The Optimism of Colour: William Perehudoff, a retrospective
October 1, 2010 to January 9, 2011
Guest Curated by Karen Wilkin
The Optimism of Colour is a major retrospective of the works of renowned Canadian abstract painter William Perehudoff. Drawn from public and private Canadian collections, the exhibition was organized for the Mendel Art Gallery by guest curator Karen Wilkin, of New York City. The exhibition will travel to the Kamloops Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Windsor and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa in 2011 and 2012. It features more than 60 works, tracing the evolution of Perehudoff’s approach from early figurative works and murals to radiant abstractions, their interplays of colour suggesting musical chords. The exhibition emphasizes these latter works, which established the artist’s reputation nationally and internationally.
Jayce Salloum: history of the present [selected works 1985-2009]
September 30, 2011 to January 8, 2012
The Mendel Art Gallery presents one of its most ambitions exhibitions to date, with Jayce Salloum: history of the present (selected works, 1985-2009), a coproduction of the Mendel Art Gallery with the Kamloops Art Gallery and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, PEI.
The show is a mid-career survey of the internationally recognized Canadian artist’s photo and video-based installation works, which explore identity, migration, and shifting borders and territories in the contemporary world.
Salloum pursues a varied career; he works as a curator and cultural activist, has founded artist collectives in Canada, the United States, and Lebanon, and practices as an artist at the intersection of text, video, installation and photographic work. The Lebanese-Canadian artist, whose grandparents immigrated to rural Saskatchewan in the 1930s, grew up in Kelowna and left home at 17 to travel and make art, a journey that led him across Canada, to Africa, and then to California. He is now based in Vancouver, but continues to travel constantly, making work and exhibiting his work all over the world.
Kathleen Munn and Lowrie Warrener: The Logic of Nature, the Romance of Space
September 30, 2011 to January 8, 2012
The work of Kathleen Munn and Lowrie Warrener represents some of the earliest abstract art in Canada as it first emerged during the 1920s and 30s. Munn, a New York-trained and Toronto-based artist, exhibited regularly from 1909 until the late 1930s. Sarnia-born Warrener also worked in Toronto during the 1920s and 30s; they both contributed paintings to the official Group of Seven exhibition held in 1928 and were included in that year’s influential Yearbook of the Arts compiled by renowned artist and writer Bertram Brooker.
This exhibition investigates these artists in relation to dominant artistic and philosophical movements of the period to provide a fuller, often alternative perspective on Canadian art. Munn’s great knowledge of theory led her to radically reinterpret traditional subjects such as religious and pastoral scenes into fractured, daring designs. She combined the mystical aspects of modernism with her own spiritual beliefs, culminating in her greatest series on the Passion of Christ. Warrener was a protégé of the Group of Seven, yet his landscape imagery is his own, projecting the lyrical stylization and bright cloisonnism of European art onto the Canadian wilderness. He also extended the search for ‘national’ cultural identity into the field of theatre, producing innovative stage designs and writing an avant-garde play with celebrated dramatist Herman Voaden.
Michèle Mackasey: face à nous
September 30, 2011 to January 8, 2012
Saskatoon based artist, Michèle Mackasey has created a new body of work that puts the spotlight on single mothers. These large portrait paintings of local families capture the bond between mothers and their children, as well as point to the complex family dynamics where the father is literally out of the picture. In Mackasey’s life-size oil and acrylic paintings, the artist imbues her subjects with the dignity and stature that has been associated with portrait painting for centuries. Yet these portraits depict families, who continue to live on the margins, facing prejudice and economic hardship with mothers balancing the roles of sole provider and caregiver. Mackasey utilizes body language, facial expression and composition with great empathy in this moving and insightful series of paintings.
Artists by Artists: Jennifer Crane and Karla Griffin
Coming and Going
September 30, 2011 to January 12, 2012
Coming and Going explores the ever-shifting relationships among people, places and objects, in connection with the notion of home as a construct of personal desire. Artists Jennifer Crane and Karla Griffin navigate both the private and public aspects of the domestic sphere in an attempt to capture the traces of human actions and experience. Focusing on empty interior spaces and abandoned household objects, these artists draw attention to the narrative and theatrical possibilities offered by their subject matter. Narrative is mainly evoked through an absence in the space or of the objects — as in a blank wall without pictures, or furniture without walls. Crane’s interiors reference the absent occupant while Griffin’s work points to the absence of a home and the actions of absent individuals.
Courtney Milne: The Pool Project
June 24 – September 18, 2011
Courtney Milne was one of Canada’s most recognized professional photographers, renowned worldwide for his images of landscape and nature. He made more than 350,000 exposures, photographing in 35 countries and on all seven continents. He wrote more than 180 illustrated articles for photographic magazines and produced numerous popular books of photography of the Canadian prairies, as well as several books of images of global sacred sites and spiritual landscapes. His best-selling 1991 book, The Sacred Earth, features a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
The Pool Project is Milne’s first solo exhibition at the Mendel Art Gallery. This unique collaborative project brings together more than 40 of Milne’s stunning colour photographs of the surface of his outdoor swimming pool, captured over the course of a decade (2000-2010) with the spiritual musings and reflections of a broad array of local and international personalities. The Pool Project is both a celebration of Milne’s unique ability to capture the qualities of light, colour, and texture and an opportunity for visitors of all backgrounds to contemplate aspects of the spiritual through art.
