Éric Simon Old School / New School

Éric Simon Old School / New School

Vernissage: Thursday, January 8 at 6 pm
Exhibition: January 9 to 31, 2004
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, January 15 at 7:30 pm

Exhibition Press Release:

The McClure Gallery is pleased to present Old School / New School, a new series of portrait paintings by Eric Simon. Simon situates the tradition of portraiture in the context of identification photography. Each work is comprised of sixteen paintings documenting various points of view of the subject rotating on an axis.
Governments, financial institutions and corporations have always gathered vast amounts of information in order to better understand and control individuals. Today ID cards, customs controls, credit research and the increased presence of surveillance cameras, in addition to the various means of identification used by the police (mug shots, composite portraits, fingerprints, etc.) are part of our daily existence. While these documents are not considered within the domain of art history, they are nonetheless part of a history of the representation of individuals. In this sense they are revealing of the way people are perceived in a given society at a given time.

Eric Simon lives and works in Hudson, Quebec. He received a BFA from Concordia University in 1984 and an MFA from Université du Québec à Montréal in 2000. He participated in the 2001 Symposium international de nouvelle peinture in Baie-St-Paul and in several production residencies at the Atelier d’estampe Sagamie in Alma. Simon’s work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. He teaches drawing, painting and printmaking, currently at John-Abbott College.