Horror Vacui Simon Bossé, Kristin Eiriksdottir, Jim Holyoak
and Patrick McEown
Invited Curator: Eric Simon
Vernissage: Thursday, February 4 at 6 pm
Exhibition: February 5 to 27, 2010
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present Horror Vacui, an exhibition featuring the work of four artists who explore drawing as their primary means of expression. In the visual arts, the term ‘Horror Vacui’ refers to a pre-occupation with covering the entire surface of an artwork with detail, leaving no empty spaces. This produces the effect of visual overload, overwhelming the eye with a surplus of information and defying conventional compositional hierarchy. These works are characterized by a feeling of vertigo rather than an organized, structured vision, or clear recognition of what is depicted.
The imagery of these four artists emerges from the darker, less traveled regions of the mind. This exhibition provides access to the unbridled accounts of the rambling nocturnal journeys of a group of adept explorers who bring back powerful images and ideas.
Simon Bossé, born in Montreal, has participated in numerous BD projects such as Comix 2000 (L’Association), l’appareil (La Pastèque) and has published two collections (Intestine and Bébête) at l’Oie de Cravan.
Kristin Eiriksdottir is an artist and writer from Iceland. Her work has been exhibited in Scandinavia and Germany, as well as Iceland, where she has published three books of poetry and drawings. She is currently completing her MFA in drawing and painting at Concordia.
Jim Holyoak, originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan but raised in Aldergrove B.C., has shown his work in LA, New York, Vancouver and Victoria. He is currently completing his MFA in drawing and painting at Concordia.
Patrick McEown, born in Ottawa, teaches drawing at Concordia. His graphic novel, The Hair Shirt, was recently published by Gallimard.
Eric Simon acted as curator for the exhibition. Simon, who teaches painting at Concordia, is a well known artist and the author of numerous essays and novels. His work is represented by Gallery Division in Montreal.
Sylvain Bouthillette Oeuvres récentes
Vernissage: Thursday, March 4 at 6 pm
Exhibition: March 5 to 27, 2010
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, March 11 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to feature recent works by Montreal artist Sylvain Bouthillette. The exhibition includes large format paintings and smaller silkscreen prints, all of which continue to explore the artist’s signature vision: the interplay of a rich panoply of popular imagery with spiritual content and considerations; Bouthillette has been studying and practicing Buddhism for over a decade. The result is a painterly cosmogony that is both “in your face” – forceful, provocative – and aesthetically sophisticated.
Bouthillette’s painterly world is destabilizing. In several of the new works, he depicts a holographic geometry of space using a variety of compositional strategies. We are simultaneously propelled through warped time as we are pinned down, unable to budge. Much of his lexicon of images plays out on this shifting ground. He creatively recycles elements of his iconography – here, a strange gathering of squirrels or swarms of bees. Two phrases recur in the work like mantras. The words, “Laissez tomber la tête dans le cœur, le cœur dans le ventre et remontez le tout dans le coeur” swirl around or between the loosely painted oversize bodies of bees or alternately hug the circumference of a circular canvas where again, large format squirrels seem to tilt out of the picture plane towards us. A second phrase – “Each one teach one” – screams out from the centre of a large painting in thick red letters like an urgent admonition. The recent work at the McClure confirms Bouthillette’s reputation as a painter with his finger on the pulse of society’s pastiche of anxieties, but one who easily avails himself of any number of artistic strategies and philosophical perspectives that might yet act as wellsprings of meaning. These are intense, provocative works.
Sylvain Bouthillette lives and works in Montreal. He completed his MFA in painting at Concordia University in 1990. His work has been exhibited in Quebec, Ontario, the United States, France and Switzerland. He has participated in over 30 solo and 40 group exhibitions. His prolific artistic practice includes painting, photography, sound installation and music. Bouthillette is the subject of many articles and reviews. His work is in such public collections as the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal and the Musée national des beaux arts du Québec.
Victoria LeBlanc
Director, McClure Gallery
Annual student show
Vernissage: Thursdaym April 1 at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 2 to 21, 2010
Exhibition Press Release:
Students registered in the School of Art’s winter session are invited to exhibit their work in our Annual Student Exhibition. The exhibition, which includes hundreds of works in a wide variety of media, gives students the experience of seeing their work in the context of a professional gallery. It also provides an opportunity for students and public to see the great diversity of creative activity that takes place at the Centre.
John Fox Refiguration
Invited Curator:Sandra Paikowsky
Vernissage:Thursday April 29 at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 30 to Mai 22, 2010
Curator’s Talk: Thursday, May 6 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition John Fox / Refiguration, which explores the artist’s return to representation in the mid 1980s after fifteen years of painting non-figurative images. The exhibition is curated by Sandra Paikowsky, well- known art historian and the artist’s partner of over thirty years.
John Fox / Refiguration celebrates and pays tribute to a remarkable painter, mentor and friend to so many artists in the Montreal community. The McClure Gallery exhibition offers a generous and telling selection of Fox’s late work: nine large oil paintings, fifteen pochades, twenty drawings and twenty-one watercolours. These recent works show traces of the figurative motifs from his early career but also bear witness to the artist’s new approach to the themes of places and people. Fox uses colour as structure and metaphor, as shapes and spaces, to reveal the truths of painting. As the curator notes, the paintings are “more a matter of mind than of mimesis.” The exhibition also underlines the deftly deliberate but seemingly effortless brushwork and sensuous line for which Fox was so celebrated. All of the drawings and watercolours, as well as the panel paintings are being shown here for the first time.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour publication, including over 60 plates as well as perceptive and eloquent texts by Sandra Paikowsky and Montreal artists Peter Krausz and Michael Smith.
John Fox (b.1927) lived and worked in Montreal, with lengthy annual visits to Venice, Italy from the mid 1970s until his death there in 2008. He influenced generations of artists in Montreal through his extensive teaching career at Concordia University and his generous friendships. Fox has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout his career and participated in group exhibitions across Canada and internationally. His work is represented in major public, corporate and private collections in Canada, the United States and Europe.
Max Wyse Mexico Terrerium
Curator: Hedwidge Asselin
Vernissage:Thursday May 27 at 6 pm
Exhibition:May 28 to June 19, 2010
Artist’s Talk: Wednesday, June 9 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Montreal artist Max Wyse. Mexico Terrarium includes approximately eight large format mixed media paintings on Plexiglas. In a universe that brings together animal, vegetal and human bodies, the paintings of Max Wyse place us outside history in the company of human figures engaged in acts of spontaneous and magical transmutation and transformation.
These new works – including two, eight-foot long horizontal freizes – transform the gallery into a kind of hallucinatory dream chamber. Amalgamations of both his own imaginings and Aztec mythological figures, Wyse’s surreal hybrid beings – part human, part animal/vegetal – seem deeply embroiled in the task of reconstructing themselves and negotiating a densely packed and often enigmatic habitat. Wyse’s creative manipulation of the human form results in headless creatures with tree stump legs, or serpant-like torsos. However surreal the iconography, the works display a draftsmanlike attention to detail and a subtly orchestrated palette. And in their own way, they make visual commentary on the interface between humanity and the environment that plays itself out beyond the representation of ritual and provokes a somewhat dismembered existence, alternately threatening and reassuring.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 16-page catalogue with text by well known Montreal writer and curator James D. Campbell. The artist would like to thank the Canada Council as well as the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Born in 1974 in British Columbia, Max Wyse lives and works in Montreal. In his work he proposes a symbiosis between the human, plant and animal worlds, revealing the tensions under the skin of a complex reality, where the strange belongs to the quotidian. He has exhibited in Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, New York and Paris and his work figures in numerous private and public collections.
Victoria LeBlanc
Director, McClure Gallery