2014 Exhibitions

The Grant and Peggy Reuber Collection of International Works on Paper

November 6 to December 6, 2014
Opening reception | Thursday, November 6 at 8 P.M.

Over several decades, Peggy Reuber and Grant Reuber, former Economics professor, Provost and Chancellor of Western University, assembled a remarkable collection of major works on paper. Internationally renowned artists, including Richard Hamilton, Toulouse Lautrec, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, and Frank Stella are joined by outstanding Canadian artists Clarence Gagnon, Jean Paul Lemieux, and David Milne. The first public display of the Reuber Collection, this exhibition demonstrates the remarkable results of a life-time commitment to collecting art with passion, conviction and a perceptive eye.

VideoZoom: Between-the-Images

Curated by Julie Bélisle, Louise Déry and Audrey Genois

Organised by Galerie de l'UQAM

November 6 to December 6, 2014

Opening reception | Thursday, November 6 at 8 P.M.

This anthology of video includes the work of seven Quebec artists who define themselves not as filmmakers but as visual artists motivated by the exploration of the image in motion. Their short videos deal with a variety of subjects in the realm of politics, popular culture, and television, as well as poetically charged images. The emphasis is sometimes on form, sometimes on narrative or content, with additional compositional elements of sound, time, the archive, landscape, and performance.  The title, Between-the-Images, is from the writing of theorist Raymond Bellour, who urges us not to pass distractedly from one image to the next but to seek in depth understanding from below their surfaces.

A free public lecture by Louise Déry takes place on Thursday November 6 at 7 P.M. in the North Campus Building (NCB-113) as part of the Art Now! Speakers' Series organized by the Department of Visual Arts. A public opening reception at McIntosh Gallery follows at 8 P.M. All are welcome..

For more information, please contact Lucas Cabral, Communications & Outreach Coordinator, at 519-661-3181 or lcabral3@uwo.ca.

Rob Nelson: Photographs 1977 to 2014

September 12 to November 1, 2014
Opening reception | Friday, September 12 at 7:30 P.M.

Since the 1970s, London, Ontario photographer Rob Nelson has infused fashion and portrait photography with a unique combination of sensitivity towards his subjects and, in contrast, an edgy, candid immediacy. Nelson is credited with reinventing the often stilted formalism of conventional portraits and fashion photography by moving his subjects out of the studio and into the street. His enigmatic images of luminaries such as Prince Andrew, Margaret Atwood, and Kirsten Dunst, have appeared in numerous publications including Saturday Night, Interview, and Canadian Art magazines. But it is his experimental work with anonymous subjects that best reveal Nelson’s remarkably sympathetic depictions of struggling actors, models, and other creative types as they reinvent themselves for the camera.

Nelson is a London-based photographer whose work has greatly influenced portraiture and fashion photography with an emphasis on melding traditional styles of editorial photography with street photography.  His photographs have been featured in major publications such as Interview Magazine, Canadian Art, Saturday Night, Flare, and Chatelaine. Nelson has been credited with playing a crucial role in the portrayal and chronicling of rising young stars such as singer-songwriter and two-time Polaris Prize nominee Basia Bulat and has also photographed established luminaries such as Kirsten Dunst, Karen Kain, Margret Atwood, and Prince Andrew.

Janet Werner: Another perfect day

Curated by Kent Archer
Circulated by Kenderdine Art Gallery

September 12 to November 1, 2014
Opening reception | Friday, September 12 at 7:30 P.M.

Janet Werner’s work as a painter focuses on the fictional portrait as a vehicle to explore notions of subjectivity and desire. Her paintings operate within and against the genre of conventional portraiture, taking found images of anonymous figures in popular culture and imbuing them with fictional personalities. The process of painting is a way of investigating the iconic power of the image, invoking imagination, memory, and projection to invest the nameless figure with human subjectivity and emotion. The final paintings are composite portraits that retain aspects of the original while also embodying notions of transformation, innocence, and loss.

In Werner’s recent paintings there is an argument between beauty and the grotesque, where the figure itself has become the site of contest. Folded, cut, occluded, or altered, with colours ranging from luminous to ashen, and scale shifting from pixie to giant, these figures possess an otherworldly aspect. There is a subtle suggestion of witchcraft in these portraits, though it is not clear if these beings are the ones casting spells or the ones upon whom the spell is cast.

Werner was born in Winnipeg and lives and works in Montreal. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and her MFA from Yale University in New Haven, CT. Werner has shown widely in Canada including solo shows at the Art Gallery of Windsor, The Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, The Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, The Ottawa Art Gallery, and Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg. Recent group exhibitions include Generation at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Intrus/Intruders at Musée du Québec, and Entre/Voir at Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal. Internationally, her work was presented at the Prague Biennale and was featured in the survey exhibition Oh, Canada at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA.

For more information, please contact Lucas Cabral, Communications & Outreach Coordinator, at 519-661-3181 or lcabral3@uwo.ca.

Jared Peters: Just as it should be

August 8 to September 6, 2014
Closing reception | Friday, September 5 at 7:00 P.M.

Painting has a long and distinguished history of drawing our attention to the overlooked aspects of everyday life. From Roman depictions of the scattered remains of feasts to the kitchen still lifes of 18th-century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, artists have interpreted the mundane residue of daily existence as evidence of the ephemeral nature of life itself.

Jared Peters’ paintings of well-used kitchen stoves and still-damp bars of soap provide evidence of the recent presence of anonymous activity. These small, intimate close-ups, typically rendered straight from above, evoke both the deadpan matter-of-factness of documentary, and the provocative drama of mystery writing, in which the action has already occurred and we are left to assemble the clues.

Jared Peters, Dresser, 2014. Photo courtesy of the artist.

As Peters puts it: “My paintings are concerned with the role of everyday objects and spaces in directing our behaviour and ways of seeing. The paintings are sourced from my immediate encounters with daily experience and interactions with the conventional arrangements of contemporary life.”

Through the practice of painting, Peters reveals and questions the aesthetic and formal logic of everyday living, permitting an active grappling and negotiation with the normalizing conventions of contemporary society.

Jared Peters is a contemporary artist engaged with themes of painting, history, power and identity. He received a BA in history from the University of New Brunswick, a BFA from NSCAD University, and is currently an MFA candidate at Western University. His work has been collected by the New Brunswick Art Bank and private collections across Canada. In 2011, Peters was a semi-finalist in the prestigious RBC Canadian Painting Competition.

Jennifer Martin: Turning to see otherwise

August 8 to September 6, 2014
Closing reception | Friday, September 5 at 7:00 P.M.

When does a personal photograph cease to circulate within everyday life and become part of an archive? And how does its meaning change in the process? These are two key questions raised by Vancouver photographer Jennifer Martin in her solo McIntosh Gallery exhibition Turning to see otherwise.

Martin is specifically interested in the way in which discrete moments of everyday life captured in photographs are re-contextualized through their inclusion in an archive, with its own inherent organizational structure and narrative. As the exhibition title suggests, Martin’s focus is that elusive moment when meaning “turns”, or changes, as a photograph moves from one context to the other.

Using materials from her own family’s archive, which includes thousands of negatives, photographs, and Super 8 films representing multiple generations, Martin edits this extensive collection to focus on what she describes as the gesture of the turn.

Jennifer Martin, Looking back, 2013. Photo courtesy of the artist.

As Martin puts it: “I am interested in the transformation of single moments of the everyday into archival materials that then inform a collection’s narrative.  By examining this turning point both formally and metaphorically, we can consider how our orientation, or rather disorientation, to the materials presented affects our understanding of the narrative.”

Any archive, including a collection of family photographs such as the one Martin uses as source material, has a narrative function. Determining what will be included or excluded can define the limits of its given history, and thus determine how its story is told. Martin questions how we, in turn, change our relationship to such images, as we become enmeshed in the fluidity of memory and meaning.

Jennifer Martin is a Vancouver artist, currently based in London, Ontario. She received her BFA in photography from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and is currently an MFA candidate at Western University.

Jared Peters: Just as it should be and Jennifer Martin: Turning to see otherwise are organized by McIntosh Gallery in collaboration with Western University’s Department of Visual Arts MFA program in Art and Visual Culture uwo.ca/visarts.

For more information, please contact Lucas Cabral, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at 519-661-3181 or lcabral3@uwo.ca.

Dave Kemp: The things you know but cannot explain

June 19 to July 19, 2014
Opening reception | Thursday, June 19 at 7:30 P.M.

Featuring video and photography by Canadian artist Dave Kemp, The things you know but cannot explain explores how different combinations of knowledge can shape our understanding of the world.

The exhibition includes works that deliberately offer single or very limited modes of knowledge transfer derived from mundane, everyday occurrences.The aptly titled Series of Boring Videos, for example, features water boiling, paint drying, and grass growing. Yet each of these videos is presented in a manner that encourages the viewer’s engagement through what Kemp calls a process of extended looking. The pot only boils when playback of the video is initiated by the viewer. The paint dries next to a version of itself playing in reverse, highlighting the distinct changes in what we might have assumed is a seamless, uneventful process. Grass grows from a patch of soil into a lush lawn in real time over the course of 30 days. With this video, it becomes clear that the focus is not the lawn itself but the many things happening around it: changes in sunlight, shadows cast by overhead trees, neighbours conversing in their backyards.

The things you know but cannot explain also includes two series of photographs, the first taken with a one pixel camera designed and built by Kemp (pictured). Its design restricts the resulting images to what are best described as colour field monochromes. It is only through the descriptive titles that we learn what they depict: cliché subject matter featuring sunsets, children’s birthday parties, and Niagara Falls.  The second series, Locations, depicts banal, yet enigmatic landscapes without any descriptive text. The logic and rationale behind these images remain intentionally ambiguous.

While Kemp’s work might initially frustrate viewers used to quick online research, they ultimately have the potential to enhance our appreciation and understanding of discreet processes in real time. As Kemp puts it:

"I am interested in different kinds of knowledge and how they form our perception and understanding of the world. It is easy to quickly label something based on one’s pool of knowledge and then simply walk away. With these works, the nature of their presentation encourages the viewer to really experience what is happening with these everyday occurrences."

Kemp is a visual artist whose practice looks at the interactions between art, science and technology. Currently working on his PhD in Art and Visual Culture at Western University, he is a graduate of the Master of Visual Studies program at the University of Toronto where he also completed the collaborative program in Knowledge Media Design. Prior to this, he earned a BFA in Image Arts (photography) from Ryerson University and a BSc. in Mechanical Engineering from Queen’s University.

Dave Kemp: The things you know but cannot explain is organized by McIntosh Gallery in collaboration with Western University’s Department of Visual Arts PhD program in Art and Visual Culture uwo.ca/visarts

For more information, please contact Kay Nadalin, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at 519-661-3181 or knadali@uwo.ca

Barbara Astman I as artifact

Curated by Catherine Elliot Shaw
April 17 to June 7, 2014

In her recent photographs Barbara Astman presents a collection of arresting, face-like constructions isolated by a dense void of deepest black. Each one appears momentarily caught, its angular eye sockets, flattened nose and individual mouth shape, projecting an animated personality. Intimidating, friendly, haunting, engaged, immediate yet somehow inaccessible, these monumental faces challenge us to consider the assortment of masks we wear every day to bridge the inner self to an outer reality.

Since the 1970s Astman has explored a wide range of photographic practices including an innovative use of new technologies such as SX-70 format film and digital techniques. She has been commissioned for numerous public art projects including the 1987 Calgary Winter Olympics and the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.  She has exhibited and lectured extensively and her work is represented in public and private collections across Canada and internationally including Canada Council Art Bank, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England.  She is represented by the Corkin Gallery, Toronto.

The illustrated catalogue for Barbara Astman I as artifact includes essays by Georgiana Uhlyarik, Associate Curator, Canadian Art, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and McIntosh Curator Catherine Elliot Shaw, an interview conducted with the artist by Department of Visual Arts MA candidate Kelly McKenzie, and previously unpublished Astman archival material courtesy of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

To learn more about Barbara Astman and this exhibition, please click the link to read a short essay by Kelly McKenzie, MA candidate, Department of Visual Arts, Western University.

• Barbara Astman I as artifact

For more information, contact Kay Nadalin, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at 519-661-3181 or knadali@uwo.ca.

Storms and Bright Skies: Three Centuries of Dutch Landscapes

Organized by the National Gallery of Canada
February 13 to April 5, 2014
Opening reception | Thursday, February 13 at 7:30 P.M.

 
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Windmill, 1641.
Etching on cream laid paper, 14.7 x 20.7 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Gift in memory of Margaret Wade Labarge from her collection, 2010 Photo © NGC

Harbinger of danger and symbol of pride, the Dutch landscape with its typical motifs, such as canals and windmills, has been a source of infinite inspiration for Dutch artists. Storms and Bright Skies: Three Centuries of Dutch Landscapes explores the emergence of this landscape tradition in the early 17th century, its blossoming during the Golden Age, and its continuation during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Some of the greatest Dutch artists, such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Rembrandt, both represented in the exhibition, brilliantly contributed to the rise of landscape as a major pictorial genre. The exhibition includes prints and drawings from the National Gallery of Canada that capture the beauty and character of the Dutch landscape over three centuries, while demonstrating its significance to the region’s economic, military and scientific development.

Join Mr. Richard Dirk ter Vrugt, Netherlands Council and Her Worship Joanne Vanderheyden, Mayor of the Municipality of Strathroy-Caradoc, and Member, Western University Board of Governors, for the opening reception Thursday, February 13 at 7:30 P.M.

For more information, contact Kay Nadalin, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at 519-661-3181 or knadali@uwo.ca.

Scott Conarroe: By Rail

Curated by James Patten
Organized by the Art Gallery of Windsor and presented by the McIntosh Gallery Art and Travel Committee

November to February 1, 2014
Public reception | December 5, 2013 at 7:00 P.M.

 
Canal, Cleveland OH , 2008. Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery.

The McIntosh Gallery Art and Travel Committee is pleased to present Scott Conarroe: By Rail.

In 2007, Scott Conarroe embarked on a journey across North America to photograph railway infrastructure. His pictures of this sprawling socio-geographical network are a remarkable testament to its past glory and future potential. In these large, arresting photographs railway tracks unify urban and rural environments. Largely empty of trains or people, these contemplative, elegiac photographs evoke a range of responses to what is arguably the defining technology of the modern nation state. Without implicitly articulating the critical role trains played in continental economic and social development, Conarroe’s singular, understated vision provides a phenomenal platform for viewers to consider the profound impact railways have had on our lives.

Conarroe is increasingly well known for his social landscapes of familiar places, which evoke romantic pictorial traditions while participating in contemporary photography’s critical discourse. His photographs of empty hockey rinks, town squares, back alleys and looming bridges have been exhibited in Canada and the US. He has lectured throughout North America and was recently a visiting instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago. He has also won BlackFlash Magazine’s “Best Still Image” prize and was awarded the prestigious Light Work residency. Conarroe is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto.

For more information, contact Kay Nadalin, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, at knadali@uwo.ca.