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WHAT'S ON AT TRUCK
MAIN SPACE WHAT'S ON AT TRUCK |
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 Florescence 2 (detail), Michelle Forsyth (Pullman, WA, USA)
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SPITTING IMAGES John Bride, Michelle Forsyth, Chris Ross July 7 - August 5, 2006 Exhibition Reception: Friday, July 7, 2006 @ 8pm CAMPER ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: Sarah Holtom All are welcome. Admission is FREE. |
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SPITTING IMAGES Photography was invented around two hundred years ago when light plus chemistry made a miniature indexical sketch of the world more realistic and faster than many of the great master painters. Many have insisted photography has freed artists from having to record or document everyday life, leaving artists free to explore different artistic pursuits such as abstract expressionism, conceptualism, feminism etc. ad infinitum. Artistic freedom may seem even more prevalent today. Artists are not needed to document in a world where photographic imagery is created with great efficient delight by countless consumer grade mechanisms such as a point & shoot camera, a cell phone, or a web-cam. Images bombard us everywhere, as advertisements and news documents. Images are downloaded from the Internet or culled from magazines. Despite an ‘all you can consume buffet’ of images, the photo-bug infects us as artists on a different level, not as documenters per se, but as processors of the photographic image. Do we view photography as a resource or as a refuse for art-making? How do we personalize and internalize photographic imagery? Thinking about photography might be a possible framework to understanding the work of the three artists exhibiting at TRUCK Contemporary Art Gallery this month, John Bride, Chris Ross, and Michelle Forsyth. For Calgary artist John Bride, art may be perceived as a reaction, a corollary to photographic imagery. Perhaps his view of our contemporary visual inventory in general is as glumly distilled efficient information. His paintings embrace and inspire the surrealistic storybook narratives of ancient or forgotten myths. Here dream symbols and ghostly bodies both haunt and delight us as we travel through the tropical and the occidental, as well as through our more familiar Rocky Mountain landscapes. These works are photographs internalized and de-processed or they may simply be products of a process, which strives to compromise the complex relationships of a collective and primal iconography. National Geographic as a photographic publication has brought the exotic primitive, the far-reaching physical anthropology of our world to millions of readers. It has awakened a general audience to the potential of human technology and futuristic ingenuity. To Toronto artist Chris Ross in particular, it is a magazine that upon re-examination resembles the enjoyable experience of looking at a photo-album. Ross relishes in this experience by making paintings that references editorial portraits of inspiring individuals featured from past editions. These portraits are both guardians and reminders of her childhood dreams. Ross invites us to introspect by re-experiencing imagery of a prolific cultural publication. Florescence (Flowers for Iraq) #2, an installation by Pullman, Washington State, artist Michelle Forsyth, is an artistic expression that invites us to re-experience one photographic image she has culled from a series of dead portraits from the Iraqi war. Forsyth recreates the photographic image through the be-labored process of pinning flower-shaped paper cutouts onto the gallery wall; compositionally creating a piece that resembles a pixilated or a pointillist representation. An interesting tension exists in this between an attempt to humanize through individual labor the unsympathetic coldness and ubiquitous flurry of media imagery. Here is an attempt to make something beautiful from terror, which appears in essence as a transformative act that somehow amends and memorializes human travesty. TRUCK is pleased to present Spitting Images as an exhibition that explores how three artists have internalized the overwhelming plethora of media imagery that pervade us in contemporary life. All of these works are expressions that range from imaginative intransigent musings, to quixotic nostalgia, in an attempt to salvage a sense of humanity from potentially disremembered images. - Linh Ly (Calgary, AB) |
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John Bride Biography: John Bride has remained an artist since he received his BFA from The Alberta College of Art and Design in 2004. John works in a studio in Calgary, Alberta, and in a sketchbook during his ravels. He began to seriously paint Albertan landscapes in September 2005, which led to a Residency at the Banff Centre this spring. Mr. Bride continues to paint out- and in- doors while integrating an intimate view of the symbolic and mystical. John Bride Artist Statement: Idiomyth There are different concepts of what we shall call the human process. Initially, the human process is what converts the chaotic elements of nature into spiritual notions of life, death, and the divine. Then there is the human process of economy, the congestion of the spiritual and sacred. The culture of tourism, for example, where captivating vistas are popularized through postcards and T-shirts. Such landmarks have become invitations to participate in a cliché, to experience that which has been photographed, mapped and measured. Everything becomes a symbol for sake of the human process of efficiency. Symbols relate to the informative. How we see a famous landmark is not far from how we read a traffic sign or recognize hazardous materials. Even imagery of the transcendent or mystical has become cognitive through reproduction. Every image is now disposable. This creates a new, exciting age for the creative individual. Since everything is assimilated into information - thus becoming generic - I am driven to reconstitute the initial human process of a myth. I work with contemporary symbols, collective, reproduced images and my own imagery. I grant myself the challenge to individualize the inclusive.
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Michelle Forsyth Biography: Born in Vancouver BC, Michelle Forsyth holds an MFA from Rutgers University and a BFA from the University of Victoria. She currently resides in Pullman, Washington where she teaches painting and drawing at Washington State University. Her work has been exhibited widely on the west coast of Canada and the United States, at venues including Shift Gallery (Seattle, WA), Lorinda Knight Gallery (Spokane, WA), Third Avenue Gallery (Vancouver), The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (Spokane, WA), and the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center (Port Angeles, WA). Her work has also been exhibited at the Charleston Heights Arts Center (Las Vegas, NV), Mercer Union (Toronto, ON), and City Without Walls (Newark, NJ). In 2005 she was awarded a Professional Artist Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. Further information and images of her work can be found at www.michelleforsyth.com Michelle Forsyth Artist Statement: I use the slowness of hand-technologies such as painting, needlepoint and paper-crafts to counter the potential dehumanization of rapidly transmitted digital images. My studio practice involves a slow and compulsive process of translating them through minute and repetitive hand-gestures resulting in of thousands of tiny brightly colored brush-marks, hole-punches, cutout circles, and hand-stitches. Rather than strive for perfection, I embrace the characteristics and imperfections of each mark I make. The source material for my work often volleys from horrific scenes of disaster and images of death to escaping views of the ocean’s surface and lavish marine life seen through aquarium glass. Growing up on a sailboat off the west coast of Canada, my experience was framed by these amazing ocean vistas, beautiful moments that were often forked with moments of fear and perilous events. Even though reflections of seafaring are peppered throughout my practice, the majority of my work is culled from a vast collection and archive of catastrophic images gathered from contemporary media sources. Acquired primarily from the Internet as well as from newspapers, they include horrific scenes of disaster, terrorist attacks, bombings, massacres, and representations of war. These images of peril and demise have permeated nearly every aspect of contemporary life, and looking at them through the screen of my computer or television, for me, invokes the same distant and apathetic ways of looking as does staring at the undulating surface of the sea and viewing the fauna of the deep. In opposition to the high-resolution digital images we are generally bombarded with, the images in my work are rarely easy to discern. The surfaces are covered with the scars and blemishes created by the mistakes of my hand, in turn making the translation process more palpable than the original sources. Most recently I have expanded my practice to include digital video, installation and paper sculpture, however, as a whole, my work is firmly rooted within the language of painting. Florescence 2 (Flowers for Iraq) is a part of a series of installation pieces that examine images from the war in Iraq available on Internet sites. In these works, I have attempted to rescue the horrific images from their de-personalized context and imbue them with a sense of beauty. Creating them out of thousands of small, colorful pieces of paper they become memorials to the brutal realities of horrors of war. |
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Chris Ross Biography: Born in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1970, Chris attended the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in the late eighties. She spent her fourth year of school in the College's Independent studio program in Florence, Italy. After Graduation, Chris moved to Montreal and began her career as a painter, with work that was heavily influence by feminist film theory and contemporary popular culture. She began exhibiting in Montreal an Toronto, and was awarded a B Grant from the Canada Council in the mid nineties for her project, PRIVATE, a series of twelve large scale paintings depicting a crime scene. Since that time, Chris's work has been shown in private galleries, artist run centres, and museums in several different provinces. Now based in Toronto, Ontario, Chris continues to paint, with the tiny desires series being her most recent project. Chris Ross Artist Statement (50 Tiny Desires): National Geographic holds a special place in my heart. As a child, the magazine was a glimpse of a fascinating world far from my own reality. studious scientists in horn rimmed glasses, rugged arctic explorers, cheerleaders for the Dallas Cowboys... the magazine's gorgeous photos captured my imagination. As an artist years later, my imagination is used to support the balancing act that is often the reality of making a living and making art. Looking through some old National Geographics one day, I'm struck by a photo of a professor lecturing a class. I decide to do a small painting based on this photo. as I paint, I change the direction of the professor's eyes so that he's no longer looking at his class, he's looking straight at me. Would I rather be in his shoes? I'm compelled to do more of these paintings; little paleontologists and marine biologists, all staring at me instead of at their bones and sharks. These tiny portraits look back at me seductively, a nostalgic desire for childhood's limitless possibilities. After working on the series for three years, however, the whole project stares me down. Originally 100 paintings, 50 tiny desires is one half of a larger work. All this time and all these little paintings later and I can see the big desire behind the tiny ones; the desire to connect with the world around me, and the need to make that connection through art. (50 tiny desires is made up of 50 small paintings, each one 6 x 6 inches, oil on canvas. The paintings are hung in a grid on a wall painted National Geographic Yellow.) |
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CAMPER (Contemporary Art Mobile Public Exhibition Rig): |
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+ 15 Window Project Space: In Which the Honourable Company Explores its Territories - Dave & Jenn |
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The Grain Exchange (Lower Level) 815 - 1st Street SW, Calgary, AB, T2P 1N3 CANADAT: 403.261.7702 F: 403.264.7737 E:info@truck.ca Hours: Tuesday - Saturday: 11 am to 5 pm |
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50 Tiny Desires (detail), Chris Ross (Toronto, ON) 
The Dreamer, John Bride (Calgary, AB)