Exhibitions.

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Luanne Martineau

 

“The Knitter Woman” 2020, steel bar, glass, paper pulp, acrylic matte medium, plaster,
insulfoam, plastic, paper, 87″ x 30″ x 30”. Installation View at the Art Gallery of Alberta.
Photo Credit: Charles Cousins

 

“The Knitter Woman”  2020, detail yarn

 

“The Knitter Woman”  2020, detail head

 

After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?

In 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles developed a series of works calling attention to the place of art development and maintenance within the systems of the contemporary art exhibition. Ukeles’ radical series examined the socio-economic powerlines that feed and enforce our associations of the (political, social, economic, artistic, conceptual, facility, and environmental) development as an act of creation, alongside with the notion of maintenance as essentially an uncreative, subservient, and servicing janitorial function. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Manifesto is as vital and compelling today as it was when first published over 40 years ago. Feelings and experiences of comfort within an environment are inextricable from the issues and structures of development and maintenance. The Knitter Woman is a kind of kinetic mother figure that spins out the knitted yarn being manually fed to, and mechanically hooked within her glass head crown, producing a thin i-cord which grows and progressively drops within the interior cavity of the sculpture, to be expelled out between its legs. The produced i-cord interior scroll offers here the potential for creature comfort in the shape and form of an expanding circular rug to be sat and walked upon; but achieving the promise of comfort requires extensive collective and cooperative action: wool donation from the general public, the gathering and feeding of the donated wool to The Knitter Woman by volunteers and staff at the gallery, and the stitching together of the subsequently produced i-cord, into a growing rug which expands and requires more attention and service the more it is served and tended. The resulting knit i-cord rug of The Knitter Woman is a material record of the time, service, and care provided within and by the exhibiting institution and its audience members.

 

 

“Fournier and Meleney” 2019, installation view.
Cast paper pulp, acrylic matte medium, archival glue, archival paper.
64″w x 12″h x 35″d

 

“Fournier and Meleney” 2019, colour view 1.

 

“Fournier and Meleney” 2019, colour view 2.

 

“Fournier and Meleney” 2019, colour thumb detail.

 

“Fournier and Meleney” 2019, black view 1.

 

“Fournier and Meleney” 2019, black view 2.

 

“Fournier and Meleney” 2019, black butterfly detail.

 

“Fournier and Meleney” 2019

George Bataille writes that “Human life entails … the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse — a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot.” Luanne Martineau’s work takes this rage – this eternal internal flip flopping between baseness and virtue, vulgarity and the purity, abject and proper – and brings it into the physical form.

Fournier and Meleney,  greyscale and chromatic versions of one another, are three-dimensional collages made from the pulp of Martineau’ vast archive of found papers. Double repetitions, they are recycled and reprocessed appropriations, reworked readymades that are also somethings made of nothing. In pilfering shapes from the wall-works, these cadaverous landscapes are simultaneously stage sets for Bataille’s battle between the mind and the muck and evidence of Martineau’s cannibalistic process, one that also rages between the realms of banality and beauty, the crafter and the connoisseur, the brain and the body.

Rhiannon Vogl

 

 

“Recliner” 2017, needled felt, craft felt, pastel, paper, acrylic, glue, 35.5″ x 54″ x 1.5″

 

“Fall Carade”, 2019, hand-needled felted hand-dyed wool, linen, synthetic thread,
archival glue, archival ink, acrylic paint, 47″ x 27″ x 3″, SOLD

 

“Commissure, Carol”, 2019, hand-needled felted hand-dyed wool, linen, synthetic thread,
archival glue, archival ink, acrylic paint, 43″ x 48″ x 1.5″

 

“Replica”, 2018, hand needled felt, 50″ x 18″

 

“Hypnos”, 2018, hand needled felt, 41″ x 30″

 

Luanne Martineau on her piece Blow, 2016

I was in residence in Cape Dorset for three weeks, and during that time I hosted 3 workshops around the process of felting with the women at Dorset’s Sewing Centre, which is a female-only meeting space.

In response to Candice Hopkin’s suggestion that the felting process would be of interest to the community, I allocated 3/4 of my provided materials budget to the purchase of felting “starter” kits for the Centre, and hosted 3 workshops during my stay in Dorset.

Because the technique is basic, and because the women were already highly experienced in the creation of textile outwear, the “workshops” were primarily a social opportunity, which offered me interaction in a situation where socializing was fairly limited for an outside artist visiting from the South. We got to chat, the felting was a process that was unfamiliar to them but they saw the applicability to their own textile interests immediately, and there was talk of the Centre getting more felting supplies after my departure to continue on with this form of work through a local grant.

I arrived with the idea that this felting might offer a bridge between the stone carving that happens there (which is exclusively the activity domain of the male artists living in Dorset) and the female textile makers, but in the end the “art” possibilities of the community were less interesting to them than the possibilities in garment making, which I was more than happy with.

Blow is a return to my earlier needle felting process, and is also a landscape-body-architecture hybrid. The contrasting black to pink, to yellow, to blue-white striping reflects the light quality of Dorset, the spareness of it’s protruding forms are an echo of the buildings that occur there. There is a yellow “peeled banana” walking figure in this landscape that from several angles appears as a humanoid form traversing the slab of felt, and from the opposite angle it creates a crescent “eye” peering over two hills/ breasts. The way that sound bounces around Dorset due to the hard snow, stone and human structure surfaces influenced this particular passage in the sculpture, particularly from my experiences of the Dorset nights, when I could hear footsteps and vehicles from far distances, but frequently not from the direction they were actually coming from.

There is a lipsticked mouth /blow-hole / box-shed that reasserts Blow as landscape-body-architecture hybrid, the title came because the word “blow” is hard and soft, aggressive and gentle, phenomenological as well as social-slang encoded (blow me, blow job, take it and blow).

 

“Blow”, 2016, hand needled felt, 7″ x 26.5″ x 12″

 

“Blow”, 2016, hand needled felt, 7″ x 26.5″ x 12″, view 2

 

“Montréal-based Luanne Martineau produces felted wool sculptures, drawings, collages, and large-scale textile-based collage works. Combining various methods of craft with the legacies of 1950s and 1960s contemporary art, Martineau has explored the spaces in between art genres, unsettling the boundaries between style and ideology in her enticing and sensual works. Martineau’s work is like a rivet that holds together new histories. The conversations generated through Martineau’s work bridge genres and movements, such as Abstract Expressionism, Post-minimalism, Feminism, popular culture and craft, making them fluid, porous and relevant to current discourse. In breaking down the barriers between figurative/abstract and art/craft, Martineau’s work unpacks the formal and critical underpinnings of art history and traditional female work while also creating an engagement with this history and its omissions. Her sculptures and collage together reset current conversation about craft and women’s work in the 21st century.” 

[Vicky Chainey Gagnon & Karine Di Genova, Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop’s University, 2015]

Martineau has exhibited across Canada and internationally including at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Power Plant, Toronto; and MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts. Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition titled Luanne Martineau, curated by Lesley Johnstone, at the Musée d’art contemporarin de Montréal in 2010. In the spring of 2014, her work was included in COLLAGES – Gestures and Fragments at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and in Contemporary Drawings from the National Gallery of Canada at the Mendel Gallery, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. In 2015, Martineau’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition curated by Vicky Chainey Gagnon and Karine Di Genova at the Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop’s University.  In April of 2016 Martineau participated in an Artist Residency at the Kinngait Studios in Cape Dorset. The TD North/South Artist Exchange, in collaboration with the Canadian Art Foundation, invites artists from southern Canada to live and work in the Arctic for a three-week period and artists from Canada’s Arctic to travel to The South for a similar residency.

In the fall of 2016, she co-curatored Aujourd’hui Encore, a group exhibition at TrépanierBaer Gallery featuring the works of Vikky Alexander, Shary Boyle, Lyse Lemieux, Nadia Myre, Meryl McMaster, Beth Stuart, Carol Waino, along with pieces from her own practice. Martineau’s work was also included in the following upcoming exhibitions: INTERNATIONAL HOKURIKU KOGEI SUMMIT “ WORLDS KOGEI (artisan crafts) 100”, group exhibition, Toyama City, Japan (2017) a two-person show with Elena Herzog at Western Exhibitions, Chicago (2018); and a group exhibition titled Fait Main/Hand Made at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (2018).  Recently, Luanne Martineau was featured in a solo exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides (2019), and she was commissioned to do a work for the Art Gallery of Alberta’s group exhibition titled Nests for the End of the World (2020). Her work will be shown in an upcoming exhibition slated for the fall of 2020 at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. 

Martineau received the VIVA Award for the Visual Arts in 2007, and in 2009 she represented British Columbia for the Sobey Art Award. She was a guest lecturer at the Tate Modern for The Banff Centre and Middlesex University symposium titled Informal Architecture in 2007. Martineau’s work can be found in many prominent public and private collections in Canada including those of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, Loto Québec, TD Bank Group, the National Bank of Canada,  Hydro Québec, and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, to name a few.

Luanne Martineau was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1970.  She studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design before transferring to the Alberta College of Art + Design, where she received her Fine Art Diploma in 1993. She completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia in 1995.  Luanne Martineau lives and works in Montréal, where she is Associate Professor, Painting and Drawing, at Concordia University.

 

 

 

Carroll Taylor Lindoe

 

“Figure 1″ 2002, charcoal on paper, 47.75″ x 31.5”

 

“Figure 2″ 2002, charcoal on paper, 47.75″ x 31.5”

 

“Figure 3″ 2002, charcoal on paper, 47.75″ x 31.5”

 

“Figure 4″ 2002, charcoal on paper, 47.75″ x 31.5”

 

“Coppice Worm” 1984, wood, plaster, oil and enamel paints, 8″ x 28″ x 11″

 

“Image Poem”, 1985

“Image Poem is an expression of my experience in Strumica, a town in southern Macedonia near the Bulgarian border a few years before the civil war broke out. The experience, of a culture and environment dramatically contrasting with my life in Canada as an artist, opened my eyes and senses to an affinity I did not know I would have. The connection I felt then to the eastern sensibility and rooted cultures of the less travelled Islamic infused world has stayed, enriching my work with it’s rhythms, patterns and simplicity.  

The work is most readily experienced in free association as a non-linear poem. A feeling for fugue or Mediterranean music patterns can assist.” CTL

 

 

“Light, Landscape in Yellow and Pink”  1982,  wood, plaster, oil and enamel paints,
12″ x 14″ x 8″

 

Carroll Taylor Lindoe’s practice spans over four decades. Born in Calgary, Alberta in 1948 to artists Luke and Vivian Lindoe, from whom she benefited both in learning and association with other artists, she studied formally though only sporadically at the Alberta College of Art + Design (now known as the Alberta University of the Arts). She counts Illingworth Kerr, then Head of the Alberta College of Art + Design, as her mentor throughout her adult life.  Her marriage to artist Ron Moppett was mutually supportive as she developed her practice and professionalism throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. She now lives and works on Denman Island, British Columbia.

Taylor Lindoe produces short, closely-related series; these develop and manifest a particular aspect of her exploration of the ability of cultural metaphors to speak to who and how we are. Each medium, form and theme that she refers to is seen as a language with a history and established use. She sees metaphor as the means by which that language, more or less frozen in our minds from repetitive use, can be refreshed and transformed, made new to our time. Sometimes, forms of art and architecture from other cultures and times are seen by her as ancestors and companions in the contemporary moment, and are suggested in her work. Often, nature is called to join the dialogue; nature is always present, in both our external surroundings and residing within us. Taylor Lindoe aims to make art that speaks to both physical and subconscious conditions; this aim remains constant in all series she produces, as variable as they are in medium and form.

She has exhibited widely in Canadian galleries and museums; taught painting, drawing and sculpture at various visual art departments; and was represented for many years by Wynick/Tuck Gallery in Toronto and for the last two decades by TrépanierBaer Gallery in Calgary.

 

 

 

Mike Bayne

 

Mike’s studio in Kingston, Ontario.

 

Over the years, Kingston-based painter Mike Bayne has been trying to get the details right: “It seems to get more intricate every few years,” he says, about the evolution of his practice,”as I become unsatisfied with the level of detail.” Bayne’s paintings are subtly coloured and intensely realized. He locates himself within a tradition of painters working in a scrupulously representational mode – Johannes Vermeer, Givoanni Antonio Canaletto, Andrew Wyeth..painters who inhibit spaces towards the meditative and melancholic.

Robert Enright, “Mike Bayne: Detailesque,” Border Crossings Magazine, Issue 110, 2008, p. 18

 

“Green Shrub” 2019, oil on wood panel, 16” x 24″

 

“855” 2019, oil on wood panel, 16″ x 24″

 

“Public Parking Pebbles” 2016, oil on wood panel, 7″ x 5″

 

“Hospital Food” (1 and 2), 2020, oil on wood panel, 4″ x 6″ each.

 

“Fried Tail On White Shrimp Dinner”, 2020, oil on wood panel, 5″ x 5″

 

“Cloud Studies” (1,2,3) 2020, oil on wood panel, 4″ x 6″ each.

 

“Crista Looking Left” (1,2,3), 2020, oil on wood panel, 5″ x 5″, 6″ x 4″, 6″ x 4″

 

Mike Bayne received an MFA from Concordia University (2004) and a BAH and BFA from Queen’s University (2001).  He has had numerous solo exhibitions over the past decade in Canada and the United States, most recently Mike Bayne: Public Information at Louis K. Meisel Gallery in New York ( 2019); Cruising Paradise: Mike Bayne and Geoffrey James at TrépanierBaer in Calgary (2018);  Pictures, Garrison Art Center, New York (2017); Deadpan, Katharine Mulheim Contemporary Art Projects, New York (2015); and Post, Structure, Sign, Katharine Mulheim Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto (2013), to name a few. He has participated in a number of group exhibitions in: Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Vancouver, and Toronto. His work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Nerman Museum, The Jordan Schnitzler Museum of Art, the Wieland Collection and numerous prestigious private collections around the world. Mike is the recipient of the Kingston Prize for Portraiture, and had his work in a solo presentation at The Armory Show, 2012 in New York. He lives and works in Kingston, Ontario.

 

 

 

Carol Wainio

 

“Treasure” 2019, acrylic on canvas, 76″ x 118″

 

Human Natures

European fairy tale relied on animal helper figures to imaginatively navigate a human world where change in the conditions of life was impossible and good did not always triumph. As scarcity and hierarchy gave way to industry and social mobility, some well-worn characters were enlisted to sell things humans at first needed and perhaps later did not, accelerating growth which later became unsustainable. Puss in Boots sold shoes or other products and Le Petit Poucet led his brothers out of the forest with flashlight batteries or Peugot cars in early advertising. Gretel, who with her brother Hansel was also abandoned in the wood by a selfish older generation, sailed safely away on a swan and apparently didn’t appear in later advertising for candy or charming houses.   

It’s also hard to find Aesop’s earlier animals hawking products across the centuries. Fables illustrate more enduring human characteristics or morals.  Still, the ground of anthropomorphized animals of fable has shifted in the anthropocene; their human natures echo strangely and more plaintively.

Fairy tale is replete with catastrophes, fears, desires and imagined transformations of an earlier world. Despite talking animals and other imaginings, neither quick devastation nor anthropogenic climate change was imaginable for Aesop or Jean de la Fontaine. In our time the former resulted in treaties and engineering feats to address threats. The fable of The Hare and the Tortoise resonates with fast versus slow calamities – hubris and short term thinking versus the glacial pace of efforts to address climate, for example. In a pessimistic 19^th century retelling of the tale there is a different ending, little known, we’re told, because few of the animals who witnessed the fabled race survived a great forest-fire shortly after. In that version the hare’s hubris and laziness led him to decide not to bother racing the tortoise.  Declared the fastest creature, tortoise was sent by the animal council to warn of the fire. He was too slow and they all perished.

But to illustrate is not to predict:  Non-Western, indigenous turtles suggest the persistence or regeneration of nature and life itself.  A young girl with braids named Greta (a variant of Gretel) recently addressed another large council about what she called the ‘fairy tale’ of unsustainable growth.  Fables are true and untrue, paradoxical and ambiguous. While parts of the world now seem at times as harshly drawn as early tales – with an ersatz golden haired fabulist having left his gold tower for a House where serious writers are reduced to fairy tale analogies to describe a strange new kingdom, it may be worth considering what earlier talking animals or young girls with braids may still offer.  In these works, figures from these tales wander across paint grounds and wonder about these things.

 

 

“At Hare”, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 78″ x 120″

 

“Bagmen #1″ 2009, acrylic on canvas, 44″ x 50”

 

“Bagmen #3″ 2009, acrylic on canvas, 36″ x 36”

 

“Bagmen #4″ 2009, acrylic on canvas, 40″ x 48”

 

Carol Wainio’s work combines the visceral and painterly with the discursive to create structures for wondering not only about the practice of art, but about things that often come from elsewhere other than the field of painting. The works draw together diverse references and approaches to explore the nuances of history, narrative, representation, the environment, and the changing nature of human experience.

Carol Wainio: The Book, Galerie de l’Université du Québec à Montréal

Born in Sarnia, Carol Wainio now lives and works in Ottawa, where she is Adjunct Professor in the Visual Arts department of the University of Ottawa. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1976) and a Master of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montréal (1985). In 2014, she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2014.

Carol Wainio belongs to the generation of Canadian painters whose artistic practice was influenced by the conceptual and political currents permeating the world in the 1970’s and engendered an approach to painting that was, on the one hand, marked by abstract and expressionist formal concerns and, on the other, by a desire to use painting as a means to think about representation itself as well as real-world issues. Her paintings are visually and conceptually full: layers with references to the past and present; to different regimes of knowledge; to popular and high art and their attendant modes of representation. And as paintings, they are emphatically constructed, drawing attention to the shaping and delineating character of painting and line, and shifting with ease between one spatial register and another, as well as between representational styles, each with its social, historical, and artistic connotations.

In 2010, Wainio’s work was featured in a travelling exhibition, Carol Wainio: The Book, curated by Diana Nemiroff, and organized and circulated by Carleton University Art Gallery.   This exhibition displayed Wainio’s interest in the evolution of fairy-tales, the art of the copyist, industrialization, and the narrative power of images. An exhibition of new work, Old Masters, also appeared at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, March 8 – April 28, 2013. Wainio’s work was exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as part of the group exhibition Her Story Today, October 8, 2015, to August 7, 2016. In 2018 she was included in the inaugural group exhibition We’ll All Become Stories at the new Ottawa Art Gallery. In 2019 she was named the Artist-In-Residence at the Diefenbunker, Ottawa, which led to the exhibition Disasters for Little Children. Wainio’s work can also be found in the current group exhibition, Painting Nature with a Mirror, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal to June 15, 2020

She has exhibited widely in Canada in Canada and internationally, including: the National Gallery of Canda, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Glenbow Museum, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Aperto exhibit at the Venice Biennale, Italy,  the Shanghai Museum, China, and the Galleria Communale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, to name a few. Her paintings are found in major corporate, private, and public collections.

 

 

 

 

Ron Moppett

 

Ron’s studio in Calgary, Alberta.

 

Ron’s studio in Calgary, Alberta.

 

“Dusk” 2016/19, acrylic, oil, alkyd, canvas, 24″ x 60″ (3 panels).

 

“As Above So Below” 2019, acrylic, oil, alkyd, enamel, canvas, 60″ x 120″ (2 panels).

 

“Adam and Eve Blackhand” 2019, oil, alkyd, graphite on paper, 2 sheets 30″ x 22″ each.

 

“VIEWOFTHEBAY1964/DUSK” 2009/2020, oil, alkyd, acrylic, enamel, wood, canvas, 72″ x 88″ x 3.5″ (4 panels)

 

Glenbow Museum, One New Work, Ron Moppett: “Do You Remember/Snow & Stars”, video tour.

 

 

*PDF, catalogue link*, Ron Moppett, “One New Work” Glenbow.

 

 

“I’m much more interested in the openness of abstraction than a closed and coded narrative – however suspended. I look for approaches to abstraction and find touchstones in the work of other artists, popular culture and in the rich emotional and psychological responses triggered in everyday things.”

Ron Moppett is one of Canada’s leading contemporary artists who is often at the forefront of advanced research in the field of visual arts.  His practice is multidisciplinary slipping in and out of painting, which is at its foundation, into sculpture, drawing, printmaking and installation art. Drawing inspiration from a variety of historical and cultural styles, the artist offers a diverse view of pop culture and a glimpse into the “dailiness” of life. A brilliant colourist, Moppett stencils and distills shapes with oil, acrylic and Alkyd paint, creating complex “picture puzzles” that hold multiple layers of meaning. 

His career includes a significant number of honours, exhibitions, publications and awards, including numerous Canada Council grants and the prestigious Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 1997. In addition to his painting practice, he has worked as a curator and a teacher. In 2013, Ron Moppett curated Made in Calgary: The 1970s, an important survey exhibition of Calgary’s artistic community during that decade, and one of five exhibitions organized by the Glenbow Museum that examined the history of the visual art community in Calgary from 1960 through to 2015.

Many major surveys of his work have been organized: beginning with a show at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre in 1982, and another, a travelling exhibition, organized by Glenbow Museum in Calgary in 1990. Ron Moppett’s sculptural and installation work was the subject of a major survey exhibition titled SCULPTUR(AL) curated by Christine Sowiak for the Nickle Galleries that opened in the fall of 2015. Primarily known as a painter, this major survey presented three-dimensional works from the 1970s through to the present. In the fall of 2016 the Art Gallery of Alberta presented a two-person exhibition with Ron Moppet and his son Damian Moppett, a prominent contemporary artist in his own right, titled Damian Moppett + Ron Moppett (Every Story Has Two Sides). In May of 2017, the National Gallery of Canada presented Masterpiece in Focus: Ron and Damian Moppett, an iteration of the exhibition that was recently shown at the Art Gallery of Alberta. In August of 2017 his work was included in Open Horizons: Allyson Glenn, Colleen Heslin and Ronald Moppett at the Cultural Foundation of Tinos, Tinos, Greece. In 2019, his work was included in an exhibition titled Hope is Maybe, shown at the Munich International Airport, Germany. And in 2020, he featured in One New Work Ron Moppett: Do You Remember/Snow & Stars, at Glenbow Museum. 

In the fall of 2012 Ron Moppett unveiled THESAMEWAYBETTER/READER, a monumental mosaic tile wall work measuring approximately 110 feet long by 13 feet high in Calgary’s East Village.