Winter Exhibitions

Marie Lannoo, Through and Through and Through #22, 2009, mixed media. Image courtesy of the artist.

 

Marie Lannoo: Through and Through and Through
January 22, 2010 to April 5, 2010

Virtual Tour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrdUHR3BQeQ

Saskatoon artist Marie Lannoo is one of Canada’s best-known abstract painters. Over the past seven years she has developed a series of paintings that use transparent, reflective, acrylic mediums that allow her and her audiences to explore light and depth of field on the picture plane. Through this innovative technique, Lannoo’s paintings often “spill” an added dimension of colour beyond the frame onto to the wall or nearby environment. The stunning results of Lannoo’s endeavours led to her inclusion as the only female Saskatchewan artist in historian Roald Nasgaard’s influential book Abstract Painting in Canada. Nasgaard will also contribute an essay to the publication planned for this exhibition. Over the past two years, Lannoo has been experimenting with a new material that increases the dimensional capabilities of reflected colour.

 

Working with beam line scientists and physicists at the Canadian Light Source Synchrotron in Saskatoon, a facility in which light reveals the subatomic particle structures of matter, she has created a new body of sculptures that diffract colours from incoming light sources. The resulting colour reflections form caustic or logarithmic spirals whose visual impact is mesmerizing. Through and Through and Through will present a number of these new sculptural works, as well as a new series of paintings that “turn colour on” sequentially, similar to the evolution of cells, through the artist’s painstaking layering of colour in specific patterns that, depending on the quality of light and the viewer’s position, cause different patterns and colours to appear.

 

Marie Lannoo was born in Delhi, Ontario in 1954. She has an Honors Degree in French from the University of Saskatchewan and also enrolled in the MFA program there. She has further training at The Banff Centre and in Virton, Belgium. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally. This exhibition is her first solo exhibition at the Mendel Art Gallery and is curated by Dan Ring.

 

Ed Pien, Haven, 2007–2008, mixed media. Image courtesy of the artist.

 

Ed Pien: Haven of Delight
January 22, 2010 to April 5, 2010

 

Audio Artist Feature: http://www.mendel.ca/wordpress/?p=675

 

Ed Pien is one of Canada’s best-known contemporary artists. For over twenty-five years, Pien has succeeded in creating his own unique, phantasmagorical visual language of tales and myths and half-human and half-animal figures, plunging the viewer into worlds which spark the imagination. Ed Pien: Haven of Delight features the artist’s drawings, installations and paper cutouts, the latter inspired by the traditional Chinese art of paper cuts.

 

In addition to large cut-paper frescoes, the exhibition features the first Canadian showing of Haven, a work that was created for the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington State. This imposing installation includes five interlocking paper structures that form a labyrinthine space bounded by jagged hedges, into which visitors are invited to venture. Inside the structures, sound and video elements intermingle with paper vines from which various peculiar figures emerge.

 

Ed Pien: Haven of Delight is curated by Eve-Lyne Beaudry. The exhibition is organized and circulated by the Musée d’art de Joliette in Quebec.

 

Ed Pien was born in Taiwan in 1958 and has lived in Canada since 1969. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Western Ontario, and a Master’s of Fine Arts from York University. He has exhibited in Canada, China, France, Germany, Mexico, and the
United States.

Brendan Tang, Manga Ormolu Ver. 4.0-g, 2007. Image courtesy of the artist.

 

Diyan Achjadi and Brendan Tang: Sugar Bombs

Guest Curated by Kristen Lambertson

January 22, 2010 to April 5, 2010

 

Sugar Bombs features new work by two of British Columbia’s exciting young rising artists, Diyan Achjadi and Brendan Tang. These artists combine traditionally minor fine art techniques with pop culture visual vocabulary, creating a fusion that is truly 21st century Canadian.

 

The artworks in Sugar Bombs invite us into an imaginative terrain where innocence and beauty meet violence. Achjadi’s inkjet prints and Tang’s conceptual ceramic sculptures juxtapose childlike playfulness with worldly tensions. They feature candy-coloured rockets, imploding robots, and pink hued military parades. These elements direct our attention to the presence of militarism in popular culture, questioning its role in the construction of collective and personal identity. Borrowing and combining aspects of diverse cultures, from France to Indonesia, the works in Sugar Bombs critique racial and gender stereotypes and militaristic patriotism, signaling a possible reconfiguration of identity.

 

Diyan Achjadi has a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York City and an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal. She is now based in Vancouver.

 

Brendan Tang has a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville. He is now based in Kamloops.

 

Leslie Gale Saunders, Blizzard, 1942, gelatin silver print on paper. Collection of the Mendel Art Gallery.

The Jessie S. Saunders gift 1981.

 

Permanent Collection: Getting There
January 22, 2010 to April 5, 2010

 

Opening Reception: Friday, January 22 at 8pm

This exhibition brings together a range of artworks, historical and contemporary, from the Mendel Art Gallery’s permanent collection that share a common subject of a road, alley, trail or pathway.

 

Roads, alleys, trails and pathways can be lifelines that physically connect people and places. They can also be a point of pause and reflection connecting the present with memories of the past. Choosing which road or path to travel down can potentially alter the course of one’s future, hopefully for the better. A road can be heavy with metaphor in an artwork (life, destiny, adventure, hope, danger, mystery...) or a road can be simply a road.

 

Guest Curated by Linda Sawchyn, Getting There includes a selection of photographs, prints, water colours, paintings and other works by James Davies, Robert Hurley, Doris Wall Larson, Orest Semchisen, Leslie Saunders, Hilda Stewart and others.

 

Ruth Sulatisky, Pantherette, 2009, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

 

Iris Hauser and Ruth Sulatisky

Artists by Artists: A Mendel mentorship program
January 22, 2010 to April 5, 2010

 

Opening Reception: Friday, January 22 at 8pm

 

Iris Hauser and Ruth Sulatisky present a body of work that reflects their mutual interest in figurative painting and the pursuit of technical proficiency. Informed by the study of philosophy, social mores and the complexities of human psychology the mentorship pair seek to explore the human condition.

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Upcoming Exhibitions April 16 to June 13