Saturday, February 18, 2012

Jay Wilson on the role that craft plays in his practice

 


An interview with artist Jay Wilson about the role that craft plays in his practice.

Produced to accompany the exhibition 'The "C" Word: A Look at the Role of Craft in Contemporary Art' at the Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto Scarborough (February 8 - April 4, 2012).

Friday, February 17, 2012

Pearl Van Geest at Robert Langen Art Gallery

Better late than never...this exhibition closed last week, but for the record:

January 4 - February 11, 2012

Pearl Van Geest's exhibition "INTO PLACE" includes an interactive video projection and is linked to the Department of Philosophy at Wilfred Laurier University. Van Geest worked with Dr. Gary Foster and  presented a lecture for his course, The Philosophy of Sex, Love and Friendship. "INTO PLACE" explores concepts surrounding the human relationship to the physical and natural world. Through this interactive piece Van Geest invites viewers to  participate as collaborators in the creation of a large work that reflects ideas around love and desire and the potential consummation of this longing.

Some views of the installation follow:




Thursday, February 16, 2012

KWT contemporary Celebrates First Birthday

The artists and staff (along with a few spouses and partners) recently celebrated the first anniversary of our re-launch with a dinner at the gallery. These pictures pretty much say it all...suffice it to say that I feel lucky indeed to be working with people like this.
A.K.C.


Saturday, February 11, 2012

An Interview with Moira Clark






An interview with artist Moira Clark about the role that craft plays in her practice.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Moira Clark, Jay Wilson @ Doris McCarthy Gallery, Feb 8-April 4

The "C" Word 
University of Toronto
Feb 8-April 4, 2012

 Jay Wilson, Floppy Foam Stack, 2011
Craft foam, bracket, 24 x 23 x 21 cm


Moira Clark, Livadia, 2001
Acrylic on canvas, 101.6 x 137 cm


Guest curated by Richard Mongiat

The "C" Word is a group exhibition exploring the role of craft in contemporary art, through the work of eighteen Canadian artists. Suggesting that “craft” sometimes carries negative connotations, the exhibition celebrates the making of things, drawing attention to the continued presence of craft in the work of well-known contemporary artists.
The artists selected for The "C" Word recognize that their production engages in craft—whether rejoicing in, re-framing, or battling against preconceived notions. Recognizing a diversity of approaches, the exhibition includes works in a range of media, including Gord Peteran’s furniture/sculpture hybrids, Sheila Gregory’s raucous paintings, Jay Wilson’s dollar-store-foam wall pieces, Gerard Gauci’s lush interior scenes, Moira Clark's geo-abstraction and Marianne Lovink’s quirky organic forms.  Central to the artists’ work is a love of the process, for the struggle of working with materials and transforming them into objects.
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of video interviews, in which each of the artists speaks about the role that craft plays in their practice, and a publication featuring texts by Shelley Adler, Richard Mongiat and Richard Rhodes. Both the videos and texts will also be accessible on the DMG website, as part of The "C" Word

Dagmara Genda at Neutral Ground

Dagmara Genda is showing along with Bruce Montcombroux and T+T (Tyler Brett and Tony Romano)
at Neutral Ground Contemporary Art Forum in Regina, Sask. She's installed an amazing vinyl wall drawing, and she writes to us:

"The piece in Regina presented new problems in terms of install but we surpassed them. The premask was barely sticking to the vinyl because of the type of ink used. It was a beautiful rich satin finish but hard to work with.  I'm attaching a few snapshots!

Finished piece: 12 feet tall, about 3 feet on the floor and 20 feet wide. The piece is a tracing of a tracing of a tracing. It's an apartment block in Poland, the one I used to live in and where my aunt lives now, that I traced in ink onto a plastic-like material, cut that out, photographed it as a 3-D maquette, retraced it in illustrator, printed it and cut it out to be a two dimensional shadow of it's former self. It references it's flat 3-D state by the white lines cutting through the black that hint at peeling or bending."


 
Looks amazing, Dagmara...sorry we won't see it in person. But luckily, we still have two more weeks to enjoy your installation here at KWT contemporary.
A not-great snapshot of the wall painting at KWT contemporary...I'll replace it with a better one soon.




Here is curator John G Hampton's statement for "Unplanned Architectures" at Neutral Ground:

"Within artistic production, architecture is a discussion about society and interactions, while within the discourses of capitalism, architecture is a commodity, whose production rises and falls according to periods of growth or recession. "Unplanned Architectures" looks at artists' representation of the architectural plan in our current state of global instability and uncertainty. During the great depression, there was a dramatic rise in "paper architects" (architects who focused on plans for buildings and cities that were never meant to actually be built). Similarly the great recession offers us the unique opportunity to rethink our place in this world; it is a time for architectural experimentation, to examine the philosophical implications of our constructed environments and our relationships with them.

The "unplanned" here is multiple: it is the architectural cousin to capitalism or other unplanned economies (market architecture), it is the architecture of necessity that is borne from crises, it is the unforeseen forms that emerge from buildings as living systems (living architecture), it is the intuitive patching together of previous forms like the Frankensteinian advancement of Western civilization (automatic architecture). As the consequences of sprawl and deregulation become widely apparent, the architecture of our current system is readying to be uprooted, to be rebuilt yet while this market architecture is being dismantled, what will replace it is unknown. The artists in this exhibit use new media, sculpture and installation to provide insight into our current state of limbo. While we demolish the foundation on which we stand, they illustrate our fascination with the collapse, they illuminate our feelings of dread and excitement, they examine failings in analogous architectural shifts, while all along appreciating the beauty of the uncertain and emergent structures that rise from the natural movement of cities, buildings and culture."

Tali Dudin (ArtSync) interviews Jay Wilson and Dagmara Genda


Tali Dudin's Gallery Hop of January 12, 2012 included a stop at KWT contemporary, for discussions with Jay Wilson and Dagmara Genda. View it here. (at the 6'40" mark)

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Virtual Tour of Jay Wilson's "Yes. Yes. Try Less"

Here's a tour of Jay Wilson's current exhibition at KWT contemporary:








For more information and close-ups of Wilson's work, visit his page on our website, here
The exhibition runs through Feb. 19, 2012