solo exhibitions

2009 Johnston's Falls
2009 Radiant
2008 This old thing?
2007 All That Glitters…
2006 Tag (with Erin MacMillan)
2006 Talk Back
2006 Shoes
2004 Friday, February 13th, 2004
2001 - 02 Wish You Were Here...
2000 Bonjour, Je m’appelle Shelley Ouellet
1999 Marilyn
1999 Aviary
1997 - 99 Entomology
1997 Quilt
1995 Entomology
1994 Entomology
1994 Bunnies

group exhibitions

2005 Stride 20th Anniversary
2002 Alberta Biennial
2002 Art Throb
2002 ACAD Faculty Exhibition
2000 Coffee Break@instant coffee.com
1999 Light a Match
1996 Alberta Biennial
1996 Numbered Company
1995 Mysteries of the Flesh
1995 Copy

other diversions

2006 - 2008 Carpet 'N Toast Gallery
1996 - 2010 vanitygallery.com

The ACAD New Faculty Show

Curated by Wayne Baerwaldt (exhibition essay published with permission)

The current group exhibition at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery (IKG) brings together recent work by ten new ACAD faculty members. Their interests are represented in a range of media, from performance and ephemera to photography, commercial graphic design, ceramics, glass, printmaking and installation art. Each artist or designer brings a specific approach to making art and /or design projects, overlapping creative strategies in the process. It is an exhibition capable of accommodating itself to diverse contexts and whose meaning and visual surfaces are to be perceived differently according to respective contexts. How do they work? Shelley Ouellet's contribution, Radiant is characteristic of her self-described interest in "creating connections between people, the work and the site", linking a largely conceptual artmaking process to an unpredictable social dynamic in which she engages friends and strangers alike in group activities. A group happening by 100 invited women is the key performative ingredient that informs her mixed-media gallery installation. 100 women will fan themselves, spreading their scent and overall "presence" throughout the gallery and beyond. Ouellet chooses the invited women based on their interest in similar historical circumstances, cultural trends and art-historical tendencies. These are the assumed reasons why they agree to perform with the fans. The installation is process oriented and completed in stages throughout the run of the exhibition. Ouellet credits the invited opening night performative audience, incorporating their names and photo portraits on the walls (thanks to Hutch Hutchinson), and/or actively building this information into a Facebook presence. Ouellet's work serves not only to corroborate common interests, experience and knowledge of participants to bear on the exhibit. It is precisely this sensitive level of caring, the sudden flashes of humour and the repeated, emphatic embrace on an ongoing dialectic on private artist and social participation that fuels the work. Ouellet describes her process as follows:

"Radiant is a collaborative performance with colourful fans and 100 women who wield influence in our art community. The contributions of these artists, mentors, supporters, mothers, daughters, and sisters will be celebrated at the opening reception and their participation in Radiant will be commemorated throughout the exhibition. These amazing women will be assembled at the opening reception, creating a live social network. Each woman will be given a fan to move the air around them. The fans serve to acknowledge her presence and signify her impace on the art scene in Calgary and beyond."

Steve Speer's China Series (Selected Works) acknowledges the presence of his Chinese subjects through photographic documentation, focusing on qualities of light, his mastery over the "crutch of colour" as he refers to it, and the resonance of place. Speer is well known as a commercial photographer in Alberta but the fleeting images he has chosen for IKG show are taken in a foreign landscape, a shared allegory of a rural landscape in transition to an urban condition still unfolding, highly complex and intensdly exclusionary. The omnipresent Chinese cyclist maneuvers a rain slick street, the high wall of a compound clearly delineates the power to exclude, images of a Chinese landscape might suggest alternative approaches to new, carefully tended capitalist landscape and an elderly man against a cement fence stares blankly into the lens. Are these work that are site-specific in a soft, flexible way and to be read as a very different environment than our own? I wonder to myself if photographs produced for specific contexts can develop their potential via secondary, tertiary systems of reference in formally and thematically different sites? Could the same be asked of all participants and works in this group show?

George Webber's Cecil Hotel (Selected Works) captures another kind of urban moment in his five portraits of a neglected, seedy Cecil Hotel façade as well as some of its ravaged inhabitants. Webber opens a door on the darkest corner of downtown Calgary, where to die outside the Cecil amidst windswept, muddy newspapers was not an uncommon occurence. Inside the Cecil Hotel lay another Hell. Before it closed its doors for good in February, Webber gained access to its musty corridors and the last remaining inhabitants, cautiously capturing a gothic entropy of a façade, emptied of business like an eclipse after dark. (Thank you to Shelley Youngblood and Swerve magazine for publishing the great portfolio).

"V is for Victory" is graphic designer Vincent Murakami's moto for his applied design firm. He's contributed to Covered on didactics already... comprised of two black bulletin boards with an orderly arrangement of printed images and handmade preparatory drawings. The presentation conjures up a collage of miniature project pitches in various catagories to develop "corporate identities, branding and multmedia promotional packages for presentations in various client advertisements." Do they invoke the collage exchanges of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell? (Lammirato). It ties modeled on hyper-illusionistic Surrealism. Where does the Surreal arrangement take the imagination? In my mind, not to product/service identification. The topography of form, proportion, appropriateness of colour is so familiar without drawing on any prior knowledge of a design exercise linked to product/service. "I get so sentimental when I see / How perfect perfection can be..." croons Fred Astaire in Top Hat. I am suggesting something as surreal is suggested in the detailed, compressed grid of rectangles perceived as perfectly abstract in the artworld. Distance yourself from the details of the support surface. The polychromed component rectangular images, the dark metal support surface and black matte surface...a narrow band of vermillion/whit draws the faces of each window together and ties each to the face of the metal piers of the picture frame. The predominantly golden/blue wash of colour in the images compliments the cool tone of the grids. The relentlessness of colour scheme underlines an obsession beyond design assignments. Is there anything at all that is incompatible in the composition that subverts its perfection?

The schism between the design solutions of commercial graphics and their abstracted forms taken up in the artworld are exemplified in two digital projects. Applied design can remain as resolutely abstract yet relate an architecture of a system of supply. I prepare for the open laptop presentation of Rick Silva's Antler's Wifi by applying headphones and sitting down in a white chair. If you close your eyes you will fall into a dull and dreamy state. The gaze should be lowered without focusing on anything but the laptop and screen. Experience has shown that the mind is quietest, with the least fatigue or strain, when the eyes are in this lowered position. Electronica audio tracks and moving image loops are in the process of being amended by Silva, each successive piece dated. Complex Nature and abstract image structures of remarkable scale and intricacy are in continual motion through this system, maneuvered by Silva but seemingly maintained by the viewer. To the viewer the architecture of the system cannot be encompassed by plan or rendering; merely to conceive its extent is to grasp one's inability to do more than glimpse temporary fragments, and it will only be through these that it can be represented. The process of the drawing system (combining images and sound) is the process of investing a photographic trace of the fragment with the sense of its sublime, ungraspable whole. Silva's investment is effected through all the small decisions over emphasis, contrast, and simplification/refinement taken over time. This sense of discipline yields a palpable tension in the works, particularly in the achingly sustained areas of colour.

Opposite Silva, on the long white table, is a new work, The Whaleback Awhile Back by Mark Giles. He offers a meditative experience in the form of a laptop dvd and voice-over narrative from an essay he wrote, an ode to a mountain retreat. His source material ranges from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Thoreau to his diary chapbook of text and fine pencil drawings produced while in the renowned Whaleback residency program near the Crow's Nest Pass. Giles/ material offers a vividness achieved through another level of density and concentration of moving image and sound. The effect is deliberately casual, a snap-shot arrangement, a reiteration of what is at hand in the original chapbook of memories and its relation to the writing instrument (a fine pen, a sharp pencil). The compression of meaning for Giles transforms a drawing, which literally figures the necessary effacement of authorial presence implicit in the technique. Giles provides careful, mediated extrapolation from the original visual data sources to preserve a crucial cognitive distinction between the independent life of the working appartatus (laptop, headphones) and the presence of the viewer -- and on can feel the force of this exclusion. One yearns to handle the original chapbook drawings and perhaps experience a live narration of Giles' essay.

Six framed intaglio prints entitled Encounter, initiate, Contemplate, Discuss, Assemble and Resolve are a collaboration between Rhonda Neufeld and Vancouver-based printmaker Rodney Konopaki. The prints are beautiful renderings of Nature and the artists' experiences that Neufeld claims can be "both personal and geological." The resulting prints have the appearance fo automatic writing as their forms imply an active, almost performative search for a mental and physical bearing. The prints come as close to being a residue of performance art as Sarah Fuller's photo and photo-text "documentation" on the adjacent gallery wall. The prints also demand a response to an implied spontaneity and sense of play that is not found elsewhere in this exhibition.

In Gallery 2 are new mixed media works by Brian Molanphy and Tanya Rebakoff. Both artists have created singular works of component parts. Molanphy presents a singular work, "Study for The Socratic Method", consisting of a set of stoneware and glass forms set inside a wall mounted open metal box. The contained forms are, as Molanphy has remarked of his ceramic works, full of absurd contradictions in that they "suggest sometimes fullness, sometimes emptiness, through their formal elements. I try to exploit the flow of clay in the overall form or in the surface qualities." One is light and has a tentative presence, the other deep and wide. Both forms, collected in the matte polished metal container, are clear, direct abstract forms and colour convey a plain-spoken authenticity, an unadorned honesty and sincerity not without humour. The component parts could hardly be more different and yet intimately linked. What do we make of the objects in the artist's welded metal box?...

Tanya Rusnak's simple handmade wooden boxes painted a matte black with glass bottoms, tops and sides appear extremely fragile, stacked and tentatively holding its form in the centre of the gallery as a staircase to nowhere in particular. Raw white salt has been poured in the boxes, partially filling and grounding them. Salt surrounds the staircase as if it has drifted around and up against the staircase from the ceramic tiled floor. It is a haunting, reverential sculpture that is both queer staircase and slender, interrupted grid form, burnt and abandoned. The geometrically alligned collection of matter hovers in the gallery as if under a dark sun. Ten drawings line two adjacent walls and a vitrine covered with refined, decorative metal table wears is arranged on low display platforms and sifted salt. There is a spooky, surreal air to the installation with selected metal containers hovering above the vitrine. The idea that one can make the illusion happen again, in one's mind at least, possesses a magical fascination. The handmade drawings also nudge the imagination toward the Surreal and myths of mechanical perfections. But they betray the construction (pencil marking, smudges) invariably undo the effect to a more demanding eye. Rusnak's strategy of the aged appearance is highly crafted in order to link the drawings to ongoing concerns that link informed craftsmanship and mechanical reproduction. It is old school analog magic at play, as if Rusnak lacks the conceptual grid of competent drawing necessary to check and recover the coherence of the subject by 'correcting' them. But this is not the case as Rusnak is aware of her inherited conceptual challenges. The results plainly remain captivating to both maker and viewers who invest in both drawings and vitrine objects that might just as easily become source material for animation wizards such as the Quay Brothers. Rusnak calls the drawings "afterimage drawings" and describes them as follows:

"The process-based activities of drawing prove formative in my studio practice today, whereby the repetitive act of conjuring ghostly traces becomes the primary mnemonic activator of the phenomenological processes of recollection. Moving back and forward between images in a series, drawing circulates the illusion of movement as the viewer's eyes traverse the same images again and again. Repetition gives emphasis. The afterimage drawings emerged out of a larger exploration of how media-specific historical and technological changes, such as photomechanical reproduction, transformed the nature of social experience in the late Victorian period. The aged appearance of each drawing is rendered through a palimpsest process of scraping away hand-painted designs that were initially drawn on prepared sheets of semi-transparent vellum paper. This visual technique draws attention to more distant forms of mechanical reproduction, which becomes in part, their subject matter, aligning these fundamentally abstract images with earlier forms of mechanical reproduction..."

In Gallery 1, Sarah Fuller's Self Portrait Holding a Pinhole, is comprised of a large photograph of the artist and two framed units to the right. The large colour photograph depicts a woman with her eyes closed sitting upright in a chair beside a bed. Padded wires are attached to her head and face and run into a wooden box sitting on her lap. A samler panel of text suggests and interview with the subject, questions and answers relating to an EEF recording of a two second period of sleep. The second framed panel suggests a record of brain activity as monitored by the EEG. The combined panels and artist text are surreal in their earnest depiction of an altered state of being. Against a back drop what strikes one is that the mere appearance of Fuller's references elicit a certain distance, or respect for, the subject's evident complexity. The EEG results and text tend to function preeminently as objects of "distinction", even more so when they represent as special branch of knowledge. These references, rather than those related to conceptual photography are used by Fuller as bait to draw the viewer into the work. While the surface and style of Fuller's work ties it to photo conceptualism, a host of thematic references counter them too.

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