GRREEDEN Installation Photo

Photo by Ashley Bilodeau

Painting: Thick and Thin Post Number Two

Images from the first installment of "Painting: Thick and Thin", the group show I curated for the Sled Island Festival in Calgary, at the IKG:







The exhibition features the work of Kim Neudorf, Miriam Bankey, Kyle Beal, Dave & Jenn, Ryan Sluggett, Chris Millar, and Patrick Lundeen. It will be re-opening for a longer show at the Glenbow Museum Jluy 25th to September 28th.
Photos by me and Kim Neudorf

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

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

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.