GRREEDEN Installation Photo

Photo by Ashley Bilodeau

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

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.

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

Another Stop for Painting: Thick and Thin

The group exhibition I am curating this summer at the Glenbow has been offered a four day home at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery during the Sled Island Festival proper.
And we've accepted. June 25th to 28th. An ever so slightly different version of the show, with free admission and more rockstars.
Opening the same time as mine and Justin Evans' exhibition GRREEDEN - for which i saw the proofs of the lenticular prints Justin is working on last night and nearly lost my mind - it's going to be like the rock 'n' roll circus stop before the three month holiday on the fourth floor gallery at the Glenbow.
Look to my blogfor a lot of supporting documents to the exhibition in the month between the two stops, we'll have interviews, expanded essays and furor.....lots of furor, I hope.

Unfortunately, the rumors of Stampede Wrestling holding a few matches at the opening are untrue.

Sled Isand 2008 Press Conference

The cat's out of the bag.
I will be presenting two shows at the Sled Arts Festival.
The first being and exhibition of my paintings with lenticular prints by Justin Evans. The opening for this show will include a performance by Gavin Sheehan, and a screening of a film by Mark Loeser.
The second being an exhibition of current and former Calgarian painters I am curating. Featuring the work of Miriam Bankey, Chris Millar, Dave & Jenn, Ryan Sluggett, Kyle Beal, Kim Neudorf and Patrick Lundeen.
More detail on both soon.

Originally posted by Aubrey at CJSW.com:

"It looks like another banner year for Sled Island, one of western Canada's brightest music festivals. SI '08 will be taking place between June 25th-28th at some of Calgary's finest venues.

At a press conference this afternoon, festival director Zak Pashak, guest music curator Scott Kannberg (Preston School of Industry, Pavement) and other festival participants revealed a glimpse at the initial line-up. It's going to be a white hot June, gang.

Confirmed acts include seminal British punk rockers Wire, Jonathan Richman, The Gutter Twins, Of Montreal, American Music Club, Jose Gonzales, RZA (Bobby Digital), Mogwai, Scott Kannberg a.k.a. Spiral Stairs, No Age, Deerhunter, The Dodos, Drive By Truckers, Extra Golden, Miss Murgatroid & Petra Hayden, Woodpigeon, Beans, Hot Little Rocket, The Broken West, Cave Singers, Wet Secrets, Pride Tiger, Portastatic, Headlights, Ramblin' Ambassadors, Bison, Mother Mother, Elizabeth, Modern Man, Luther Wright, The Whitsundays, Elliott Brood and Carolyn Mark.

The full line-up will be announced on May 1st.

Sled Island's 2008 visual art curator, Wayne Baerwaldt (IKG) spoke about a few exciting exhibitions which will be unveiled to Calgarians during the festival. Works include Peaches' Pit (an installation featuring a walk-through cave lined with hundreds of items that have been thrown to the singer onstage), a series by Wil Murray (featuring works by former Calgarians) and a narrative but abstract series by surf aficionado and Brazilian artist Paulo Whitaker.

Early bird festival passes will soon be available at SledIsland.com. Stay tuned to CJSW for insider information on all things Sled Island 2008!"

Photo:Sled Island Press Conference. Beth Gignac (City of Calgary), Zak Pashak (Sled Island Festival Director), Wayne Baerwaldt (Sled Island 2008 Visual Art Curator), Scott Kannberg (Sled Island 2008 Music Curator, Preston School of Industry, Pavement).