2013 Exhibitions

Carol Wainio: The Book
Curated by Diana Nemiroff
Organized by Carleton University Art Gallery

When: September 19 to November 16, 2013

Exhibition tour: November 14, 2013 from
2:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M.
Plenary lecture: October 18, 2013 at 4:30 P.M. "In Praise of Affective Form: the Book and its Ruin in the Art of Carol Wainio" by Randy Innes, PhD, University of Ottawa, at Conron Hall, University College, as part of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference Enlightenment Constellations.
Public reception: October 18, 2013 at 6 P.M. with Carol Wainio and Randy Innes in attendance.

Illustrated books, which seek to educate their readers through images and ideas about the world, are the focal point for Ottawa painter Carol Wainio’s recent reflections on the changing and contradictory role of representation. Her paintings draw on such rich and varied sources as La Vie Privée et Publique des Animaux (The Private and Public Lives of Animals) by the 19th-century illustrator J. J. Grandville, which depicts the ‘social class’ of animals by dressing them in human clothes, and illustrations for familiar folktales such as the story of Puss in Boots, in which clever Puss transforms his peasant master’s fortunes by dressing him like a prince.
 
Many of Wainio’s paintings evoke a mood of disenchantment and loss rather than wonder. In them, books have become crumbling monuments, provisional structures in a landscape littered with empty shopping bags and cheap, discarded shoes. Mass production replaces scarcity and commercial exchange but, in spite of this transformation, poverty remains ubiquitous. The subjects of the traditional European folktale – poverty and excess, high culture and low, desire and consumption, camouflage and forms of recognition or status through representation or dress – become commentaries on today’s global consumerist society and its inequities.
 
Carol Wainio lives in Ottawa, where she is Adjunct Professor in the Visual Arts department at the University of Ottawa. She has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally, including at the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Venice Biennale, and the Galleria Communale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna.  Carol Wainio is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.

For more information, contact McIntosh Gallery at 519-661-3181 or mcintoshgallery@uwo.ca.

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Passion & Panache -
Remembering Brenda Wallace
Curated by Judith Rodger

When: September 19 to November 16, 2013
Public reception: October 6, 2013
from 2 P.M. to 4 P.M.

Often described as a pioneer of Canadian contemporary art, Brenda Wallace was known nationally and beyond for her connoisseurship and her support for contemporary and emerging artists. She herself trained as an artist at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design, and subsequently taught art in Japan, Canada, Austria and Germany before becoming an arts administrator in the 1960s.
 
Her career included positions at the National Gallery of Canada, Gallery Stratford, National Museums of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Institute for Art and Urban Resources in New York, London Regional Art Gallery and the Banff Centre. In 1989 she returned to Montreal to open Galerie Brenda Wallace. For over thirty years her heart belonged to her home and garden on L'Île-du-Grand-Calumet, Quebec, where she died last September just after her 80th birthday.
 
This exhibition includes forty works of art and archival material from Wallace’s personal collection, which she donated to McIntosh Gallery in 2009. The artists represented, including Stephen Andrews, Ron Benner, Geneviève Cadieux, Greg Curnoe, Aganetha Dyck, Evergon, Gerald Ferguson, Angela Grauerholz, John Greer, Geoffrey James, Suzy Lake, Les Levine, N.E. Thing Co., Jerry Pethick, Takao Tanabe and Claude Tousignant,  clearly demonstrate her discerning eye and national reach.
 
Join us on Sunday, October 6th from 2:00 to 4:00 P.M. for a reception to celebrate Brenda Wallace’s passion for art and artists and to pay tribute to her long and influential career in the visual arts. For more information, contact James Patten at 519-661-2111 ext. 84602 or jpatten2@uwo.ca.

Thea Yabut: Lines of Necessity / Giles Whitaker: Listening Space
When: August 16 to September 14, 2013
Closing reception: Thursday, September 12, 2013 at 7 P.M.

Meet the exhibiting artists and other Department of Visual Arts graduate students at the closing reception, Thursday, September 12th at 7:00 P.M. For more information, contact James Patten at jpatten2@uwo.ca or call 519 661-2111 ext. 84602

Giles Whitaker: Listening Space uses sound recordings, video and software to examine the politics of public and institutional space. Whitaker’s computer-controlled, sound-generating devices confound and engage unsuspecting audiences, whether installed in the gallery or on the street. Due to the unprepossessing, easily overlooked physical presence of the work, sound is the key element of these site-specific installations. Sound’s anarchic nature: its ability to define, yet infiltrate and overflow a given space, is critical to the artist’s practice.
 
With his piece Structural Breakdown 2013, installed on a major commercial street in downtown London (pictured), Whitaker becomes the fourth annual McIntosh Artist in the Community.  Previous installations by artists Lea Bucknell, Kyla Brown and Jeremy Jeresky have engaged audiences in various London neighbourhoods with thought provoking, participatory projects. We thank the City of London Culture Office for facilitating Whitaker’s public installation.
 
Whitaker trained and worked as a scientist before completing a fine arts degree in 2007 at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand. He has exhibited in New Zealand and Canada, and his videos are held in the New Zealand Film Archive. He is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate within the Department of Visual Arts at Western University.

Image: Giles Whitaker, Structural Breakdown 2013, installation with computer-controlled, audio-synthesis devices in found electrical boxes (image courtesy of the artist)

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Thea Yabut: Lines of Necessity

explores the complexity of identity through drawing. Delicate webs of intersecting lines, fluid passages of pale colours and swathes of graphite marks push abstract drawing in unexpected directions. Yabut expands drawing’s vocabulary by making her own tools and devising new methods of application. She drags, scratches folds, cuts, erases, pins and scores her drawings to reveal the physical act of their construction while maintaining a cohesive compositional integrity.

These large, exquisitely-rendered works evoke the varied ways in which the artist relates to the contingency of fluctuating social realities. Historically an ephemeral practice most often associated with preparatory sketches for other media, Yabut exploits drawing’s tradition of marginality and its limitless dimensions and modalities to embody the complex, intersectionality of her experience as a Chinese Filipino Canadian woman.

Yabut holds a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design. She has exhibited at ArtLab in London, Ontario and The Marion Nicoll Gallery in Calgary. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Calgary and TRUCK Contemporary Art, Calgary, and at Embassy Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate within the Department of Visual Arts at Western University.

Artist website: theayabut.artistrunwebsite.com

Image: Thea Yabut, A Form of Extension (detail), April 2013, 213 x 140 cm, graphite, chalk pastel, charcoal, pencil crayon, paper, photo: Brad Isaacs

Colin Miner: the illuminated becoming blind evokes the blue hour, the twilight between day and night. According to the artist: “The haunted and anxious nature of the blue hour rests within the photographic like a shimmering cloak of silver.”
 
Miner explores the fundamental elements of photography through oblique references to its rarely seen reference points, including the spaces of its production. The photographs, collages and videos in this exhibition examine the material and conceptual nature of photography, including the qualities of lightness, darkness, reflection and refraction. In asking what photography is, Miner proposes a conversation based on relations of the anxious, cyclical and askew.
 
Miner is a Toronto artist from Halifax. He holds an MFA at The University of British Columbia and is completing a PhD in Art and Visual Culture at Western University. Miner has had solo exhibitions nationally and has participated in group exhibitions in Vancouver, Germany and China. www.colinminer.com
 
Organized by McIntosh Gallery and the Department of Visual Arts, Western University. For more information, contact Natalie Finkelstein, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at nfinkel@uwo.ca

ESSAYS

• Notes on Colin Miner, by Jacqueline Mabey
• Behind the Sky, by Trevor Mahovsky

Susan Gold: Decorating the End of the World
Curated by Catherine Elliot Shaw
When: May 16 - June 29, 2013
Opening reception: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 7 P.M.

For the past two decades, Windsor artist Susan Gold has researched and photographed natural history collections to develop imagery for her paintings. Her current investigation explores animal specimens as objects of decoration in relation to architecture. Inspired by Norwegian natural history museum displays, she has layered images of the iconic Isbjørn (ice bear), old master paintings and William Morris wallpapers within architectural spaces to evoke the longstanding relationship of decoration to nature.
 
Gold has exhibited in Canada, the United States, England, Germany, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. She is a visual arts professor at University of Windsor and a frequent lecturer at international symposia.  Her work is represented in public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the King Stephen Museum in Szekesfehervar, Hungary. Susan Gold:  Decorating the End of the World has been organized by McIntosh Gallery.

For more information, contact Natalie Finkelstein, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at nfinkel@uwo.ca

PUBLICATION

• Susan Gold: Decorating the End of the World

VIDEO

 
A conversation between Susan Gold and McIntosh Curator Catherine Elliot Shaw.
Edited by Eric Simard at EGS Productions. egsproductions.com

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Janet Jones: DaDA Delirium
Curated by Stuart Reid
When: May 16 - June 29, 2013
Opening reception: Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 7 P.M.

With this series of paintings, Toronto artist Janet Jones probes our fascination with the future. Digitally manipulating black and white photographs of sterile public spaces, Jones creates paintings that appear like frozen screen projections. Focussing on the affects of globalization’s hybrid spaces, Jones collapses the experiential and the technological—the real and the virtual—thus underscoring the ecstatic blur of technology.
 
Jones has exhibited in Canada, the United States, England, Germany, France and China. She is visual arts professor at York University, where she received her MFA from York University before completing a doctorate at New York University in the area of art theory and criticism.
 
DaDa Delirium was organized by the Tom Thomson Art Gallery. The exhibition catalogue, co-published by the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, MacLaren Art Centre, Art Gallery of Northumberland and McIntosh Gallery, includes essays by exhibition curator Stuart Reid and Nell Tenhaaf, and an interview with the artist by Georgiana Uhlyarik.

Both Jones and Gold with attend the opening reception on Thursday, May 16 at 7:00 P.M. For more information, contact Natalie Finkelstein, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at nfinkel@uwo.ca.

Image left: Susan Gold, Ice Bear with needlework, 2010, oil on linen, 137 x 290 cm, photograph: C. MacDowall.
Image right: Janet Jones, DaDa Flow #3, 2006, oil and acrylic on canvas, 239 x 137 cm, photograph courtesy of the artist.

WHEN:  April 15 – May 11, 2013

For over fifty years, Doreen Curry has been a friend of London’s visual artists.  As a librarian at London Public Library, she assisted their research on varying topics related to their art practices.  But, more importantly, she attended their exhibitions and purchased their work, ultimately amassing a collection of over forty artworks.  A self-imposed rule to acquire works only from artists she knew personally led to close and ongoing associations.

This exhibition celebrates Doreen’s generous donation to McIntosh Gallery of many fine artworks including major canvases by Paterson Ewen and Ron Benner, watercolours and drawings by Greg Curnoe, Murray Favro, Jamelie Hassan, Ron Martin, and David Rabinowitch, and mixed media constructions by Royden Rabinowitch and Dave Gordon.

For more information, contact Natalie Finkelstein, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at nfinkel@uwo.ca

Please click the link below to view the exhibition web brochure, featuring an interview with Doreen Curry by Jamelie Hassan and an essay by Amanda Oppedisano and Karly McIntosh.

• A Circle of Friends: The Doreen Curry Collection exhibition brochure

Jamelie Hassan, IRAQ, May 1979, 1979 watercolour on paper, 78.1 x 61.1 cm,Collection of McIntosh Gallery, Western University, Gift of Doreen Curry, 2012.

WHEN: April 8 - May 8, 2013
WHERE: The D. B. Weldon Library
RECEPTION: May 8 at 4 pm.

In 2002, Dr. Heidi and Dr. Dieter Berger generously donated their impressive collection of contemporary Inuit sculpture and graphics to McIntosh Gallery. Over the last decade, it has been the subject of curatorial research and experiential learning opportunities for Western students.  With this exhibition, comprised of most of the sculptures in the collection, we are pleased to present it to a wider audience.

Under the supervision of Professor Lisa Hodgetts of the Department of Anthropology, doctoral candidate Laura Elena Kelvin has curated this thematic selection with numerous cultural insights into the imagery. Her inclusion of reproduction objects, such as the harpoon and polar bear skull, offers additional dimension to her observations.
On behalf of McIntosh Gallery, I thank Laura Elena Kelvin and Dr. Hodgetts for their enthusiastic response to the project proposal; the Department of Anthropology for its generous loan of objects from the Zooarchaeology Collection; Laura Collishaw of Weldon Library for her gracious assistance; and especially Dr. Heidi and Dr. Dieter Berger for their donation of an outstanding collection of Inuit art.

For more information, contact Natalie Finkelstein, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at nfinkel@uwo.ca

Please click the link below to view the exhibition web brochure, featuring installation images and a short essay by Laura Elena Kelvin, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology.

• The Berger Collection of Inuit Art

Image: Jaypetee Karpik Spirit 1980 whale bone Collection of McIntosh Gallery, Gift of Dr. Heidi and Dr. Dieter Berger, 2002

Curated by Kirsty Robertson
Featuring work by Germaine Koh, Allyson Mitchell, Payton Turner and Kelly Wood
WHEN: February 28 - April 9 2013.

There is no doubt that North Americans consume at breathtaking rates, often amassing mountains of goods that produce contradictory feelings of guilt, comfort and greed. Secret Stash looks at this drive to collect and hoard, and our deeply conflicted relationship to such accumulation. Exhibiting artists Germaine Koh (Vancouver), Allyson Mitchell (Toronto), Payton Turner (New York) and Kelly Wood (London, Ontario) use photography and installation to examine these phenomena and the related issues of labour, consumerism and memory.

The project itself spills beyond the gallery. Near the entrance, the trunks of large trees will be transformed by colourful wool cozies created by over 60 Department of Visual Arts students and individuals from the community. A publication designed and illustrated by Shannon Gerard (Toronto) accompanies the exhibition.

Secret Stash is made possible with funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. We thank Western University’s Department of Visual Arts for collaborating with us on this project.

For more information, contact Natalie Finkelstein, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at nfinkel@uwo.ca

VIDEOS

Yarn Bomb McIntosh Gallery from McIntosh Gallery on Vimeo.

Time-lapse: "The Lookout Circle Collection, 2013" (Installation) from Flat Vernacular on Vimeo.

Image: Kelly Wood, Vancouver Cart No. 4, 2010, colourgenic print, 152 x 112 cm, Courtesy of the artist.

WHEN: November 9, 2012 to February 16, 2013.

Currently teaching drawing at Concordia University, Adrian Norvid emigrated from the United Kingdom to Southern Ontario as a child. This might explain the curious mix of hillbillies and louts from both sides of the pond —think Jack Daniels meets Johnnie Walker—that inhabit the fantastic realms he creates.

Enshrining ruptures and affronting conventions, Norvid’s drawings conflate and debase incongruous genres and subject matter. From 1960s psychedelic graphic design to Victorian ornament, Norvid breaks boundaries that traditionally define cultures and historical periods. The works are saturated with imagery and patterns. Take, for example, the large drawing Woodie Hoodie, which deals with themes of decay, disorder and nostalgia. Norvid weaves together diverse elements—cracker packaging, talking trees, a giant mushroom house, gothic text— into a ersatz Scandinavian saga.

Sit Your Sorry Asses Down presents a dinner for a dozen or so disreputable characters. We see the aftermath of a long night of partying, with most of the revelers sprawled asleep at the table. Slogans and song lyrics complete the drawing in which Norvid combines 1970s Rock and Roll with English neo-classical and Rococo motifs.

Curated by James Patten for the Art Gallery of Windsor, this show includes Hermit Hamlet which received critical acclaim in 2008 as part of the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art’s Quebec Triennial. In this near life-sized drawing, dilapidated rural buildings, cast-off furniture and vintage musical equipment form a sort of backwoods lounge for a collection of dissipated hippies, hermits and recluses. All of which seams vaguely appealing as a form of rustic escape from the harsh economic and social realities of contemporary urban life.

McIntosh Gallery’s fall 2012 exhibition program investigates the graphic arts of drawing and illustration and their use within underground music and alternative cultures. To this end, Norvid’s show follows the presentation of Jason McLean: if you could read my mind, and Raymond Pettibon: the Punk Years. A fourth exhibition, Graphic Underground London 1977-90, curated by Brian Lambert, continues at Forest City Gallery until December 15th. It tells the story of London, Ontario’s remarkable history as a centre for punk culture during the 1980s through the copious graphic art production of local artists and musicians. The forthcoming publication includes essays by Anna Hudson, Tom Carmichael and Ben Portis. For more information visit: graphicundergroundlondon.ca

For more information, contact Natalie Finkelstein, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at nfinkel@uwo.ca

Image: Adrian Norvid (Canadian, b. U.K., 1959), Trailer home, 2002, flashe vinyl paint, 300 x 300 cm, Collection of the artist.