarah Cale received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Guelph. In 2009 and 2010 she was shortlisted for the RBC painting award and has been awarded numerous grants and residencies. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in 2011 and 2013 at Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto, and has been included in recent group exhibitions at the Musée D'Art Contemporain, Montréal (2009), the Power Plant, Toronto (2010), Equinox Gallery, Vancouver (2012), Oakville Galleries, Oakville(2012) and Galerie de l'UQAM, Montréal (2013).
The exhibition is curated by Christina Cuthbertson. It is organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in partnership with the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
Both exhibits run until April 20.
Also opening Feb. 15 is “Hobby Shop,” an exhibition of new work from Lethbridge artist Arianna Richardson which opens at 9 p.m. at the Trianon (104-5th Street South).
Richardson created these new works as artist in residence at Gushul Studio in Blairmore in January 2014. She has created consumer counter culture products using recycled or discarded items. Her works examine the frivolous and wasteful nature of modern society.
Hobby Shop runs Feb. 15-March 31.
The opening reception is at 9 p.m. The first 40 people attending receive a limited edition hobbyist souvenir.
