Vernissage: Thursday, February 5 at 6 pm
Exhibition: February 6 to 28, 2009
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Robert Walker’s photography. Mediascapes addresses the visual information overload that infects most urban centers. Times Square and Las Vegas represent but two of the epicenters of this phenomenon in what at times appears to be a seamless mediascape of provocative commercial imagery.
Mediascapes represents Walker’s attempt to subvert the original manipulating intention of this imagery by mixing and matching, creating discordant harmonies, often with ironic and humorous results. Times Square can be seen as analogous to a giant Rubric’s Cube, with buses, cabs, and trucks laden with words and images in constant motion. The result is an endless moving collage of cryptic messages.
To achieve maximum dramatic effect in the photographs, Walker employs several compositional devices, such as the exploitation of huge exaggerations of scale. He also creates a sense of ambiguity by confusing the relationship between background and foreground or by manipulating juxtapositions between the real and artificial. Pedestrians, often viewed as victims, seem to be caught in a perpetual trompe l’oeil or separate world. Visual pollution or garden of visual delight? Mediascapes offers an ambivalent view of this contagious new urban reality.
Robert Walker lives and works in Montreal. He spent ten years in New York photographing the city. Portfolios of his work have been published in numerous literary, photography and art magazines including Aperture, American Photographer, Parachute and CV. His work was shown nationally and internationally and is represented in many public and private collections including the Bibliothèque.Nationale de Paris, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Catherine Y. Bates Out of line : Monochromes
Vernissage:Thursday, March 5 at 6 pm
Exhibition: March 6 to 28, 2009
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, March 12 at 7 pm
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present Out of Line: Monochromes, a series of monochromatic drawings and paintings by Catherine Y. Bates. While Bates is celebrated for her colour and poetic renditions of specific locales, the works in this exhibition call attention to a more restrained palette that highlights the expressive immediacy of Bates’s drawing and the underlying abstraction that informs her work. The exhibition includes approximately 26 works, ranging in size from large canvases to small, intimate ink drawings. Mostly landscape but not exclusively, all but one of the works have been executed since 2000.
The McClure Galley has joined with Stewart Hall Gallery in Pointe Claire to present a double venue exhibition of Bates’s work. The Stewart Hall exhibition, Out of Line: Retrospective brings together 65 works created over four decades. Bates emerged on the art scene in Montreal at a time of avant garde abstraction and experimentation yet always maintained her connection to the figurative, more particularly to the land and the rich legacy of Canadian landscape painting. The works at Stewart Hall provide a visual means of mapping the conceptual links between abstraction and realism in her work.
The works in Out of Line: Monochromes thus compliment the retrospective by isolating a specific aesthetic trajectory. The works trace the artist’s quest to find a way of ‘drawing into paint’ that would maintain the spontaneity of the drawing process within the painted surface. In many of the larger Georgian Bay works in the exhibition, such as Grasses I and II, meaning derives as much from the artist’s gestural energies embedded in paint as in the realistic images the marks describe. The surface is covered with a rhythmic agitation of lines, as if the artist is pushing her way into the land, establishing a relationship of self to nature. This sense of entry through drawing also marks such evocative works as Owl’s Head, Nostalgia which serves as a dark mourning song for her passionate concern for the environment.
This “in tandem” exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, Out of Line, published by McClure. We would like to thank the artist, Catherine Bates, and Joyce Millar, Director of the Stewart Hall Gallery, for their enthusiastic support and cooperation in all aspects of this project. The Stewart Hall exhibition, Out of Line: Retrospective, takes place March 21 to May 3. The vernissage takes place March 22 at 2 p.m.
Annual Student Show
Vernissage: Saturday, April 4 at 12 pm
Exhibition: April 4 to 23, 2009
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.
Virginia McClure Recent Drawings
Vernissage:Thursday April 30 at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 30 to Mai 23, 2009
The McClure gallery is pleased to present the exhibition, Recent Drawings, featuring the work of Virginia McClure. While the artist is well-known for her ceramics and monotypes, over the last several years she has returned to figurative drawing. The gallery presents a series of approximately 25 mixed media works on paper.
Many of the works in the exhibition, executed over the last three years, began as studies of the model during the Monday morning drawing sessions McClure enjoys with a group of fellow artists. While done with the traditional media of charcoal or conté, the works are given a unique and layered resonance through the artist’s pre-prepared surfaces whose abstract textures and shapes interact with the figurative portraits. Other studies have been transformed into a series slightly more satirical in nature, which humourously explore feminist viewpoints, often overlaying the initial study with bright acrylic washes.
This exhibition also celebrates the launch of the artist’s third book, The Yellow Painting, published by the Visual Arts Centre. The book, a personal memoir, also recalls the history of the Visual Arts Centre and her own on-going involvement with this institution over more than four decades.
Virginia McClure studied with Arthur Lismer at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as a child. She later graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. McClure has been a pivotal figure in the history of the Centre since the 1950s, serving both as director and president of the board over the years. As an early member of The Potter’s Club, the Centre’s original name, Virginia McClure was a talented and successful ceramic artist. She has gone on to develop as a multimedia artist and, most recently, as a poet. She has exhibited throughout Canada and in the United States as well as in Spain. Her work is in several private collections.
Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon Survol 1979-2009
Curator: Hedwidge Asselin
Vernissage: Thursday May 28 at 6 pm
Exhibition: May 29 to June 20, 2009
Artist’s Talk with Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon and Hedwidge Asselin: Thursday, June 11 at 7 pm
The McClure gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Survol 1979-2009, a mini-retrospective featuring the work of artist painter Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon, well known in Quebec’s artistic milieu. The exhibition is an overview of this artist’s 30 years of work, covering the period from 1979 to 2009.
Joyce-Gagnon’s artistic work is essentially based on series. When in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in the 80s, she discovered the generation X and kept on developing this theme for more than a decade. She found this generation to be aware of ecology and political choices. Their questioning aroused her interest and led her to her present research on ecology. She began this new series with the intention to bring in full light the carelessness, loss of decency and blindness of leaders.
In large format works, she sometimes shows the bareness of the earth where clouds of dust enhance the dryness of the earth. These barren places become spaces for meditation where the bystander freed of guilt is forced to note the evolution of nature.
She still pursues this interest, which now brings her to show the urgency to protect the environment. She fell in love with those “protected areas” (aires protégées), such as lakes, ponds, rivers, marshes, plantations, forests, etc. She denounces the slowness of government action in this regard. The size of her new canvases becomes smaller, more intimate.
Her early 80s series was focused on the theme of intimacy. “Lieux cachés, lieux sacrés” (Hidden Places, Sacred Places) shows the intimacy of a studio. At the beginning of her career, a very long series of abstract paintings titled “Empreintes” (Prints) brought her pure joy and laid the foundations for all her subsequent work. This subsequent work has included paintings inspired by the ecological disaster at Sao Paulo, self portraits painted in solitude, the teenagers’ series and intimate family scenes. Her paintings have always been influenced by her immediate environment.
And throughout her career and through all of the abovementioned series, light remained undoubtedly the main focus of her research.
Thérèse Joyce-Gagnon was born in Montreal where she received her artistic education at l’École des Beaux-Arts and at l’UQAM. Her works have been presented in Canada and in France. Cofounder and President of the Regroupement des artistes en arts visuels du Québec (RAAV) 94-95 and president of the Conseil de la peinture du Québec 91-92, she is very involved in the artistic community. She was received as a member from the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts in 2002 and received bursaries a number of times from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec and from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work is included in public and private collections.