ARCHIVES >> Front Gallery:Tweak,
Back Gallery: Kelly Richardson
Platform: Lee Goreas, Lecture: Su-en Wong
Front Gallery:Tweak,
Back Gallery: Kelly Richardson
Platform: Lee Goreas, Lecture: Su-en Wong
Front Gallery: Amanda Bindley, Hildur Bjarnadottir,Lucky De Bellvue, Chris Hanson, Tracy Nakayama, Hendrika Sonnenberg, Arye Wachsmuth
Back Gallery: Kelly Richardson
Platform: Lee Goreas
May 25, 2000 - June 30, 2000
Opening Reception: May 25, 2000
Curated by Michael Buckland
"It was so cold where we were," bragged the explorer, "that the candles froze and we couldn't blow them out." " That's nothing." said his pal. "Where we were, the words came out of our mouths in pieces of ice, and we had to fry them to find out what we were talking about."
The problem with explicating and describing works of art is a bit like the dilemma of the explorer forced to fry words in order to understand them. I am fully aware that anything I say is as likely to detract from the art as it is to provide any insight. With this in mind, I will attempt a few words about Tweak. This exhibition is capable of withstanding any interpretative manipulation I may lapse into.
Tweak is a disparate collection of artists whose work varies widely, both conceptually and in their use of materials. The word "tweak" is the curatorial umbrella that encompasses all the work; it means to seize and pull with a sharp jerk and twist, or to make small adjustments. These artists take domestic and relatively banal material and subtly shift it through minor alterations in context and/or fabrication. The hand of the artist is evident but is not of paramount importance. The work is unspectacular, yet quietly compelling. Art is tipped off its pedestal and placed where it belongs.
Amanda Bindley's Cold Comfort is a second hand sofa kept wet for the duration of the exhibition. Eschewing the visual in visual art, the work is reliant on the tactile and the olfactory. It is not warm and welcoming, but offers instead a certain cold comfort. We might even return home with a bit of a dark stain on our trousers - an intimate interaction we will be, at best, ambivalent about.
Hendrika Sonnenberg, and Chris Hanson's Soapboxes absurdly manifests the proverbial soapbox. The rug is pulled out from beneath our proselytizing propensities by awkward cartoon crates clearly incapable of supporting any weight. Those who choose to speak are destined to fall. Beans is a sculpture that would not afford a second glance if sitting on the floor at a corner bodega, but in a gallery it seems temporary and out of place. That each of these thousands and thousands of beans has been made by hand represents a gentle faith that tempers the suggested nihilism of Soapboxes.
Lucky De Bellevue's work sounds bland and unspectacular: a yellow plastic chain hanging from the ceiling with cable ties sticking out. It fails to describe how the work manages to transcend the modesty and banality of its materials. Tenuous linking of mundane plastic objects conjures up something both elegant and suggestively organic.
Arye Wachsmuth's Interieur seduces and repels; a meditation on space that is both limitless and confining. A looping electronic soundtrack emanates from headphones, its ambient sound echoes the cool modernity of room interiors in a video, reinforcing the meditative slow pan of uninhabited, perfect rooms. The closest thing to these rooms is the room we are in, a room existing only to be looked at.
At first glance the sad little bits of clothing of Hildur Bjarnadottir's wool project are as melancholy as a lost mitten in the snow. The realization that their undersized scale is the result of repeated washings confounds our initial sad, fuzzy feelings of sweet young children. A few judicious washings restore a loss of innocence .
We are immediately aware that Tracy Nakayama's small, precise ink wash drawings are not traditional nudes. These sanitized images of limp-dicked men are taken from photographic source material. The props and mustaches clearly place these images in the seventies. The work is archival research and preservation rather than portraiture; it is not who is in these pictures, but what is in them.
Science Teacher: "Can you explain radio for us, Arthur?"
Arthur: "Well if you had a very long dog reaching from New York to Chicago, and you stepped on its tail in New York, it would bark in Chicago. That's telegraphy. Radio is exactly the same thing without the dog."
In this particular instance, it is the eloquence and not the volume of the dog's bark that is important. The simplicity of the work in this exhibition is a conduit for small perfect ideas that open into a complex system encompassing humour, passion, clarity, quiet, simplicity, beauty, and everything else.
Michael Buckland
Tweak bibliographies
Amanda Bindley 1962, 8lbs 1oz, 16". 2000, 9st 5lbs, 5'4".
Hildur Bjarnadottir was born in Reykjavėk, Iceland and currently lives in Portland, Oregon after recently moving from New York City. She received her B.F.A. from the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts in 1992 and completed her M.F.A. at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1997. She has had recent solo exhibitions at The Living Art Museum in Reykjavėk and the Nordic Museum of Arts and Crafts in Thorndheim, Norway and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Europe and North America.
Michael Buckland is an artist who sometimes organizes shows when no one else is available.
Lucky De Bellevue was born in Lafayette, Louisiana and currently lives in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include Feature Gallery, New York (2000), Stephen Freidman Gallery, London (1999), Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris (1998), Ten in One Gallery, Chicago (1998). He is represented by Feature Gallery.
John Massier is a curator and writer in Toronto.
Tracy Nakayama: Jailbreak / Thin Lizzy, Hey Joe / Love, Orgasm Addict / Buzzcocks, Steppin' Stone / Monkees, Barracuda / Heart, Good Times Roll / The Cars, Little Black Book / MakeUp, Strawberry Soda / Royal Trux, Loving Cup /Rolling Stones, Cowgirl in the Sand / Neil Young, Every Mother's Son / Will Oldham, You Need Loving / Small Faces, No Train To Stockholm / Lee Hazelwood, Caroline No / Beach Boys, Surrender / Cheap Trick.
Hendrika Sonnenberg and Chris Hanson live and work in Brooklyn. Solo exhibitions have include Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (1999), and Windows (Bernier & Tanit) in Brussels (1998). They have featured work in group exhibitions at P.S.1, New York (2000), White Columns, New York (1999), Thread Waxing Space, New York (1998), the MCA in Chicago (1996) and at TBA in Chicago (1995).
Arye Wachsmuth was born in Hamburg and raised in Tel Aviv. He studied at the Hamburg School of Photography in Germany and visual media design at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna with Professor Peter Weibels. He lives and works in Vienna. Recent exhibitions include the Austrian Cultural Institute, London, MARS at Post Gallery, Los Angeles, Europa spielt New York in Berlin at Philip Grötzinger´s exhibition space in Berlin.
Was Kelly Richardson Born on a Hill?
Kelly Richardson's work appears simple, but it makes me ruminate on primal things.
Often modest in scale and execution, her materials are often acutely banal: beer caps, broken drumsticks, used corks, old concert T-shirts. Her images are brief and concise: the moon at night, undulating red jello, a stop sign in the middle of a desert. The detritus and the ordinary. A motley and mundane assemblage. And a deceptive simplicity.
Her sculptural works appear to verge upon the territory of the one-liner: corks carved into canoes; broken drumsticks tenderly rebuilt with cork, thousands of beer caps glued together to form a six foot high tower; old concert T-shirts in a pile. Richardson creates her sculptures from objects retrieved and collected from the real world - they are what they are and she does very little to transform them. But the slight transformative touches which are subtly applied to these mundane objects move them beyond one-linerland into a persistent river of sensations.
Longing, desire, aspiration. That these sensations be embodied in not only mundane, but often modestly-sized artworks, is not an ironic device. It is the implementation of a microcosmic model. Richardson recognizes that scale need not dictate the impact of the work and that the universe can be located in small packages or slight moments. A full-scale canoe carved from cork might be impressive, but a discreet pile of hand-carved corks is more emotionally charged, even if the emotion is an anxious sigh. The gesture of rebuilding a drumstick is a tender and futile gesture, a desire to relive the glorious moment of impact when it broke in the first place.
Richardson's sculptures depict a querulous modularity, a re-integration of like things into new forms. Her beer cap Tower does not simply itemize how many beers the artist served in her job as a bartender, or else she would have built a beer bottle and had herself photographed beside it for Bartender's Monthly. Instead, Richardson has constructed a hollow tower, twisting slightly through its own torque. Glittering and bright, it is the endless upward stagger of aspiration, Richardson's shining city on the hill.
Desire and longing are big, fat cosmic sensations, primal things, and Richardson's two video works bookend these ideas with contrived and real images of universal import. Jello is a nonstop loop of jiggling, red jello, but with the image in full-bleed on the screen, it seems a seething bloody swirl of primordial ooze, the fiery birth of the universe, full of violent, beautiful desire. In Camp, a still shot of the full moon at night is distorted visually and interrupted aurally by the crackling snap of popcorn. The heat from the campfire off-screen gently mutates the shape of the moon and the sound of jiffypop speaks with an inarticulate but passionate crackle.
If these sensations sound too broad for the work described, consider that many of Richardson's works are equally deft: a photograph of two bubbles floating over the city, a pencil-crayon drawing of a world ringed by rainbows, or a polaroid photograph of an image from a B-movie. The polaroid shows the back of a car in the midst of a barren desert, stopped, strangely enough, at a stop sign. This image, as much as any other work, contains traces of Richardson's ubiquitous "It." And "It" is not the meaning of life. It is the sensation of life: simultaneously absurd, hilarious, beautiful, sad, hopeful, futile, exciting, pathetic.
I heard tell recently of a woman who was born on a hill and I wondered what that might be like, what kind of person that would create. I think you would be forever imbued with an acute sense of the ever present slippage of life and compensate with a burning desire and a nonstop sense of aspiration. You would be filled with urgency. You would recognize the inherent absurdity of life. You would exhibit an impulse to not simply endure, but prevail.
John Massier
Kelly Richardson graduated with honors from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1997 and previously from the Art Fundamentals Program at Sheridan College in 1993. She has exhibited at various galleries including Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York, Galerie SKOL in Montreal, Quebec, and Robert Birch Gallery in Toronto, Ontario. Upcoming exhibitions include The Tunnel Channel in Melbourne, Australia and Floating Gallery in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She lives and works in Toronto.
Lee Goreas
Car Trouble
I have been photographing the chrome name plates of various 1960-1973 North American automobiles for 3 years. After the completion of this photographic project I began photographing customized plastic models of 1960-1973 North American automobiles, which are both new and broken down. I photographed these newly broken down models within simple settings. These settings become narrative landscapes that contextualize the models and their distressed state. These newly broken down models and the landscapes they are located in represent the marriage of both my desire and esteem.
Lee Goreas was born in Kelowna British Columbia, 1965, educated in Victoria and Toronto and taught at the University of Victoria 1998 and 1999. Over the past ten years Lee has exhibited both nationally and internationally. In the past twelve months, Lee has had solo exhibitions at Robert Birch Gallery, Toronto, Stride Gallery, Calgary and presently having a solo exhibition at Southern Exposure in San Francisco. He is represented by Robert Birch Gallery.
Su-en Wong
Girl as Covergirl
Lecture
Art Gallery of Ontario
Opening: Wednesday, June 7, 2000, 6 - 6:30 pm
Lecture in the Ridley Member's Lounge, 7:30 pm
New York based artist Su-en Wong is featured in the fifteenth exhibition of Present Tense, an ongoing series of current work by Canadian and International artists. Su-en Wong's paintings are self-portraits that explore the uneasy transitions between childhood, adolescence, and maturity. Often expansive in scale, her paintings on canvas, paper, and wood primarily feature a lone figure isolated within a minimal field of pastel color. The works are imbued with social and sexual stereotypes, which are used to explore the conflicting positions of power and vulnerability within the artist's life as a young Asian woman.
Su-en Wong was born in Singapore in 1973 and currently lives and works in New York. She received her M.F.A. in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997, and recently finished studio residencies at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, New York, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Stefan Stux Gallery, New York (1999) and at the Chicago Cultural Center (1999), and is currently exhibiting in the North American section of the Kwang Ju International Biennale, Korea (2000).