New Painting: "Sexing Up the Lipsticked Pork"

Take Me Out At The Library: The Magenta Foundation's Canadian Painters Book

The Magenta Foundation has announced the 190 painters to be featured in their upcoming book "Carte Blanche Vol. 2: Painting".
I was chosen for the book, and now can tell people that I make the kind of art that is in books when they ask.
I didn't even think there was 190 painters in Canada, but when you count the Established, The Mid-Career, and we Emerging painters, it really adds up. The full list can be read here.
Glad to be in the company of David Foy Jennifer Saleik, they've been making great work for years.

Machines Molles Catalog

Marie-Douce St. Jacques produced a catalog(texts, collages, colour) for the exhibition at the Notman House in October. Run in an edition of 100, and sold at the show, I have to say it is gorgeous and the text from an interview we did in September is one of my favourites. This text is currently up on the website for my show in Red Deer in January, read it here.
We still have some copies available, if you are interested in getting one($5 North America, $9 Overseas), please email me.
Payment by Paypal is preferred.

Phainting Poenix

The constant re-emergence of painting as a viable practice in contemporary art, that is, the phoenix-like death and re-birth every two years or so, forces a renewed but consistently narrow assessment of painting's value relative to whatever fresh practices provided the contrast to make its re-birth remarkable.
More often than not it seems what is chosen as the representative work of a painting resurgence is that which is a relief from forms with shorter histories that have become too laboured conceptually, too ephemeral, or rely too heavily on dick and shit jokes. Painting can be the emancipated heroic formal relief, the permanent and hopeful stalwart release, or the hard-working under-appreciated and intelligent relief.
I’ve been thinking about this phoenix cycle since reading a proposal for an upcoming exhibition, written by the curator, Jacqueline Mabey. She discusses the current resurgence of interest in painting, and tracks the disinterest back to the 60s or 70s with the rise of more conceptual mediums.
I think I have lived through at least two resurgences in the years since starting art school. The first was triumphant, the second frustrating. I hope the third will be funny.
Maybe painting is the garage rock of the art world. Garage rock never stops, sometimes a band or two will have a little trip into the hearts and CD players of millions, their faces on the cover of magazines that proclaim Rock, recently deceased, is actually alive and well in a third-tier American or British city.
If painters didn’t work all the time, and garage rock bands didn’t keep rocking all the time, there wouldn’t be anything to find when the web-art and the acid-folk gets a little dusty.
While the cycle never really gets at what painting does, or has time to address the slightly different relief painting provides. In making such a narrow criteria in such a limited time-frame, painting is not allowed enough dick jokes, or shit jokes, or to labor its own concepts. Maybe its because painting's required time is so long, and its autographic qualities so undeniable that it suggests refinement and elegance. Just on the cusp of anything revelatory about why we keep on coming back each time and what is different about this time and the last, some faster medium karate-chops painting back to the grave.

I have a desire to refine my own practice that does not reside in soliciting this cycle's start or end, or in a reaction to the cycle itself.
I wonder what black motives live in the absence of my usual ones.

There's just strip clubs and strip malls, right?

Rather quiet these days when I'm on the dais speaking to more than one. In that twisting sentence, I mean to say that I don't want to write here. I don't know how to shoe-horn the fat, short generalizations I am working with into eloquent and elegant words at all.
I am drawing out my decisions for days to see if they die from hunger if not fed or put to bed the second they are noticed. Worrying that I am hesitant, wondering about the actions that are similar to hesitancy while not making spontaneity into a paper tiger to be slain. I am trying not to balance abundance with lack or chance with intention. Trying not to carefully democratize every action with another.
Not working in order to balance the books.

I've named the show at The Bilton Centre For Contemporary Art: The Brawl Of The Beast
From Djuna Barnes' Book, Nightwood:
"The brawl of the beast makes a path for the beast"
A fitting title for a show opening on my 30th birthday. i think it will be the last titled this way, I am tiring a bit of the clever, self-referencing in-joke titles. Nothing else in mind, just feel like getting quiet like when you want to hear if there really is a rat in your house but don't want to get up and scare it off. Of course you have no clue what you'll do if you hear it, or whether you want to hear it.

PS. Please check out my grow-a-saurus paintings on The Bilton Centre site, so good.