Guest Curator: James D. Campbell
Vernissage: Thursday, January 6 at 6 pm
Exhibition: January 7 to 29, 2005
Lecture by James D. Campbell: Thursday, January 13 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Canadian artists Prudence Heward and her nephew Ross Heward, curated by James D. Campbell. The exhibition will offer a unique perspective on the representation of the female figure and family ties.
Prudence Heward is recognized as one of the most important Canadian figurative artists of the 20th-century. Lesser known is the fact that her nephew Ross Heward pursues a lifelong creative practice as well, as a figurative painter working in the south of France. A major aspect of Prudence Heward’s creative process was the study of female nudes and paintings of women. Ross Heward makes large acrylic paintings of female nudes directly onto found patterned fabric. On one hand Ross’ work is far more unconventional than his aunt’s, characterized by his choice of bedspreads, dresses and shower curtains as supports for his paintings. On the other hand, the aunt and her nephew share a common concern with the integration of the figure into their environment, often using elements of clothing and pattern.
Two important paintings from the later part of Prudence Heward’s career, never previously exhibited, are accompanied by a series of charcoal drawings of female nudes. Twelve acrylic paintings and a selection of graphite drawings by Ross Heward are presented.
The exhibition is accompanied by a colour catalogue with a text by James D. Campbell.
Prudence Heward’s work is represented in the collections of most major cultural institutions in Canada, including the National Gallery of Canada. Ross Heward lives and works in Caderousse, France. He presented a solo exhibition of his paintings at Galerie Calligrammes in Ottawa in 2000.
Vernissage: Thursday, February 3 at 6 pm
Exhibition: February 4 to 26, 2005
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Montreal artist Carmen Ruschiensky. Over the past several years Ruschiensky’s paintings, hovering between abstraction and figuration, have represented diverse forms of accumulation: heaps of objects, signs, words, painterly marks, cumulative motifs evoking natural phenomena, convoluted surfaces or simple methodical repetitions. Her paintings suggest material and sensual excess or accumulations of redundant, humorous and contradictory information.
Both small and large format oil paintings are presented, from 2002 to the present. The more concentrated, singular figures of the small figurehead paintings are the artist’s most recent works. The forms bring to mind the contours of a face or head, but are radically distorted to monstrous proportions. Ruschiensky is interested in the multiple linguistic meanings and connotations of the expression figurehead (the ornamental figure or symbol placed at a ship’s bow; the bust of a famous person; a head or chief in name only). The paintings also speak of the contrast between traditional portraits that represent power, celebrity and influence and the grotesque facade that is the simulation of power, the nominal leader, the personnage purement décoratif.
Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Carmen Ruschiensky studied Studio Art at the University of Regina from 1987 to 1989. In 1989 she moved to Montreal and received a BFA from Concordia University in 1992. Ruschiensky recently presented her work in solo exhibitions at the Darling Foundry and Galerie B 312 in Montreal and in the following group exhibitions: Lines Painted in Early Spring, a travelling exhibition from the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Les Mars de l’art contemporain, Clermont Ferrand, France and Portraits-robots, Galerie Graff, Montreal. Her work is included in the collections of the Musée du Québec, Loto Québec and the Centre d’art de Baie-Saint-Paul.
Nadine Bariteau Éclipse; dans l’oeil du monde
Todd Munro Lascaux revisited
Vernissage: Thursday, March 3 at 6 pm
Exhibition: March 4 to 26, 2005
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present two exhibitions of prints by Montreal artists Nadine Bariteau and Todd Munro. In the large gallery, Nadine Bariteau presents a dozen large-format silkscreen prints using digitally manipulated stills from her own videos. Blurred sequences manipulated at slow speeds allow the artist to seize a gesture, focusing on the transient nature of the human race. Eclipse; dans l’œil du monde traces how we react in light of the staggering changes that are taking place in the natural and urban environments surrounding us.
In the small gallery, Todd Munro presents Lascaux Revisited, a series of prints (lithography and monoprint) based on the cave drawings of Lascaux, France that date back some 15,000 years. In Munro’s works, the images of bison, horses and other animals are replaced by the automobile. Munro’s crudely drawn images are accented by scratchings and hand prints similar to those of the cave drawings.
Nadine Bariteau received a BFA (print media) from Concordia University in 1999. She is the recipient of several grants and prizes including the Large Format Print Biennale hosted by Atelier Circulaire in Montréal, the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (both in 2002) and the Best of original print award (2003). In the summer of 2003, Bariteau participated in the International Contemporary Print Biennale in Trois-Rivières, Québec. Nadine Bariteau wishes to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for their support.
Todd Munro received a BFA from York University in 1994. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including a recent solo exhibition at Transit Gallery in Hamilton (2004) and group exhibition at Warringah Printmakers Studio in Sydney, Australia (2004). He also participated in a residency at Imago printmaking studio in Moncton, NB (2003). Munro has been an active member of Atelier Circulaire print studio since 1995.
Annual Student Show
Vernissage: Thursday, March 31, 6 pm
Exhibition: April 1 – 23, 2005
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.
Eric Le MÉnÉdeu Rain Expected at the End of the Day
Vernissage: Thursday, April 28 at 6:00 pm
Exhibition: April 29 to May 21, 2005
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Montreal artist Éric Le Ménédeu. Rain Expected at the End of the Day combines oil paintings of varying sizes created since 2001, with a series of recent charcoal and oil drawings, rapid studies based on memory.
For the last several years, Éric Le Ménédeu’s painting practice has focused on the representation of cloud-filled, moving expanses of sky above thin bands of landscape. Loosely inspired by photographs taken during his travels – discreet moments gathered in passing – the works often recall the plains and rivers of his homeland.
The fluidity of the elements of air and water and their ungraspable, perpetual movement become symbols of transition, change and exile, a metaphor for the passage of time and childhood nostalgia. Waiting for the rain implies a hope for renewal, for regeneration. Through his paintings, Éric Le Ménédeu gives us an occasion to stop and contemplate. This is his calm and slow response to the world that surrounds us.
Éric Le Ménédeu was born in Paris, France in 1962. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (Paris), he has lived and worked in Montreal since 1994. He was the recipient of the 2001 3rd Annual New Canadian Painting Competition for Eastern Canada. His work can be found in several important corporate collections including those of Alcan, Gildan and Royal Bank. Éric Le Ménédeu is represented by Mira Godard Gallery in Toronto.
Anne Ashton garden of joy
Vernissage and Gala Evening: Thursday, May 26 at 6 pm
Exhibition: May 27 to June 18, 2005
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, June 2 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent oil paintings by Montreal artist Anne Ashton. Ashton’s work explores the strange and mutable beauty of the natural world. Garden of Joy was a jazz and blues club in 1920’s Harlem. The botanical paintings in this exhibition were inspired in part by the music of that era, and the flowers’ somewhat suggestive shapes have been renamed using the vernacular of the Dirty Blues.
The paintings depict flowers and plants both out of context and out of scale, and are rendered with many layers of translucent oil paint and much detail. Ashton paints on small wooden panels that often incorporate vintage frames. The frames are not always able to contain the imagery, which tends to push its way beyond the confines of the painting. The flowers are portrayed in various stages of bloom, while insects wander here and there.
Ashton seeks to incite the viewer to look more closely both at the paintings and at the natural world itself, including those elements that are often dismissed as useless, unlovely or dangerous. By emphasizing individual peculiarities, she hopes to offer a way of looking at our planet’s systems and inhabitants with a more open, curious and compassionate eye.
Anne Ashton was born in San Diego, California and studied visual art and literature at San Diego State University and the University of California at Santa Barbara. She has worked at the San Diego Museum of Natural History and at the National Film Board of Canada. A founding member of Montreal’s Galerie Clark, she has had solo exhibitions in Quebec, Ontario, Newfoundland, Alberta and Arizona, most recently at Oboro in Montreal in 2004. Her work is part of public collections including the Musée des beaux-arts du Québec, the Tom Thompson Memorial Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank, as well as corporate and private collections in Canada and the U.S. She lives and works in Montreal.
Dorothy Stewart chimes
Vernissage: Wednesday, June 22 at 6 pm
Exhibition: June 23 to July 16, 2005
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition that celebrates nine years in the career of Montreal born artist Dorothy Stewart. The exhibition features eight large acrylic paintings on canvas along with smaller works on paper, produced between 1995 and 2004. Stewart’s work references interior and exterior space, resulting in evocative poetic compositions that bring together large colour fields with forms that recall cubist investigations of the still life.
Dorothy Stewart writes, “Today, we are so attuned to non-objective art that we are geared to looking not for meaning in the recognizable, but reading feeling and then making associations with what the abstract artist has set down. Colour ascribed to particular shapes should then sharpen a viewer’s response or even strike an ambiguous note…It’s all to do with relationships.”
Dorothy Stewart was born and raised in Montreal. She graduated with honours from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where she won scholarships for Best Woman Painter and First Prize, Painting. For the first half of her career she lived and worked in Montreal. In the late 1970’s, Dorothy moved to New York, where she spent 20 years painting and exhibiting. She participated in numerous group shows as far afield as Japan, United Arab Emirates, and Spain. Recently, she returned to Toronto where she continues to paint.
Full Circle Mandala Project Meeting in the Middle for Peace in the Middle East
Vernissage: Thursday, August 4 at 6 pm
Exhibition: August 5 to 27, 2005
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present a mixed-media exhibition in collaboration with the Montreal Dialogue Group and the Full Circle Mandala Project that features the collective works of Jews and Palestinians/Arabs who are actively engaged in finding the human in the “other”.
Meeting in the Middle for Peace in the Middle East is an exhibition based on an intercultural exchange with an emphasis on peace, through mutually supportive Arab/Jewish relationships. The project is meant to bring awareness to spiritual, humanitarian and social issues through the participants’ personal stories told in writing, painting, sculpture, photography and mixed media.
A group of Montreal Jews and Palestinians/Arabs, some artists, some not, collaborating for the first time, created a collective artwork in the form of mandalas (symbols of sacred and structural unity). The mandalas are constructed from a wide variety of materials, including paper made from Israeli and Palestinian newspapers, newspaper clippings, family photos, mementoes and bits of journals. The participants also cast their hands and faces to create sculptures that express the immediacy of their physical and emotional involvement in the stories they have recreated.
This project was initiated by Helga Schleeh (artist, director of the Full Circle Mandala Project and Visual Arts Centre faculty member), and Nada Sefian and other members of the Montreal Dialogue Group.
With special thanks to Engrenage Noir, the CRB Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support.