|
PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS
|
|||
TRACES- with guest artists: Tinka bechert, marcia harris & ehryn torrel |
|||
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. |
||
Laura Millard- glide |
|||
 |
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. |
||
kim dorland- over the fence |
|||
 |
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.
|
||
andy fabo -
queen street desperados |
|||
 |
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 |
||
CURTIS CUTSHAW-
THE DOWSING ROD SERIES |
|||
 |
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.
|
||
dan hudson
- The Myth Paintings |
|||
 |
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. |
||
cesar damian - inverse landscape |
|||
 |
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.
|
||
blake senini - after lawren |
|||
 |
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.
|
||
Art la - los angeles international
art fair |
|||
 |
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. |
||
margaux williamson & tyler clark burke |
|||
 |
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. |
||
Photo miami 2006 - international
art fair |
|||
 |
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. |
||
diana thorneycroftTHE CANADIANA MARTYRDOM SERIESSEPT 07 - OCT 14, 2006 |
|||
 |
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. |
||
merge:
|
|||
 |
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. |
||
BILL RODGERS
|
|||
 |
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. |
||
andre ethier
|
|||
 |
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. |
||
Matt crookshank
|
|||
 |
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. |
||
diane bos
|
|||
 |
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. |
||
TONI HAFKENSCHEID
|
|||
 |
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.
|
||
BRIAN FLYNN
|
|||
 |
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.
|
||
KIM DORLAND & ANDRE ETHIEROCT 20 - NOV 26 2005 |
|||
 |
SKEW Gallery is pleased to present the debut Calgary exhibition of Toronto-based painters Kim Dorland and Andre Ethier.
|
||
RIC KOKOTOVICH
|
|||
 |
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”.
|
||
STEFANJA DUMANOWSKI
|
|||
 |
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.
|
||
|
||||||
|
