Painting: Thick and Thin Post Number Five

A very nice photo essay of the exhibition "Painting: Thick and Thin" I curated for the Sled Island Festival at the Glenbow Museum has been posted at shotgun-review.ca
For further information on this exhibition, posted on this blog and on Kim Neudorf's Writing Shed In The Woods, click here.

Painting: Thick and Thin opening at the Glenbow Museum

We've got the paintings hung, the lights pointed at them, the chafing dishes counted and the booze ordered.
We're having an opening.
Painting: Thick and Thin at the Glenbow Museum July 25th to September 28th, 2008.
Featuring works by: Kim Neudorf, Miriam Bankey, Dave & Jenn, Ryan Sluggett, Kyle Beal, Chris Millar anbd Patrick Lundeen.
Curated by Wil Murray

Opening reception July 28th, 5:30pm to 8:30pm.
4th floor Gallery, Glenbow Museum
130 - 9 Avenue S.E.
Calgary, Alberta

Painting: Thick and Thin Post Number Four

Who can wait until tommorrow, when there's such good stuff in my inbox today(especially after the FFWD review)? The next round of questions, answered by Kim Neudorf(who made my father's favourite paintings in the exhibition). I'll add the other artists as they weigh in on the same questions.

WM: How do you feel about the implications of a regional style that this exhibition carries with it?
KN: My thought is that this exhibition includes artists who for one reason or another, happened to have lived in Calgary and have been found here, like traces. Other layers of meaning will happen when the exhibition is seen in person, adding to any expectations of “regional” and altering long-distance or drive-by experiences of the work.

WM: Does the naming of a community (or art team) serve anyone beyond the person who named it?
KN: A group name can be one way of creating a means to be more visible, for the group and for the namer, and for the public to access the work. I like temporary names that expire or become wizened, or have split-personalities.

WM: How do you feel about my position as outsider to the city I am speaking about?
KN: The circumstance that artists from Calgary, or Canadian artists in general, often no longer live and work where they’re from - this seems very normal and practical now. Though as someone who hasn't lived here for years, you may be able to see things that the Calgary-based artists can be too close to.

WM: Who benefits from an exhibition like this tracking a geographic community or style? How do the viewers benefit? The community beyond the artists and curator?
KN: If there is a tracking of a geographic community or style, I like the idea that “geographic” can also include mediated and metaphoric spaces, like the spaces in-between, described in that great book about Canadian photography – "Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography And The Canadian Imagination". Maybe the point can be about reminding viewers about what is already mediated, such as clichés and conventions about what is “geographic style”.

Ryan Sluggett (answering on the general themes presented in this round of questions):
I did recieve a specific grounding in painting from Chris Cran in
perceptual painting, and in perspective from Eric Cameron. So yes, I
have been formally trained in a regional tradition. I find that a lot
of artists assume that they are homeless these days, ignoring what is
going on in their own backyard by always thinking internationally. But
keeping yourself locked away in your studio without a context for
your work in presents other, perhaps more critical, difficulties. It's
a balancing act. I just hope that art in general will get a little
less international looking. It has a flattening effect aesthetically
and spiritually.
I wonder, is Morandi a regional artist?

*Photo by Ashley Bilodeau

Tasty FFWD Review of Painting: Thick & Thin

Erin Belanger has written a review of Painting: Thick & Thin for FFWD weekly in Calgary.
Read it here.

This leads into tomorrow's blog post exploring my position in relation to naming and tracking art-teams for this exhibition.

Thick and Thin Post Number Three: Where You From?

Expanding on the themes of the exhibition, beyond the very brief curatorial statement, I am sending out questions to all of the artists in "Painting: Thick and Thin" to answer at their leisure.
I'm beginning to think that the answers given will display more disparity than cohesion, and this delights me. Working on this exhibition has highlighted the thousands different paths that eight people, connected by medium, school and geographical ties can take through, to, or from the same city. Threads holding together this exhibition, as I stare harder, are more and more transluscent and move every time I take my eyes away. All the while the circle drawn around becomes more solid by exhibitions, articles and talk.
Painters, except in their paintings, wear their angled skin so all blows are glancing, like those radar-deflecting spy planes. I they stand just right, everything is deflected into the paintings on the wall.

1.Given all the ways an artist can be from a geographical location (born, attended school, lived, or lives), describe to me how you are “from” Calgary.

Kim Neudorf: I’m “from” Calgary in the sense that I’ve lived here for seven years, which is the longest I've lived in any city, so it has probably influenced my perception of "city" and "living and working" more than any other place I've known. As a kid from Saskatoon, “Calgary” used to be associated with Banff, relatives' weird livingrooms, pirate ships in shopping malls, and The Spoons video for 'Romantic Traffic' mixed with an idea that the C-train was another version of the gondola (you wait forever, pay a cryptic currency, and sit cramped with strangers for an anti-climactic time). Saskatoon was about extreme weather survival, independent coffee shops, cult films from the public library, the Mendel Art Gallery, a community orchestra (8 years of violin lessons), and painting lessons from Degan Lindner. “Calgary” has been about Artist-run Centres, film festivals, The Banff Centre, Cat Power (Sled Island 2007), the BFA years (and the U of C library), my first studio at Untitled Art Society, the art and writing community, and longer-lasting friendships. There’s also the “commute”, which has introduced all kinds of new contexts for public waiting/purgatory. Mainly though, Calgary has felt and acted like a starting place (or a waiting place), not a staying place.
Chris Millar: I am from Calgary as a result of moving here to attend art school. I stuck around after graduating because I liked the city and the people who live here.
Kyle Beal: Well I was born in Calgary, and am actually third generation Calgarian. I attended grade school up to college in the city as well. More abstractly where I grew up was on the eastern most edge of the 'Properties', which at the time was the end of the city, after that was just prairie and big sky. Which might be formative in its own way.
Ryan Sluggett: I was born, attended school and lived in Calgary

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

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

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

In Calgary On Research

Somehow Zak got me to do "stuntman" shots last night. It involved snorting salt and squeezing a lemon in my eye and then drinking a tequila shot. Needless to say, I barely tasted the tequila.
I'm here on business, researching the exhibition I am curating for the Sled Island Festival at the Glenbow Museum.
I am now represented in Western Canada by the Diane Farris Gallery in Vancouver. They've posted a very nice page that has a few new things, like the interview I did with Kim Neudorf.