Introduction
Museum London’s growing collection of contemporary photography and
photo-based art represents the work of a number of prominent Canadian artists
who are actively exploring the potential of this dynamic and rapidly changing
medium. The works demonstrate an engagement with issues of representation, as
well as the practices of image-making itself—both of which have increasingly
come to the fore of critical and creative interventions in photography. Of
particular resonance are the intriguing interconnections between works that
confront landscape (both environmental and social), challenge constructions of
identity, and examine the relationship between image and text.
Ed Burtynsky
Burtynsky’s photographic work is widely celebrated and collected in Canada
and abroad. His large scale, richly coloured, and detailed images of industrial
sites and scarred landscapes recall the heavy demands of human consumption on
the natural environment.
Oakville Oil Refineries # 6, Oakville, Ontario presents a view of
massive, intricate tubing and machinery employed in the refinement of crude oil.
Without the reference of its title, scale and strategic cropping render the
image a confusing maze of unrecognizable pipes. Oakville Oil Refineries # 6,
Oakville, Ontario is compelling and frightening—a metaphor for the urgency
of sustainable technologies.
Stan Denniston
Toronto-based artist Denniston has exhibited widely both nationally and
internationally. His interest in photography is often connected to a critique of
the photograph’s status as a document of experience, or a record that maintains
the powerful import of evidence. Likewise, Denniston’s work considers the
meaning of place, and he employs the photograph as a widely resonant venue for
examining constructions and articulations of memory.
Making Pictures #4 and Making Pictures #5 consist of enigmatic text
fragments mounted on plexiglass, floating in front of photographic images of
highway convoys. They refer to the continuous strategic movement of nuclear
missiles across the United States by truck. The works simultaneously arouse and
frustrate the viewer’s desire for knowledge about this secretive activity,
posing questions about how much can be known through either photographic or
textual evidence and about the limitations of the documentary record.
Shari Hatt
Hatt’s work often confronts social roles, constructions of identity, and the
body as a contested site of both cultural and individual meaning. Her portraits
examine domestication and the integration of animals into the social sphere.
Her 2001 Museum London exhibition Dogs included 50 individual dogs photographed
within the conventions of traditional portraiture. Black and Brown Dog #1 and
Black and Tan Dog #4, featured here, were created during her residency at
Museum London, in which Hatt photographed dogs from the community. These “head
and shoulders shots” reference the extent to which dogs take on a social
identity and engage with human relationships on a very direct and participatory
level. The images also raise amusing questions about the socially coded meanings
inscribed in photographic representational strategies, such as those that define
the portrait or identification image.
Katherine Knight
Nationally recognized for her distinctive landscape-derived photographs and
her photo-based installations, Knight frequently incorporates multi-media
elements such as video. Elegant, evocative, and replete with metaphoric and
emotive content, her work often makes reference to individual and social memory
as embodied in sites, artifacts and texts.
I became unconscious is based upon the 1893 boating disaster in which the Victoria, a sternwheeler full of holiday passengers, capsized and sank in
the Thames River in London, Ontario. Partly inspired by the writings of the
French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, the work’s title makes reference to the
thoughts of someone while drowning. The work incorporates image and text through
both juxtaposition and integration and, as such, eloquently gestures to the
experiential, unstable and often elusive qualities of memory and meaning.
Suzy Lake
Lake’s work spans the categories of photography, performance and time-based
art. She holds a distinctive place in Canadian art through her efforts to engage
with photography on a conceptual level, as a tool and extension of performance.
Her works often examine the body (often her own) as a political site of
contention and a prop for the investigation of broader social and psychological
issues.
Petrouchka’s Dance with Abaddon consists of eight black and white,
hand-tinted photographs and is a component of the more extensive series Are
You Talking to Me? The title, Petrouchka’s Dance with Abaddon, refers
to Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s ballet—a tragic love-story in which the
protagonist is an animate wooden puppet. Here, Lake has distorted her
self-portrait in order to further activate the viewer’s experience. Her facial
expressions, along with the compression and manipulation of the images evoke an
emotional and intellectual response; there is a tension created between the
desire to identify with the images on a personal level, while questioning their
effect as photographic constructions.
Stephen Livick
London-based photographer Livick’s work is held in public and private
collections throughout Canada and the United States. His photographic images
demonstrate a sophisticated concern for representational and technical
experimentation. Livick describes his work as “a blend of image-making and
print-making” and has, in particular, extensively explored the textural and
perceptual effects possible through the process of gum bichromate printing.
Siblings: Kalikata and Costumed Demon are two works from a series of
photographs that Livick took while traveling in India, on one of the many trips
that he has made to the country. These images demonstrate Livick’s fascination
with Hindu spirituality and mythology, as an outsider who interprets and
subjectively records the visual spectacle of another culture. The photographs
can be read as embodiments of a fragmented, disorienting and richly broadening
cross-cultural experience.
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General Introduction:
Nationally significant, Museum London’s collection of contemporary painting
speaks to the potent shift towards challenging prescriptive, medium-specific
conventions most commonly defined under the rubric of postmodernism. Museum
London’s collection of contemporary painting includes works by artists from
across Canada, with a strong and varied representation of works by artists from
the region. A number of London-based artists have become key figures in
promoting a perpetual, open-ended approach to (re)defining Canadian art. By
rejecting externally imposed criteria and ostensibly international standards,
these artists have developed a positive sense of regionalism, which continues to
generate personally and politically meaningful endeavours in the practice of
painting.
Eric Atkinson
Since emigrating from England in 1969, Atkinson has played an important role
in the art community of London, Ontario, as both an influential educator at the
Fanshawe College Department of Fine Arts, until his retirement in 1994, and as a
widely acclaimed practicing artist. Atkinson’s work examines the landscape as
idea, site, and avenue for self-exploration.
A representation of the Lake Huron shoreline, Silver Black Huron embodies
Atkinson’s interest in landscape with a carefully chosen, yet characteristic,
colour palette and a highly textured surface that combines sand with gesturally
applied paint. This tactile reference is further compounded by enigmatic marks,
recalling archetypal symbols, etched onto the surface of the canvas.
Jack Chambers
Working as both a painter and a film-maker, Chambers’ challenging and
experimental approach to his work has blurred the boundaries between his
mediums. He returned to London, Ontario in 1961, after spending nine years in
Spain studying art and developing his technical and conceptual interests.
Chambers became a central figure in the London art scene during the 1960s and
1970s, and his paintings maintain a distinctive place in Canadian art.
The Artist’s First Bride was painted following Chambers’ return to
London, where he was met with the realization that his mother was terminally ill
with cancer. The figures in this work are adapted from a photograph of his
parents as newlyweds. They seem to organically grow out from their amorphous
surroundings, with a highly built-up surface articulated through the patterning
and blending of form and colour. The work hovers between capturing a dream-state
and a memory. Poetically haunting, it evokes the bitter-sweetness of nostalgia
and the evasiveness of origin.
Greg Curnoe
Curnoe has indelibly altered the notion of what it means to be a Canadian
artist, and, more specifically (and emphatically), an artist from London,
Ontario. Resolute in his rejection of external criteria, Curnoe pursued an
artistic practice rooted in his own daily experiences, his perceptions of the
London artistic community and his broader social network. At times
unapologetically controversial in his stance, Curnoe’s work received
international recognition during his lifetime, and continues to demonstrate an
evocative and engaging approach to regionalism.
View From The Most Northerly Window On The East Wall is a mixed-media
work, involving a painted representation of a view from Curnoe’s studio, as well
as a sound component, where a recording made at this site at two different times
of day (on the 19th of June, 1969) can be heard through a speaker that is
integrated into the work. The bright colours of the painted panel, as well as
the incorporation of collage elements and text, are examples of Curnoe’s
signature style and pop sensibility. This work demonstrates a very specific and
personalized concern with the phenomenological reality of a lived situation, an
embodied time, and an inhabited environment. Rather than attempting to transcend
every-day life, Curnoe has embraced the idiosyncratic contingency of quotidian
experience.
kerry ferris
Ferris is a long-standing London artist whose work engages issues relevant to
both the local and the global community. Her vivid paintings of the animal world
and the natural landscape, as well as her works depicting captivating and
unconventional portraits of human life, exude a rhythmic energy. A concern with
preservation coupled with a celebratory view of nature pervades ferris’s
painting practice.
13 Cats à la maison is one of a series of works, entitled 13 Cats,
that ferris painted at a time when a number of cats had, of their own accord,
taken-up residence in her studio. The lively, dynamic grouping of the animals,
along with the vivid, powerful and scintillating use of colour, activate this
work in an almost transportive way. Likewise, through a highly detailed and
fractured surface, and the flattening of space achieved by a compositional
merging of foreground and background, the viewer’s attention constantly shifts
between surface and image, paint and representation. This visual and cognitive
shift-effect lends a captivating quality to the work, as it operates on a very
experiential level.
Thelma Rosner
An important presence in the London art community, Rosner has worked and
exhibited as a painter for over 25 years. Since the 1970s she has used the
medium of painting—recently also incorporating mixed media elements—to examine
pertinent social and political issues. Her work often considers how gender has
been framed within an art-historical context, in relation to broader power
relationships.
She is lost forever is a multi-paneled painting, with the title quoted
from Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice. The numerous associations that
this work conjures up in the mind of the viewer are activated through a
pastiche-like configuration, where literary, historical, and art-historical
references are combined to startling effect. Sandwiched between the raw and
abstractly rendered side panels is a narrow band of three closely cropped
representations—jewel-like in their exquisite detail—of a carpet pattern, the
torso of Queen Elizabeth I, and a unicorn from a medieval tapestry. Through both
composition and subject matter, this work raises uncomfortable questions
concerning how female sexuality has been taken-up in art historical discourse,
and how gender has defined artistic practices.
Bernice Vincent
Bernice Vincent, born in Woodstock, Ontario, is a widely recognized
London-based artist. Vincent has depicted the London area in her paintings from
multiple perspectives—including numerous picturesque series of skylines and
intimate views of her own daily circumstances. Her work often captures time as
though frozen. These representations draw attention to the heavy temporality of
seemingly insignificant moments, and the compelling richness of fleeting
experiences.
Tea Ceremony presents a bird’s eye view of a kitchen counter and
stove-top, with cups, saucers, a kettle and a tea pot—all the accoutrements
necessary for afternoon tea. Instead of receding into banality in its
unremarkable subject matter, this work takes on a quiet monumentality. Here, a
domestic space and a minor moment are reconsidered. The viewpoint, together with
the delicacy and stillness of the composition, call close attention to this
common scene, making the familiar extraordinary and activating a consciousness
on the part of the viewer of the complicated nuances and gestures that comprise
our habitual tasks.
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General Introduction
The exciting expansion that three-dimensional media has undergone over the
past decades is apparent among the works in Museum London’s collection. The
historically traditional understanding of sculpture as a process involving
modeling, carving, or otherwise manipulating stone, metal, or wood into
freestanding forms has been critically revised and reinvigorated in contemporary
contexts. Likewise, experimental practices have dissolved boundaries concerning
how three-dimensional art is both conceived of by artists and experienced by the
viewer. The plethora of materials and immersive atmosphere of installation art
often denies a stance of distanced detachment, instead turning the viewer into
an active participant in the work itself. Moreover, performance art as well as
video and digital technology have had a major impact on our current
understanding of participatory, spatially-oriented, moving and mutable art
forms. Artists from the London region continue to engage in the ongoing task of
investigating how work in three-dimensional media presents a highly affective
forum for articulating formal, conceptual, spiritual, and social concerns.
Rae Davis
An innovator in the London art scene during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Davis
drew on her background in avant-garde theatre production to develop performance
art as a means of exploring the experience of time, space and energy from a
multiplicity of perspectives. She worked with the particulars of the performers’
bodies, voices and life experiences in dynamic interaction with the physical
environment: distance, volume, architecture, objects, light and sound. In recent
years, video installation became a principal component in her practice.
Ivy’s night, Edna’s days was produced in 1978 as a performance in the
artist’s studio in the former Talbot Street Block, a notable location in the
history of art production in London. As a multi-leveled work, Ivy’s night,
Edna’s days celebrates everyday movement through improvisation, and is based
on personal experience and a ‘found’ diary. The piece tells the story of a night
when Ivy and her husband were held hostage in their London apartment by an armed
gunman, and recounts a year of Edna’s days as she recorded them in her diary.
This elaborate documentation of the performance includes a scale model of the
space of the original work, which incorporates flashing lights, a miniature
video showing a tap dancer, and an audiotape of the reading of Edna’s diary.
Jamelie Hassan
Hassan’s artistic practice is strongly influenced by her activist politics,
cultural heritage as a Canadian born to Arab parents and significant travels.
The complexity of the cultural framework that defines her own life, and the
lives of many Canadians, is central to her practice.
Bench from Cordoba is a reconstruction of a bench that Hassan encountered
in the Spanish city of Cordoba, in a park dedicated to Seneca—a Roman
philosopher, whose words adorn the bench. The tiles are hand-painted,
highlighting Hassan’s personal mediation of the re-contextualization and
replication, or ‘actualization,’ of this public park bench in a gallery space.
This reconstruction references the physical and social motivations that
engendered the original object and have left their marks on its surface, while
also personalizing its significance. Hassan’s work speaks of cultural
specificity and displacement. The text and elaborate patterning which cover the
surface of the bench likewise raise questions regarding the conventions that
guide Western artistic hierarchies.
Spring Hurlbut
Hurlbut’s work often explores the relationship between the tangible, physical
records of life, and the historically continuous practice of preserving and
cataloging such fragile remains. Hurlbut is a Toronto-based artist who is
internationally renowned for her collaborative interventions with the natural
history and anthropological collections housed in prominent museums. She, like
Davis, worked for many years throughout the 1980s in a Talbot Street Block
studio in London, Ontario.
The Fish Cabinet recalls Victorian vitrines, in its fine wooden cabinetry
and use of a glass encasement. As such, the multitude of dehydrated sardines
contained within this display case take on the quality of carefully arranged
specimens, which belies their common appearance in fish markets. This work calls
attention to the dead physicality of this mass of fish, and the connotatively
ritualistic act of preservation that has maintained their bodies. Hurlbut
prompts a recognition of the wonder and desire that accompanies the activity of
collecting, and the preciousness of material memory.
Walter Redinger
As an internationally recognized artist from the London region—working and
residing in West Lorne, Ontario—Redinger has been at the fore of sculpture in
Canada with his large-scale works often involving grouped configurations, or
highly complex, multi-part constructions. A number of Redinger’s sculptures are
prominent public works of art, as such they have reached a very wide audience
and evoked both intrigue and controversy, while generatively imprinting
themselves upon the Canadian cultural consciousness.
Untitled (1) and Untitled (2) are two sculptural works by Redinger that
denote his interest in lush, organic movement as realized in the solid and still
sculptural form. The austere whiteness of the surfaces of these wall reliefs,
and the geometric perfection of their spherical shapes, are interrupted by the
folding, warm, seemingly liquid appendages that bring them to life. These works
remind us of our own bodies and of biological, natural processes—yet they also
seem quite alien and impenetrable. Redinger’s use of fiberglass, a synthetic
material, further confuses the viewer’s relationship with these sculptural
works, a relationship that moves between familiarity and displacement, intimacy
and distance.
Patrick Thibert
Thibert, a resident of Mount Bridges, is widely known for the clean lines of
his sculptural works. A concern with the formal aspects of sculpture, including
the physical characteristics of materials, has preoccupied Thibert’s early work.
Since the late 1980s, he has also taken-up sculpture as a venue for
autobiographical constructions and personally meaningful figurative
representations.
Lambeth Way, an outdoor sculpture, is located on Museum London’s front
lawn. Thibert’s interests in the structural properties of metal and the
interplay between the sculptural object and the space that it occupies are
manifest in his conceptualization of this work. Moreover, Thibert’s recurring
theme of the table as a referent is incorporated into Lambeth Way. Here,
the many contexts that ‘table’ references for the viewer—including, potentially,
the dinner table, the board room table, or the dissection table—are made
secondary to the table-as-object that is realized in this work. The sculptural
form announces itself through construction, placement, shape and size.
Ed Zelenak
Zelenak, based in West Lorne, Ontario, has been a prominent Canadian sculptor
since the late 1960s. The structures of his works have transformed over the
decades, as has the personal content. Nonetheless, Zelenak’s interest in
temporal and geographical manifestations of space and place has remained central
to his practice.
Untitled No. 7 is a work whose physicality arrests the viewer, with the
heaviness of the materials and the rough and deliberate markings, incisions and
jutting wedges that mar the smooth metallic skin of this metaphorical map. The
sculpture’s expressive topography seems to locate an individuated, continuing
experience, rather than presenting a definitive or complete record. In Zelenak’s
conception of sculpture, the task of mapping not only functions as a means of
potentially charting the distant unknown, but also serves as a way of
contemplating the sites that are very close at hand, yet ever just out of reach. |
