FrAmEd : John Hall and Ron Moppett, 1964-2023

TrépanierBaer and Loch Gallery
Opening Saturday, September 9, 2023
Time: 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm at both locations
Artists in Attendance 

Affiliated Events

Nancy Tousley, Curator, and Artists Tour
Saturday, September 9, 2023
TrépanierBaer at 1:00 PM

Mary-Beth Laviolette, Curator, and Artists Tour
Saturday, September 9, 2023
Loch Gallery at 2:00 PM

TrépanierBaer and Loch Gallery are delighted to announce the opening of FrAmEd: Ron Moppett and John Hall, 1964-2023. Anchoring the exhibition that will be held at both locations will be a series of new paintings made collaboratively by the artists.  Including recent works, the exhibition will also feature works dating to the early years of the artists’ careers including John Hall’s Tango (1977), and Ron Moppett’s Rosecase (1975). Works from the ground-breaking and influential Rose Museum exhibition that was the artists’ first collaborative project in 1974 will also be presented.

Ron Moppett and John Hall were classmates at the Alberta College of Art in the mid 60s and they both attended the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in 1968; they have collaborated on several occasions since.  In the mid-1970s, Hall and Moppet discovered they shared a common interest in how roses were depicted in art – from medieval paintings to sculpture and architectural decoration, to contemporary advertising, clothing and even tattoos. Hall and Moppet formed the International Society of Rose Painters, based in Calgary, and organized an exhibition that explored the use of the rose motif in art and everyday life. It became a uniquely collaborative project:  after the exhibition opened, people (including other artists) continued to contribute rose-themed material.[1]

The current Moppett and Hall collaboration has both artists painting the same canvas, one painting a faux or trompe l’oeil frame leaving the center of the canvas blank for the other to paint the “image” and vice versa. Using collage as the basic compositional strategy, the paintings depict colourful and sometimes hyperreal images of objects from daily life including post-it notes, pieces of tape, pins, licorice candies, soft-drink cans, pastiche representations of old picture frames alongside abstracted representations of animals, moons, shards of glass, boats, stools, and night skies all represented in bold, saturated colours that both compliment and contrast one another. There is a playful and comedic quality to each of these skillfully executed paintings. As for meaning, the paintings are about what Hall and Moppett like to paint, inviting viewers to delight in the pleasure of ambiguity.