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PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS
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May 2010 |
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Barry Underwood, Parade Field, 2009, 30 x 40 inches signed and number #2 /10, inkjet with archival Ultra Chrome inks. |
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Summer nightsThree years of artist residencyBarry Underwood May 13 – June 12 With a profound respect for nature, Underwood does not disrupt or rearrange nature, but rather calls attention to the wonderment of nature by providing a more heightened or theatrical view of nocturnal, landscapes through the use of a large-format film camera. Photography allows Underwood to present extraordinary settings that are non-existent within nature. Creating light levels that do not naturally exist in remote areas, Underwood utilizes aperture and exposure to allow the viewer to partake in what the naked eye could not normally see. By morning all traces of Underwood’s enchanted light installations have dispersed like a dream, all that remains as evidence is his spectacular photographs. Barry Underwood received two Bachelor of Arts degrees from Indiana University Northwest, in Theatre and in Photography. He earned his Masters in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Barry has recently been an artist in residence at the Banff Center for the Arts, Banff, Alberta, Canada; I-Park in East Haddam, Connecticut, and the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California . His work has been presented in several international art fairs including Annual International Los Angeles Photographic Art Exposition, NEXT 2009, NADA in Miami, and Scope in Basel, Switzerland. Barry's work was recently chosen for a Spotlight award from Color Magazine and the London Times Spectrum magazine. Barry Underwood is an instructor and Head of the photographic department at the Cleveland Institute of Art. His work is included in corporate and private collections across North America and Europe.
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April 2010 |
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The Fifth World: An IntroductionMin Hyung April 1 – April 28
– Gary Micheal Dalt –art critic for the Globe and Mail, December 2008 Skew Gallery is pleased to present it’s first solo exhibition of gallery artist Min Hyung’s paintings and sculpture. This new work depicts the central characters of an imagined alternate universe filled with parallel human emotions of love, aggression, joy and passivity, and the collective life experiences that generate such feelings. Responding to the craze of the inter-active video game/world such as Second Life, Hyung invites the viewer into her imagination where paintings and sculpture serve as both artifact and gateways. Hyung’s work depicts a captivating journey into her fantastical Fifth World filled with unearthly primates of mythological proportions, visually describing their sexual energy, intense competition and the events that transpire as they navigate the depths of Hyung’s thoughts. Meanwhile Hyung’s work explores notions of obsession, escapism universality and human de-evolution.
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March 2010 |
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Perception and Endurance
Matt Crookshank received his BFA from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 2000 attended Centennial College where he pursued digital animation. His work has been featured in several publications, including The National Post, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, and The Calgary Herald. In 2008 he was included in Carte Blanche Vol.2: Painting, published by the Magenta Foundation. His inclusion in the thematic residency Cosmic Rays at the Banff Centre lead to the formation and his participation in the collective Unconstrained Growth into the Void. In 2009 the Museo de la Ciudad, Querétaro, México debuted the Razor Beam Series as part of the group exhibition comprised of both the individual artists work and collaborative work of the collective. Crookshank lives and maintains his studio practice in Toronto, Canada. |
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AMALIE ATKINSScenes From a Secret World In Conjunction with Exposure: 2010
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Staged
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Skew Gallery is pleased to present in conjunction with the One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo a thematic exhibition of four artist’s painting and photography all informed by various elements of the theatrical experience. Theatre plays with our belief system, allowing us to experience the illusion before us; and through this ephemeral suspension of reality, we as the audience, are afforded the opportunity to alter our perceptions of reality. Collectively this exhibition, explores notions of transformation, illusion, the gathering of people and the architectural apparatus employed to suspend our reality in the flesh.
ADRIAN FISH
The large format photographs selected for this exhibition examines the venue of the theatre as a 21st century manifestation of Roman Empire-era structures. Fish directs the viewers gaze towards the spectator seating area from the vantage point of centre stage. Each respective environment is devoid of viewers, suggesting the pregnant moment before an anticipated spectacle. The weighty absence of an audience altogether nevertheless insinuates their presence. This inversion of the traditional role of actor-as-exhibitionist, and audience as voyeur constructs a quiet tension within the image. The lack of people within each photograph invites the viewer to contemplate the architectural aspects of the theatre environment, as well as the nature of entertainment in the present paradigm.
TIA HALLIDAY The photographic work of Tia Halliday, explores the nature of costume to enable the transformation of oneself into a characters. Drawing from her own theatrical background in dance Halliday strikes exaggerated poses that utilize scale and cropping to suggest the intimate or secret moments of acting out fantasies of an alter-ego in front of a mirror. Employing the creative process, Halliday is able to combine her interest in figurative drawing by cloaking herself in isolated body-part masks created from her own cut-out drawings and watercolours on paper. In essence, Halliday renovates her own image into something more larger than life, and explores a personal suspension of disbelief through disguise and movement meanwhile reflecting it back onto the viewer through the use of photography.
BARRY UNDERWOOD
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Patrick LundeenSin Will Find You OutExhibited November 19 - December 19, 2009 |
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Skew Gallery presents Sin Will Find You Out, its first solo exhibition by artist Patrick Lundeen. Through mediums of film and large-scale painting, Lundeen has developed a body of art comprised of strong symbols of religion and pop culture. With an obsessive attention to detail and an impulse towards colour, line and scale, the painted works present reinterpretations of the well-known mask of comic superhero Spiderman and the heavy laden symbolism of the cross. It is Lundeen’s ongoing interest in contradictions that moves his paintings away from the traditional format of rectangular paintings on canvas over stretcher bar – in favor of grommets and custom cut-out canvases that serve to sever the association of painting as a window into the artist’s viewpoint, and place it squarely as an object for which to contend with. Although these two symbols have associations of “good” Ludeen's formal treatment serves to suggest to the viewer a reconsideration of the predetermined associations of superheroes and religious iconography as an entity that can also incite fear and anxiety.
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BILL RODGERSStudies in CitizenshipExhibited October 15 - November 14, 2009 |
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Skew Gallery presents Studies in Citizenship by Bill Rodgers. This exhibition of new work consists of paintings with two mixed media companion series, and an installation of found objects. Rodgers investigates aspects of regional social history through the depiction of early 20th century books. Collectively these paintings of books propose a pattern for citizenship. They speak to the regions first settlers and their self-reliant way of living. A descendant from Manitoba settlers, Rodgers has a depth of interest in Canadian social history. Over the last five years, Rodgers has been collecting books published between 1900-1930's from local flea markets. These books were often commissioned by companies such as CP Rail and the Saskatchewan Co-operative. With titles such as Harvesting Your Milk Crop and Farm and Home Mechanics Guide, they were intended as a delivery system of information assuring better chances of survival for new Canadians in rural parts of the country. Rodger's interest lies in the book as a prime object and the relevancy of the information to people during different points of time. The book paintings are a 1:1 scale and are painted from direct observation , and set against a painterly white background intentionally revealing the artists brushwork. For selected book paintings , an echo exists; a smaller version of the painting placed behind tempered glass which serves to obscure or degrade the information. Also included, is a series of preliminary drawings that inform the painting process.
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KIM DORLAND |
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In conjunction with its 5th anniversary, Skew Gallery presented its third solo exhibition for artist Kim Dorland. The new paintings in Canadian Content explore as subject the tradition and experience of landscape painting in Canada. With veneration for Canada's hero-artist, Tom Thomson, Dorland explores imagery of the artist’s life and paintings, taking his cues from Thomson’s painting expeditions into Canada’s back-country. The paintings for Canadian Content were created exclusively during Dorland’s guest artist residency at the historic Emma Lake Artist Workshops in Northern Saskatchewan where he endured heavy rain and a constant barrage of mosquitoes to obtain the experience of Canadian plein air painting. In contrast to a studio practice based in the heart of an urban environment, the tranquil and remote surroundings of Emma Lake provided Dorland with a fertile ground to reduce the excess and communicate through visual language in a more minimal yet signature way. Dorland’s Emma Lake paintings are indeed impacted by this environment where simple words communicate volumes. Experiencing plein air painting for the first time, Dorland delved deeper into colour-field relationships, recounting an abundance of visual information by distilling it to powerful gestures and blocks of colour. What Norman Rockwell is to American national identity, Tom Thomson is to Canada’s - a poster child for all that is nature in Canada. Dorland pays homage to Tom Thomson’s renowned early 20th century sojourns, as a platform from which to explore the tradition of Canadian landscape painting and it’s connection to an idyllic notion of being one with nature. A more accurate present-day identity is a country comprised of urbanites, celebrating our weekend communes with nature in “cappuccino-cabins” and trodden woodland paths; the influence of our manufactured society ever-present. Dorland’s use of paint and colour in his contemporary landscape paintings besmirch our perception that our society somehow shares a commonality with the iconic artist who was truly exposed to nature when he painted. By contrast Dorland’s brazen colour palette reflects a hinterland where man co-exists with speed boats, graffiti, sea-doos, R.V.s and dirt bikes. With reverence, Dorland engages the mystery around the iconic artist - depicting his last canoe expedition from which he never returned, recreating his portrait, and reinterpreting the 1915 painting called Tamarak. In a spectacular eruption of up-to-the-minute colour and texture with brushstrokes that are precise and structured, yet reactive Dorland creates a unique, contradictory painting style: bold and frenetic, yet simultaneously in control. View artist's page here
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MERGE 2 |
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Skew Gallery presented the second installment of MERGE, a group exhibition. MERGE 2 features the work of Tia Halliday, Kim Neudorf and Erik Olson, three young Canadian artists who represent the diversity of contemporary Canadian art. These artists now working and exhibiting internationally share a common local thread beginning in Calgary and will merge with each other in exhibition. These three innovative artists actively receive critical attention for their work dealing with the figure in highly innovative ways. Having studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design, Ontario College of Art and Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tia Halliday recently completed her MFA at Concordia University in Montreal. Halliday's drawings illustrate the many complexities of the female and it's relationship to technology and the everyday. Halliday allows humour and irony to play within each scene illustrating the characters desires for intimacy and detachment; conditions of the contemporary human condition. Halliday's characters created of collaged drawing and cast shadows appear at once disparate and yet full of expectation and idealization. Visual references echo that of cluttered lifestyles, stacking image on top of image amassing imagery to create each figural form. Kim Neudorf is an artist, writer, and researcher interested in the phenomena and pictorial spaces of images, film, and that which inflects and reanimates those spaces. She received her BFA in Painting from the Alberta College of Art & Design in 2005 Kim Neudorf is the local component of MERGE. Neudorf is a recent exhibitor with Skew Gallery at the internationally renowned art fair SCOPE Basel in Basel, Switzerland. Neudorf' utilizes digital media, photography and film stills focusing on close-up views evoking heighten emotions in a moment in film. This close-up view can play a role of provocation through their relation to physical spaces. The narrative role of these heightened emotional states of anxiety and dread are of particular complexity and are subject to Neudorf's additive and subtractive methods of application to the painted surface. She explores the individualized gaze and the physical spaces it can generate with the viewer. Erik Olson's recent paintings are fractured by precisely articulated brushstrokes, each a coherent component of a definitively figurative whole. Each work is expressive in movement and rhythm inspired by the resurfacing idealism in contemporary youth culture. Olson's portrayal of each of his subject's divulges the structure of expression by breaking down of the figure into the forms that articulate its significance. Even Olson's use of colour is defined by his environment; pronounced,, and an element of the paintings structure.
View Tia Halliday's Artist Page |
ALEXANDER CALDWELL |
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IMPERVIOUS: Installation view |
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Skew Gallery presented its first solo exhibition for contemporary artist Alexander Caldwell. Impervious is an exhibition of six new wall-mounted and free standing sculptures. With an ongoing interest in notions of permanency and the ephemeral, Caldwell has previously created sculptures depicting temporal moments in nature frozen in time such as clouds, galaxies and fire created from enduring materials such as stainless steel, lead and rock. In Impervious Caldwell continues to explore enduring materials such as stainless steel, but redirects his focus from the organic temporal to forms that are devoid of nature's organic irregularities, the uniformity and flawlessness of this new work speaks to a built environment and desire for perfection, only associated with humankind. With materials as a starting point, Caldwell creates juxtapositions by taking his formalist sculpture and introducing another element with the use of colour. Utilizing state of the art industrial paint technology designed to withstand chemical spills, extreme temperatures and intense psi on oil riggs, Caldwell creates a "skin" of paint which encases his metal sculptures. Caldwell employs color as an element equally important to form, by selecting a colour palette which is associated with impulsive and directive situations in society such as temporary advertising, way-finding signage and construction site safety markers. These trigger colours reintroduce Caldwell's exploration into associations of polar opposites co-existing as one object; that which is perceived as permanent and temporary.
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Diana Thorneycrofta group of seven awkward momentsExhibited February 19 - March 28, 2009 |
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Known for making artwork that hovers on the edge of public acceptance, Thorneycroft has pursued subject matter that often challenges her viewing audience. In her new series "Group of Seven Awkward Moments" Thorneycroft explores the relationship of the Canadian geographical landscape and how it relates to Canadian's national identity. Particular to this series Thorneycroft utilizes reproduction prints of paintings from the iconic collective The Group Of Seven. It is through the use of these images of pristine landscapes from the early 1920-30's that have come to be the uplifting symbols of the Canadian land, combined with the diorama's of collected dolls depicting scenes of isolation, disaster, and ill-fated choices. It is Thorneycroft's combination of the traditional landscape painting paired with black humor that conjures a more topical landscape that is fraught with anxiety and contradictions the world over.
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Blake Seniniwe are all in the same airExhibited January 8 - February 14, 2009 |
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We are all in the same air: installation view |
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Skew Gallery presented its third solo exhibition of new work by Blake Senini. Through out his career, sculptor Blake Senini has continuously expressed his interest in duality. From the fundamental notions of a relationship between an object and positive / negative shape, to the multi-faceted interpretations of form, subject or even language, Senini has figuratively speaking, flipped over the coin to reveal both sides. We Are All in the Same Air is a collection of five new sculptures that expands on his interest in the relationships the sculpture takes on, within the physical space it occupies, by creating a dynamic within the sculpture between forms. Senini's use of two components further brackets the viewer to contemplate both positive shape of the object and heightens the perception of the negative space between and surrounding. Senini's sculptures are like a tip of a wedge and behind the line is an expanse of articulated ideas and influences. The object itself can infer a physical presence such as a person, gathering, landmass or structure, or it may infer the presence which is not tangible, such as religion, superstition, mythology or even paranormal activity. In this most recent series the peaceful demonstrations of Tibetan monks, the shape of praying hands and exploration of Buddhist mythology are translated into physical form. With a pursuit to make real objects of things that are not tangible yet are real beliefs none the less, Senini sourced internet imagery, further exploring notions of what is real and what is artifice. |
TERRANCE HOULE85.11.16November 20 - December 19, 2008 |
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Pray For Me. 2008. By Terrance Houle |
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Skew Gallery the first solo exhibition of artist Terrance Houle. Houle's new prints, drawings and photographic works explore the relationship of scale and setting to develop thematic conversations. Inspired by location and found objects, Houle stages scenes with figurines creating a cast of characters acting out associations of object and their surroundings. Terrance Houle is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary media artist and a member of the Blood Tribe. In 2003 he graduated with a BFA in Fibre from the Alberta College of Art and Design. He has developed an extensive portfolio that ranges from painting to drawing, video/film, mixed media, New Media, performance and installation
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Dave & JennIN WHICH THEY FIND THEMSELVES BETWEEN HERE AND THERESEPTEMBER 4 - OCTOBTER 11, 2008 |
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"We Told Adam We'd Get Over This ". Detail. 2007. By: Dave & Jenn |
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Skew Gallery was pleased to present the debut solo exhibition of five new artworks by collaborative artists David Foy and Jennifer Saleik. Working in tandem to develop highly distinctive paintings that depict imaginary places where landscape is the protagonist and their alter egos Dave and Jenn appear as shadowy characters navigating a world which is simultaneously familiar and foreign. Drawing from a plethora of visual imagery from Canada's landscape and the pervasive onslaught of man-made imagery that invades our daily lives, these two artists set out through the tradition of landscape painting to translate the sights of the real world through the memories of two separate individuals into two dimensional and three dimensional painted objects. In turn they filter these images through visual languages learned from many sources, to create something else, their inner landscapes. These paintings exist as artifacts of a world which is neither completely real nor imagined. Fascinated by contradictions, Dave and Jenn regularly collide ideas into each other, forsaking absolutes in favour of the uncharted areas in between. This newest work expounds on their ever present interest in subverting traditional notions of painting by blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture even farther than previous work. In this exhibition paintings leap six feet of the wall, are 2 sided paintings which operate as three dimensional objects allowing light to travel through them, and painting as installation. With their work Dave and Jenn situate themselves somewhere in the grey area that exists between historical documentation and personal mythology; adornment and nature; and try to find a place for painting somewhere in between it's traditional position on the wall and the point were sculpture takes over. David Foy and Jennifer Saleik both received their Fine Art Diplomas in 2003 from Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton. In 2004 they formed as the team Dave and Jenn. Together they went on to earn their BFAs with distinction from the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Alberta, in 2006. That same year their work was selected as a semi-finalist for the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. In 2007 they attended the Imaginary Places Residency at the Banff Centre. Their work is also currently on display in the exhibition Thick and Thin at the Glenbow Museum, curated by Will Murry. They live and work in Calgary. Canada. |
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kristine moran- unraveling under conditions of uncertaintyJUNE 19 - JULY 31, 2008 |
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Kristine Moran's currant work references literature, film and mythology to help form the main narrative that runs through out her painting. Moran creates anthropomorphic characters comprised of fragments of shelter, transportation and animal parts, which she situates within a contentious site of struggle. Through paint, Moran reveals her fascination with human nature's innate region, from which comes the ability to transform oneself into something seemingly incomprehensible or violent as a need for survival. Responding to her investigation of the moment where one is pushed to the point of extreme reaction to ones own environment, Moran's paintings visibly express this struggle through communicative and the seemingly urgent quality of the painted gesture, manifested as an additive and subtractive process which is reflective of an internalized struggle while painting. Moran establishes calmness through the depicted large empty architectural environments, which recall a familiarity of public places such as airports, office towers lobbies and institutes that by design leads society to respond in an appropriate manner. Within these environments Moran unleashes a crescendo of energy by implanting her struggling creatures of teeth, fur, skin, part moving object, part shelter which exist as an isolated architectural element amongst the vacuous and unforgiving environments.
Kristine Moran graduated with a BFA from Ontario College of Art & Design in 2004 and will have completed her MFA degree at New York City's Hunter College this spring, culminating with a thesis show on May 2008. Moran has had two previous solo shows at the Angel Gallery in Toronto which both received wide critical acclaim. She has received numerous awards including the RBC New Painting Competition Honorable Mention Award, the Governor General's Academic Medal, the OCAD Drawing and Painting Medalist Scholarship and the 401 Richmond Career-Launcher Prize. Kristine has also recently been nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and has just been awarded the prestigious Mary Walsh Sharpe Foundation studio prize for the upcoming year. Her work is included in private and public collections across Canada and in the US.
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Matt Crookshank - cross-eyed |
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'Crookshank is like a benign Dr. Frankenstein, piecing together paintings from many ideas, creating scarred abstractions that are monstrous in their beauty.' -Travis Reynolds, The Calgary Harold - Swerve Magazine, May 2nd, 2006 'Crookshank's flamboyant, happy disasters demonstrate by contrast how bland and predictable most contemporary abstraction has become.' -RM Vaughan, The National Post, March 5th, 2005 ' Crookshank pokes conformity with a stick; he makes art that your Grandmother would hate.' - Bart Habermiller - artist Cross-eyed is a multi media exhibition of painting, animation and digital paintings by Toronto artist Matt Crookshank. In his second solo exhibition at Skew Gallery, Crookshank explores notions of duality. Operating from a place where he has visually conflicted points of view from being cross-eyed, Crookshank's art is a platform spawned by his artistic pursuit of the fine line between order and chaos. His approach to art-making is a metaphor for the world we live in, easily described as on the verge of synchronization or meltdown. In life and art Crookshank is liberated from conformity; he skillfully and fluidly moves between painting and new media. Less motivated by making beautiful paintings, Crookshank sets out with verve for the unexpected. Forgoing the typical approach of working within a controlled environment, Crookshank creates fertile conditions to provide for spontaneous reactions whether it is through oil and varnish or digital paintings responding to imputed information. Known for his frenetic paintings, which often incorporate the depiction of digitally produced mark-making, Crookshank forges on in his pursuit of dissipating the division between painting and digital technology. The results are three interconnected series of work that speak to contrary perspectives coexisting within one artwork; controlled yet organic, brazen and beautiful, digital and painted. Matt Crookshank has been an integral part of the vibrant visual arts community in Toronto, working as an exhibiting artist, gallery director, and curator. His work has been featured in several publications, including The National Post, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star. Receiving his BFA from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 2000 attended Centennial College where he pursued digital animation; his art practice includes painting, video and digital media work. Matt Crookshank will be featured in the soon to be published, vetted book of up and coming artists in painting, called Carte Blanche 2. He has exhibited across Canada and New York, Miami and Los Angeles.
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Jakub dolejs - in the headlights |
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In the Headlights presents a series of photographs about representation, context and reflection. In traditional photography, the strict division between the photographer, the camera, and the subject is a classic structure adhered to by many photographers. What happens behind the lens rarely becomes the image itself. In this series of photographs, Dolejs has deliberately made the viewer aware of this division; in effect the behind-the-lens paraphernalia becomes the narrative. Dolejs embraces objects as his subject, offering a narrative of the inanimate. His sets are complete only when the light is turned on itself in the reflective view of the camera. Scenes appear at first to be waiting in transition, as if the persons of subjective importance are about to appear. It is after the viewers accept their own assumptions that the story of the image becomes known. The objects, in a state on inaction communicate through materiality. Dolejs' placement and intention are linked through his object pairings of chairs, lights, mirrors and photographic set materials. The object qualities become background and subtext to absurd spaces of misunderstanding, open and yet inaccessible. Jakub Dolejs received his MFA in 1998 from the Academy of Art & Architecture in Prague. Dolejs has exhibited in the renowned collection of Montreal's Mois de la Photo in 2005. In the Spring 2006, Dolejs completed an artist residency in Paris funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. His work is included in a major survey of staged photography at the National Gallery of Canada entitled Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre. Jakub Dolejs lives and works in Toronto.
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TRACES- with guest artists: Tinka bechert, marcia harris & ehryn torrel |
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Installation View: Ehryn Torrel, Skew Gallery. |
A thematic group exhibition by guest artists Tinka Bechert, Marcia Harris and Ehryn Torrell exploring recent issues intrinsic to the co-habitation of two formidable forces; man and nature, The collected works of Tinka Bechert, Marcia Harris and Ehryn Torrell speak to an emerging visual dialog that reflects a society which grapples with the convergence of humanity and the natural environment. Historically Landscape painting, particularly Canadian, depicted the boundless; the insignificance of man in the face of the awesome abundance of nature. Yet in recent times a new awareness of nature's finite offerings, combined with mans insatiable consumption of natural resources and desire to be physically immersed within the landscape gives way to a new movement of landscape painting which depicts the fragility of nature when faced by the significance of man. Tinka Bechert's deconstructed landscapes evoke the disenchanted. Humanity's relationship with Nature is reduced to recreational activities and encounters at rest stops with picturesque viewing platforms. The natural landscape is utilized to suites our needs, creature comforts and lifestyles. Bechert's narrative and geographical paintings are telling of a collective fragmented view of our interaction with the landscape. In this context Becherts mapped frameworks of geographical locations suggest man's heavily trodden connection to the natural world. Marcia Harris evokes a deep sense of empathy for the landscape as it transforms. Visions of a seemingly fall-like landscape reveal rapid deterioration due to threats of human encroachment and unnaturally increased population of eco-dependant species such as the Pine Beetle. With the effects climate change has generated, Harris' imagery inquires as to the future of our environment, and thus, ourselves. Ehryn Torrell's poignant silk-screen prints depict the hollow structures of construction sites. Finding moments within the early stages of construction sites Torrell invites a free association, which in the case of the selected work for Traces, resonate situations found within nature. Torrell's bare skeletal formations recall images of landscapes filled with trees and water. Through architecture can be seen man's inherent desire to emulating nature, fabricating a relationship with nature that we can accept and understand. Tinka Bechert is a contemporary painter who lives and works in Silgo, Ireland. Raised in Berlin, Germany, Bechert moved to Ireland in 1996. Bechert received her BFA with First Class Honours from the Institute of Technology in Silgo, Ireland in 2003. In 2004 she was nominated for the Syrlin Art Prize in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2006 she was awarded an Arts Council Residency to the Leighton Artists' Colony at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Born in Gaspe, Quebec, Marcia Harris graduated with distinction from the Fine Arts program(with a major in painting and minor in drawing, screen-printing and photography) at the Okanogan University College, Kelowna, BC in 2004. Now based inn Calgary, Harris has shown extensively across Western Canada. Her work can be found in private collections across Canada, the United States, England and the Grand Cayman Islands. Born in Newmarket Ontario (1977), Ehryn Torrell is an artist whose work explores the visual and psychological impact of the built environment. In 2006, she was awarded the Joseph Plaskett Foundation Award for painting. She holds an Honours B.A. in Visual Art and English from McMaster University (2000) and an MFA from NSCAD University (2006). She currently lives and works in Guelph, Ontario. |
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Laura Millard- glide |
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Laura Millard's large-format colour photographs are a continued exploration melding photography and mixed media painting. Millard takes her inspiration from the delicate and minute details of air and light as they play across the surface of frozen lakes, rivers and streams found in Banff National Park. Her bird's eye perspective of the effervescent nature of oxygen bubbles captured as water turns to ice invites the viewer to focus in on the beauty in the details of the landscape, adding a human scale to the viewing experience. She challenges traditional notions of photography as documenting reality, and through her manipulation and alteration of the image, presents a truth about the landscape in a more evocative nature. These painterly embellishments are both subtle and skillful, adding depth to the abstracted details of the elemental landscape. Laura Millard has an MFA from Concordia University and has exhibited her work across Canada and the United States. She has received numerous grants and awards during her career, including an Ontario Arts Council Visual Arts Grant and a Canada Grant. Her work is in both private and public collections across North America. Laura Millard is currently Chair of Painting and Drawing at the Ontario College of Art & Design. |
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kim dorland- over the fence |
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Delving deeper into the psyche of the expansive Alberta landscape, Kim Dorland's new series of paintings entitled "Over the Fence" reveals another side to the crumbling disenchanted imagery of his previous work. After a recent visit to Medicine Hat, Alberta, Dorland uncovers the allure of small town suburbia. His focus on the appealing perfection of these self-contained communities has led to collected visions of the quiet moments that are found to be so desirable. Among Dorland's visions of adolescent discontent, this new series exposes a collective freedom of complexity through uniformity, while capturing moments of individual expression. Through subject matter Dorland explores notions of anonymity, self-expression, time as an element, and the tension where suburbia meets rural.
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andy fabo -
queen street desperados |
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Drawing upon personal experience and identity, Andy Fabo's new series Queen Street Desperados portrays a rich history of infamous personalities from Toronto's Queen Street art scene. Both meditative and interpretive, this series of diptychs combine digital print and silk-screening processes, reflecting Fabo's immersed relationship with the Queen Street art community, and his apparent reverence for the individuals he portrays. In each of the works, the artist's hand employs expressive gestures and mark- making to provide a heightened sense of the individual, while the representation of spotlights underline the performative nature of identity |
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CURTIS CUTSHAW-
THE DOWSING ROD SERIES |
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Curtis Cutshaw has brought his ongoing interest in contemporary drawing to the forefront, merging the use of new technologies with printing techniques and traditional notions of artistic discipline. Using a conventional dowsing rod with string and pen attached Cutshaw undertakes a series of chance operations to produce line compositions on paper. The drawings are done on the ground as to respond to the waters below, pulling drawings from the ground. The drawings are then reworked in the studio and printed through Lightjet and Utrachrome process. Curtis Cutshaw graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design, and was accepted by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s New York Loft Program. In 1988, Cutshaw was awarded a scholarship to attend the esteemed Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, USA. Curtis Cutshaw currently works and lives in Calgary, Alberta.
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dan hudson
- The Myth Paintings |
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Part document and part fiction, Hudson employs a large vocabulary of painterly techniques in combining modernist aesthetic theory with narrative images that convey situations that are both familiar and exotic. The paint surfaces are lush and luminous. Throughout his twenty-three year career as an artist, Dan Hudson has expressed the everyday and the sublime in a range of mediums, including painting, drawing, photography and video. Hudson's current body of work marks a pivotal time in the artist's career, favoring a personal view onto the artist's culmination of observations, experiences, and memories.
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cesar damian - inverse landscape |
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Profoundly affected by the prestine surroundings during his 2006 summer residency at Canada's Banff Centre, Cesar Damian's newest series of black and white large-format photographs shifts focus from the figure to the landscape. Yet Damian approaches nature with the same curiosity and aesthetic as with his figurative work. By isolating a single elemant in nature he surveys the personality and individuality of components in nature as if they were portraits.
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blake senini - after lawren |
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Blake Senini's newest series of work explores how sculptural shape can inform a space. Each sculpture, whether floor or wall mounted, hovers and drifts within a space, much like an island on the horizon, or a pale painted shape found in a Lawren Harris painting. Senini furthers his investigation of creating sculpture that depicts the shape of light, combined with an appearance that reinforces a state of lightness. Each of the works that comprise After Lawren is fabricated from laminated wood with various surface treatments. Silver, aluminum, and brass leaf reflect light, enamel stains capture light, while the hand-carved contours and curves generate shadows.
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Art la - los angeles international
art fair |
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Skew Gallery at Art L.A.- the only major contemporary art fair to be held in Los Angeles in more than a decade. Art L.A. draws attention to the multi-faceted world of contemporary art, showcasing current international trends through a selected number of prominent international galleries. |
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margaux williamson & tyler clark burke |
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Skew Gallery presents MERGE: a group exhibition, which intends to demonstrate the diversity of Canadian art as represented through the practices of three young Canadian painters. Artists from three different geographical areas will merge with each other in exhibition, and in turn, will merge with new audiences as they enter a commercial gallery context for the first time.
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Photo miami 2006 - international
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Skew Gallery selected to participate in Photo Miami 2006. The international contemporary art fair for Photo-based, video and new media will launch in Miami, December 6-12 during Art Basel Miami Beach. Photo Miami redraws the boundaries of technology, photography and contemporary art focusing on the medium's complexity within contemporary art. Over 40 international galleries will be represented. |
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diana thorneycroftTHE CANADIANA MARTYRDOM SERIESSEPT 07 - OCT 14, 2006 |
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Thorneycroft's latest series of photographic works mix conventional narratives of martyrdom with paraphernalia of a quintessentially Canadian type. Plastic figurines of animals associated with the north join up with Canadian icons (eg. Anne of Green Gables, hockey players, and the RCMP) in the reenactment of grim spectacles, which are at once dark and humorous. Through these constructed narratives, a unique view of Canadian tourism, identity, culture, and industry emerges.
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merge:
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Skew Gallery presents MERGE: a group exhibition, which intends to demonstrate the diversity of Canadian art as represented through the practices of three young Canadian painters. Artists from three different geographical areas will merge with each other in exhibition, and in turn, will merge with new audiences as they enter a commercial gallery context for the first time.
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BILL RODGERS
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Calgary-based painter Bill Rodgers provides a new body of work, which continues his exploration of Canadian social history, and painting as a critical discipline. Taking the familiar Hudson's Bay trading blanket as a formal and conceptual starting point, Rodgers acknowledges the history and role of this "cloth-of-empire" in relation to Canada's 18th century colonial landscape. These works, as Rodgers suggests, are not intended to replicate a blanket in specific terms, but rather provide painted models that in turn prompt a shift in the way a familiar and iconic form is re -pictured. Bill Rodgers is one of Calgary's longstanding contributors to the regional and national community. His work has received recognition from Canada Council on six occasions, and is collected nationally by the private, public, and institutional sector. Rodgers is currently a member of faculty at the Alberta College of Art and Design, where he continues a teaching career that spans nearly three decades. |
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andre ethier
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Following recent solo exhibitions in Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles, Andre Ethier debuts a new body of work, offering an unsettlingly darkened version of representational painting. Described by the New York Times as "modern fairy tales in which happy endings tend not to count," Ethier's imagery offers no salvation to the vulnerable subjects who inhabit these other-worldy places. This exhibition marks the first Western Canadian solo showing of works by Andre Ethier, a young Toronto-based painter whose controversial canvases are quickly gaining an international reputation. |
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Matt crookshank
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The enigma of the brains show is the strange and vital correlation between separation and division, and how two halves of a greater whole can be joined by some kind of indescribable cosmic bridge. In this respect it is a riddle, as well as a reflection, rousing thoughts on how a whole can often only be seen from one side at a time. An accomplished abstract painter, Crookshank's works are highly energized, dynamic, and multi-layered. The paint surface manifests itself through fluid marks and vibrating colors, creating resonating canvases buzzing with liveliness. Through the use of cutting edge techniques and materials, Crookshank's paintings capture the spirited essence of contemporary art practice. Based in Toronto, Crookshank has exhibited extensively in Toronto, New York, and the UK. |
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diane bos
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In her newest series of photographic work, Diane Bos explores the subject matter that has inspired so many great French painters (from the Impressionists to the Fauvists). Tournesol, the beautiful French word for sunflower, roughly translates as 'follow the sun'. The sun guides not only the movement of this flower head, but all of human life in the South of France.
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TONI HAFKENSCHEID
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Skew Gallery is pleased to present the fine art photography of Toni Hafkenscheid. In his most recent series, Hafkenscheid’s large format photographs challange our notions of artifice and reality. Using a shallow depth of field to obscure clarity in selected areas, while maintaining crisp focus in others, Hafkenscheid presents a view which keeps the onlooker guessing of it’s authenticity.
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BRIAN FLYNN
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Calgary-based Brian Flynn’s new body of work, Wake, continues his interest in political constructions and misrepresentation of information - contemporary and historical. Using carpet underlay as his medium, Flynn recreates figures and scenes from Ireland’s turbulent politicized past while refusing any sort of moral commentary. The new body of work showing at SKEW Gallery will also pull their subject matter from personal images – that of his childhood and of his grandfather’s family home on the border of Northern Ireland and the Republic. These new works are cultural explorations of both his familial ties to Ireland and his understanding of the country’s past.
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KIM DORLAND & ANDRE ETHIEROCT 20 - NOV 26 2005 |
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SKEW Gallery is pleased to present the debut Calgary exhibition of Toronto-based painters Kim Dorland and Andre Ethier.
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RIC KOKOTOVICH
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SKEW Gallery is proud to be presenting a solo exhibition of Calgary-based Ric Kokotovich’s Water Lilies series. Beginning with a simple, off-the-shelf Polaroid camera, Ric Kokotovich has created an elegant, dreamlike fusion of the figure and landscape. Through the use of double exposures in the camera, natural and human forms emerge from deep, mysterious wells of color. Each image is rendered with dramatic chiaroscuro, suggesting the allegorical mysticism of Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite painting. The result is a brand new series of breathtakingly poetic, large-scale photographs that explore the balance between representation and abstraction. Known widely for both his photography and for his work in film, Kokotovich’s Water Lilies series skillfully tests the boundaries between the two mediums. This innovative new body of work is what Christa O’Keefe, arts writer for SEE Magazine, calls “windows into another world”.
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STEFANJA DUMANOWSKI
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SKEW Gallery is pleased to present the debut solo exhibition of Calgary-based artist Stefanja Dumanowski. The work in Just This combines a historical interest in nature with contemporary art making practices. A painting and drawing instructor at the Alberta College of Art and Design, she utilizes a digital form of traditional printmaking that unites her interest in photography with her passion for capturing the intimate beauty of the natural landscape. Dumanowski works intuitively, remembering fleeting moments of sublime natural beauty. Referencing her photographs through her computer, she paints with transparent layers of light and color, creating images anchored in nature but translated by a computerized world. When printed, these re created large-scale landscapes are vibrant, saturated with color, and often hyperreal - offering the perfect contemporary update on the traditional notion of Canadian landscape.
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