Preview/Review at Diane Farris Gallery

Review/Preview

December 2, 2010 – January 29, 2011

Holiday Reception: Saturday, December 11, 1 – 4 pm
We welcome you to join us for a cup of mulled wine and festive treats.

DIANE FARRIS GALLERY - VANCOUVER

VIEW EXHIBITION

Diane Farris Gallery celebrates the last weeks of 2010 with Review/Preview, a group exhibit highlighting artwork from our favourite moments of the past year and providing a glimpse of what 2011 will bring.

2010 was a colourful year at Diane Farris Gallery. In Sara Genn’s first solo show with the gallery, she explored white as a starting point for a gradual shift to colour. Review/Preview includes Genn’s recent vibrant works that further demonstrate her mastery of colour and texture. In June it was All About Blue, a group exhibition showcasing artworks where the colour blue dominated, represented here by Angela Grossmann’s drawings.

It was also a year of firsts. Not only did Diane Farris Gallery launch its blog, it held its first juried show, Twitter/Art+Social Media. Through this exhibition, which included over 40 artists from across Canada and abroad, the gallery examined how social media is affecting the practice of artists. Review/Preview includes works by gallery artists Fiona Ackerman and Wil Murray who both actively use social media and were also featured in our September show Pushing the Edge.

Amy Alice Thompson’s collages on vintage library cards and Justin Ogilvie’s Velazquez-inspired mixed media painting represent the work of two guestartists. As the gallery handles an increasing number of artworks from the secondary market, a spectacular painting by David Bierk and an Andy Warhol print of Mick Jagger will be featured.

New works by Shannon Belkin and Nick Lepard take animals as their subjects. Belkin’s paintings are reminiscent of romantic historical dog portraits while Lepard’s charcoal renderings of elephants confirm his mastery of the medium in these playful drawings.

Paintings from Gary Cody and Elzbieta Krawecka’s upcoming solo shows provide a preview of the exciting exhibits the gallery will offer in the new year. In Cody’s new paintings, he moves from still life compositions towards a greater degree of abstraction while retaining the photorealist style for which he is known. Krawecka’s new series of landscapes, Coming Home, brings together views of the West Coast and Ontario.

We welcome you to join us on Saturday, December 11th afternoon for a cup of mulled wine and festive treats.

*Please note: Diane Farris Gallery will close for the Christmas holidays.

Closed December. 24, 2010 to January 4, 2011.

Diane Farris Gallery, 1590 West 7th Avenue, Vancouver

Contact: Stacey White art@dianefarrisgallery.com

Tel: (604) 737-2629 Fax: (604) 737-2675

This exhibition can be viewed on-line at: www.dianefarrisgallery.com

Image: Wil Murray: My Vagina Has A First Name It's -N-, 2010. Acrylic on Photo. 6" X 8"

Pushing The Edge at Diane Farris Gallery, Vancouver

I will edging all over Western Canada this fall, or at least my work will be. In this show will be a pretty interesting collection of my work alongside Nick Lepard and Fiona Ackerman. Two older works that showed in Vancouver in 2006, one piece from 2008 and a series of 6 small paintings on photo from last month called "My Vagina Has A First Name It's J-O-A-N-N-A". See and read more here.

Pushing The Edge
September 2nd to October 2nd, 2010
Opening: September 9th, 6pm to 8pm

Diane Farris Gallery
1590 W. 7th Avenue
Vancouver, Canada
(604) 737-2629
art@dianefarrisgallery.com

Image: My Vagina Has A First Name It's -N-, 2010. 6" X 8" Acrylic on Photo Collage.
Courtesy Diane Farris Gallery. Photo by Joe Dilworth

"Silver" exhibition Opening at Diane Farris Tonight. New collages from Berlin.

Silver December 3 – 23 Artist Reception: December 3, 2009, 6 – 8 pm Diane Farris Gallery ends 2009 with a lot to celebrate. In its 25th Anniversary year, the gallery has the same energy that first made it an exciting new art venue in 1984. The gallery continues the tradition of introducing new artists to Vancouver while featuring the best of those who have been part of its cast since the beginning. Silver presents both large and small-scale artworks by gallery artists Shannon Belkin, Dale Chihuly, Judith Currelly, John Dennison, Angela Grossmann, Kathryn Jacobi, Nick Lepard and Wil Murray. Silver also welcomes two new sculptors to the gallery: internationally-acclaimed New York artist Ilan Averbuch and Seattle-based sculptor Joseph McDonnell. Ilan Averbuch is well-known for massive outdoor pieces composed of granite, stone, lead and wood beams. They are truly fantastic in nature and in scope. Two drawings in this exhibit demonstrate his mastery of spatial balance as well as his playful, ironic nature. In the courtyard, two major works by Seattle artist Joseph McDonnell introduce his dramatic, almost Cubist sculptures of metal and granite. Their pit-marked, weathered surfaces and teetering forms capture a sense of ancient, primordial symbols and lost civilizations. New paintings by Shannon Belkin, Judith Currelly and Angela Grossmann are featured along with works on paper by Wil Murray, Nick Lepard, Kathryn Jacobi and John Dennison. Murray’s popular collages juxtapose images from National Geographic magazines with photographs of his paintings in maquette-like compositions. Kathryn Jacobi shows prints from her Baby series, while Nick Lepard presents charcoal drawings done as studies for his large oil portraits. Currelly’s large-scale work on wood panel depicts a polar bear reigning over a frozen landscape. At the feminine extreme of the exhibit, Vancouver painter Shannon Belkin has created a lovely soft study of dogs on a plush pink pillow.

I kept this under an ill-fitting hat

In honour of my show opening tonight, I'll reveal the daytime's Clark Kent to the nightime's Superman. I was a VICE Magazine "Do". Somehow this just makes me daydream of Snagglepuss and remember that Nu Pogodi is my only style hero left. Gravy Boat Bandit indeed.

This Haunted House Is Not A Haunted Home

This Haunted House Is Not A Haunted Home:

New Works by Wil Murray

April 23rd to May 9th, 2009
Opening Reception April 23rd 6pm-8pm

Diane Farris Gallery
1590 W. 7th Avenue
Vancouver, Canada
V6J 1S2
tel (604) 737-2629

Exhibition Preview

Exhibition Statement:

“Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.' I must admit that this last word is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am”

From Nadja, Andre Breton

I am a haunted house painter.
One night I heard from my writer friend a description of our bodies as houses, haunted by ghosts. This image stuck with me, and became parasite or symbiont to my memory of Breton’s lines. So I sang "There's A Ghost In My House" by R. Dean Taylor over and over and thought: The studio door disembodies. It invites visitation.
My own seduction by photography haunts me. Photographs of my paintings linger in me like a portrait of a lover or of myself. I am captivated by them, gazing as if I could see around or past the subject, into its hands or mouth, or into shadows. Or maybe just a little further up its leg, down its blouse. Into a privately known place that the photographic portrait will not show. What was past my eyes. What turned me on and sent me to the photo in the first place.
For this exhibition I’ve made dripping, tumescent, over-stimulating paintings that at first horrify away from themselves, toward the safe seduction of their portrait. But this printed flatness bores nearly as quickly as it is consumed, and once desirous of girth, weight and threat, one is drawn back to the painting in a lather - calm and collected after privately completing a seduction/consumption narrative, but quietly haunted by a relationship to the pornographic likeness - to be horrified, delighted and titillated again.
The paintings are named for anonymous ghosts. Titles function as clues to the forms taken by my spectral companions that just hung there as I paced from painting to portrait and back again.
I wish for paintings that send a viewer to flat portraits to swoon as I had, and to wish, as I did, for a return to the discomfort of their own grinning movements with the very real painting. I wish to share my own queezy seduction by ghosts by becoming myself a spectral seducer to others.
I wish to haunt and be haunted and wish again to haunt back.

* image shown: "February Is An Annual Race To The Bottom Aroun Here" Mixed Media Collage, 7" X 12", 2009(click image for larger version)

I'm only six years older than the gallery that represents me

I'll have some work in the group exhibition going up at the Diane Farris Gallery next week. In celebration of their 25th anniversary, the list of other artists is pretty awesome. Here's the copy:

Celebrating 25!
December 4, 2008– January 24, 2009
Opening reception: December 6, 2008, 2 - 4pm

Celebrating 25! is a milestone exhibition launching Diane Farris Gallery’s 25th year. It provides viewers with a survey of the gallery’s artists since its inception, starting with new works by Alan Wood, Angela Grossmann, Attila Richard Lukacs, Graham Gillmore, and Vicky Marshall, including new pieces by Michael Dennis, Judith Currelly, and Gu Xiong, and presenting paintings by rising artists Jesse Garbe, Wil Murray and Nick Lepard.

From its early Gastown days, exhibitions that featured such prominent Canadian artists as Gershon Iskowitz, Michael Snow, David Bierk and Jeffrey Spalding, were alternated with those by emerging artists – many of whom were still students at Emily Carr – such as the eight young artists who made up the landmark Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition by Scott Watson: “The Young Romantics” and the collective “Futura Bold”--- Grossmann, Gillmore, Lukacs and Root.

Diane Farris Gallery continues to play an important role in the Vancouver arts scene and internationally. The gallery wishes to thank all of the artists who have exhibited with them over the years and contributed to making Diane Farris Gallery a vibrant part of Canada’s visual arts community.

"Portrayal" Group Exhibiton at Diane Farris Gallery

I remember when I lived in Vancouver and how far the galleries of South Granville seemed from Pender Street.
I'm very excited to announce that my work will be featured in a group show coming up in Vancouver in August. This will be my first show with the Diane Farris Gallery, with more to come in the new year.
Check it out:

Portrayal
August 7 – August 30, 2008

Gallery and guest artists

Diane Farris Gallery is pleased to present Portrayal, an exhibition of varied portraits by gallery and guest artists. Portraiture has held a prominent position in western art and society throughout the ages and although creative and technological advances have altered the traditional portrait, the genre retains its prevalence and high regard. The exhibition at Diane Farris Gallery explores the portrait’s diversification by showcasing contemporary works in a variety of media such as oil, ink, photography, collage and cedar.

Diane Farris Gallery 1590 W. 7th Avenue Vancouver, Canada V6J 1S2 tel (604) 737-2629 fax (604) 737-2675