The beer just falls right back out

From the Sled Island Art Blog:

Sled Island Preview of Painting: Thick and Thin and Grreeden

The show is more than a conversation in painting. It is like entering a party of the full range of your friends, your party posse, your hours of coffee debaters and awkward acquaintances from work that you feel you should be closer to, but aren’t.

The show is well directed, beginning with Patrick Lundeen’s tripkitsch, Wanna See My Bacon Torpedo (2008). Set across from the ordered chaos of Chris Millar’s work and the slightly more subdued, Dave and Jenn pieces, the show starts off with an energetic burst of the potential and fun of painting. Terence Koh’s discrete but elevated sculpture,The Finger (2007), tucked in the corner, is a send off to authority and a nudge to the academics. The mood is a command of painting in one’s own language, one that bubbles over with excitement, like trying to eavesdrop at a party where you build the story from the snippets you overhear.

Kyle Beal’s work acts as a transition piece, literally a cushion, between the playful into the darker tones of Kim Neudorf’s series of Fele paintings (2005‑2006) my friend aptly described as, “like those dreams where you feel your teeth falling out.” They reminded me of the work of Ben Templesmith in his 30 Days of Night graphic novel series and are dark and lovely.

Shary Boyle’s the Clearances and Skirmish at Bloody Point (both 2007) were absolutely magical. The former is a twenty foot collection of drawings pinned to the wall with military men and mythological creatures directing the dispossessed. A timed sequence with overhead projectors illuminates the work and the end result is a multi-layered narrative. I saw elements reminiscent in the exploration of mythology and physical scope of Henry Darger with the basic technical aspects of Kara Walker’s work. However,this is only a superficial similarity and does not do the work justice in description.

Paulo Whitaker’s Five Abstract Paintings reminded me of contact prints in photography with their stenciled forms layered inexploration. However, I found myself distracted and wanting to wander back into Boyle’s imaginary world every time I heard the timer click.

GRREEDEN

The sister exhibition located in the Marion Nicoll Gallery is a conversation between Wil Murray’s paintings and Justin Evans lenticular prints. The show is successful in creating a dialog not only between the two but with the viewer as well. The inherent properties of the lenticular format require a side to side viewing, a physical study in curiosity of questioning how you are viewing the work and what you are seeing that spills over into Murray’s sculptural paintings which demand a viewing around the canvas to examine a process that projects outside of itself.

Photos from the show can be found in the Photos section of this site.

-Courtney Thompson

* Photo by Mason Hastie

Shotgun Review Article, No actual Shotguns

Kim Neudorf has posted a new article about my work at shotgun-review.ca.
Written after my show in the spring at Bilton Contemporary and kept under wraps until now.

"Murray's paintings have a presence that is process and time-based and relates to philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's idea that "there is at the core of time a gaze," as the artist has written about his work as a narrative of layered creation that can be seen nonlinearly. The paintings also relate to a self-generative theme of identity as constant re-habitation either literally or metaphorically, similarly used by recent painters Kristine Moran and Krisjanis Katkins-Gorsline. This is particularly described by Moran in a statement of her work wherein a survival instinct of transformation allows "protagonists" in the paintings an "anthropomorphic value, which transforms them into both shelters and beings at once." "

Read the full article here

Thick & Thin Post Number One

I've mentioned quite a lot that in the space between the two presentations of Painting: Thick and Thin that it is my intention to have a whole bunch of posts and artifacts for people to see and read in order to flesh out the exhibition.
The first of these posts is fantastic. Kim Neudorf, an artist in the exhibition has written a series of questions about my curatorial statement and sent them to me and the artists.
Kim writes some of the best interview questions I've ever read and the answers given flesh out the statement nicely and reveal how the artists are topping up the half-full glass that a 150 word maximum results in.
You can read it on on her blog, Writing Shed In The Woods

Preview of Justin Evans' Lenticular Prints: GRREEDEN

Lenticular print appearing in mine and Justin's exhibition GRREEDEN, opening the 25th of June at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery.

The Strange Catalog Text That Will Keep Us Together

I've posted Jacqueline Mabey's fantastic essay on my work from my exhibition she curated at the Belkin Satellite in March.
This is easily my favourite piece of writing about my work. Jacqueline spent nearly a year traveling to my studio and exhibitions researching and listening while I told tall drunken tales about burning studios and late nights with one-legged bikers.

" Since it is superfluous to the ends-means rationality of capitalism at its most base form, art’s very existence – its continued existence – proves the insufficiency of dominant ordering narratives. As the excesses of auction week attest, art can be a part of reproducing said ordering narratives. Nonetheless, it undercuts the fiction that there is only one way that the world can be organized. In its polysemic generosity, the painting of Wil Murray does not foreclose on the viewer’s possible interpretations, possible emancipations, that moment of disassociation with a socially constructed subjective position. Its everyday associations and the bodily confrontations it stages with the viewer propound that the emancipatory moment is not something out there at a cerebral remove, but possible within us in the most quotidian moments and spaces"

From: Jacqueline Mabey, "the strange space that will keep us together: Painting and the Possibility of Postmodern Utopias" Vancouver: Belkin Satellite, 2008.
Available as PDF or .doc file.

*A note on the photo, it is Fred Herzog. I saw his exhibition while in Vancouver for my Belkin Show. Virtually everyone I know who has lived in East Vancouver now owns his book and uses as memory.

Non-Specific Terror and Dancin'

I went last night to see Animals of Distinctions' "Smash Up" with Justin Evans at the Monument National.
It was very strange to sit in a theater with other people to watch this. I realized that nearly all of my experience of dance, save a few grinning-10-year-olds-performing-ballet recitals of my sister's, was from video. Like the one above. Where camera angles and editing really dictate duration, and narrative. Much like seeing a painting in person instead of in photograph, or actually being stuck on a Survivor-type desert island, this performance was so heavy and sweaty and disorienting.
I was terrified all through the first piece. Not for the performers or because it was scary, but non specific terror. Not horror, mind you, but terror. I couldn't tell what was happening or what was going to happen. Hell. I wasn't even sure what I was seeing.
Painting so often feels like maintaining some very delicate balance between all kinds of things you want to balance like composition, colour, texture, form along with all kinds of things that you might not, like cliches, the medium's history, trends, and your own temporary desires to not be making what you are, or to not continue. It is such a delicate, razor's edge final balance that I want to squeeze my eyes tight and hold still while I find the extremes on either side. Watching the performance last night was like watching that balance be maintained in front of me. How harrowing.
I'm a little bashful about being so wide-eyed, but holy shit Dana Gingras is one of my favourite artists. She totally wrecked my cool, leaving me yammering on about how I felt. Yikes.
This is leaving out the computer-animation stuff by James Paterson and Amit Pitaru that knocked my head off, and music direction by Roger Tellier-Craig.

GRREEDEN

GRREEDEN
Justin Evans & Wil Murray

June 25th to September 11th: Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary

Justin Evans and Wil Murray walked into a bar 10 years ago to diagram a lenticular “walked into a bar” joke called GRREEDEN. This exhibition is one possible punch line.
A sister exhibition to “Painting: Thick & Thin”, which tracks Wil’s complex relationship to far-off colleagues and to his hometown, GRREEDEN tracks the coy and winding path to and from collaboration between two artists in daily contact. The project has flowered beautifully in conversation between them about painting, lenticular printing and narrative, and continued upon leaving the table to return to individual practices. This exhibition is the fruit, printed and painted and displayed at market.
Justin’s prints of tourist vistas, taken with a hybrid camera, explore the ghosting and accidents at the breaking points of lenticular image making. Exploring the beauty created by focal distortion and partial obfuscation of the lens and amplifying it through the abuse of intentional accidents in the printing process, Justin’s prints make real his daring attempts over the years to develop techniques, theories and processes not yet explored in lenticular printing.
Wil’s paintings track his romps around the re-organization of abstract creation narratives in painting through the physical removal and re-attachment of surface sections and the construction of sculptural excrescences that force a radial viewing across a painting. His relationship to narrative, demonstrated on bar tables across the country and tracked in paint for this exhibition mean to reveal his delight and terror in the escalating demands of a project and friendship of such scale and length.
The two mediums exhibited point toward the future confusion and amalgamation of practices. A slow leaning toward material collaboration. This first public step is made intentionally blind to where it is putting its foot, but clear on where it has come from and where it is going.
GRREEDEN is both a storyboard for future and a chronicle of past projects, all called GRREEDEN.

Facebook event here.

Opening The Same Night at the IKG:
-Painting: Thick & Thin
-Shary Boyle
-Paulo Whitaker

Painting: Thick and Thin

Painting: Thick & Thin
June 25th to June 28th: Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary
July 25th to October 6th: Glenbow Museum, Calgary

Featuring Works by:
-Miriam Bankey (Calgary,AB)
-Kyle Beal (Montreal, QC)
-Dave & Jenn (Calgary, AB)
-Chris Millar (Calgary, AB)
-Patrick Lundeen (Brooklyn, NY)
-Kim Neudorf (Calgary, AB)
-Ryan Sluggett (Austin, TX)

In a city experiencing a time of such abundance, we commonly lament a cultural void, as if it came along naturally with prosperity. In conversations with the city’s exiles and in newspaper clippings, I’ve found a belief that a wealthy city is hostile to artists, and does not foster or influence them in any interesting way.
While use of this invented cultural vacancy as a discursive space was valuable, it is now confining.
All of these artists are, in some way, from Calgary. I was born here. We have made a new dialogue around painting in Calgary essential by reordering ideas of abundance and lack. Our work is not a direct critique of the general economic or political forces that created it, but is grown from the city's specific complexity of excesses and voids. We have escaped cynical mimicry and trite activism to make personal and purposeful objects out of painting's history.
We've digested both painting's history and each other’s practices from afar to work it up as influence in our own studios to be at once as dripping, excessive and ridiculous as the city itself, and as clean, slick and manufactured as a postcard from it.
Without easy access to the physical artifacts of art history or each others’ work, a shared imagination was built between us that sustained very inward practices in a city that looks perpetually outward.

-Wil Murray, Curator

Group Bio:
Miriam Bankey, Kyle Beal, Kim Neudorf, Patrick Lundeen, Chris Millar, Ryan Sluggett, and Dave & Jenn could play a very long game of biographical connect-the-dots with curator Wil Murray. Some of them left Calgary, some of them stayed, but they all came out of ACAD in the last ten years to build networks of cross-pollination between their practices through photographs, writing, internet lurking, music and shared beverages.
Employing all kinds of strategies to eek a little life out of painting's perpetually expiring body, they build meticulous and excessive paintings that don't shy from deadly serious jokes or from taking an occasional dip in sculpture's pool.

Look to this blog for essays, interviews and a ton of artifacts and remnants during the month in between the two shows.

Facebook event for June 25th opening here.

Opening The Same Night at the IKG:
-GRREEDEN by Justin Evans & Wil Murray
-Shary Boyle
-Paulo Whitaker