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Season 2003 – 2004

Vues du paysage David Hall Cityscapes
Patrick Bureau and Micheline Durocher Transmission Frankie Miller and Cynthia van Frank Recent Work
Éric Simon Old School / New School Suzanne Olivier Le grand théâtre des saisons
Annual student show David Lubell Epi formes
Collective Visions A fundraising exhibition Juliana España Keller culebra

Vues du paysage

Curated by: Hedwidge Asselin
Vernissage: Thursday, September 11 at 6 pm
Exhibition: September 5 to 27, 2003
Lecture by curator: Friday, September 19 at 7:30 pm

Exhibition Press Release:

Vues du paysage, a group landscape painting exhibition featuring the work of ten contemporary Quebec artists. The works range from detailed observations of nature (Renée Duval, Suzanne Joubert and Eric Le Ménédeu), to landscapes of the imagination (in Michel Boulanger’s paintings figures emerge from tangled masses of trees and rocks). While vivid colour and expressive brushstrokes qualify many of the paintings (Catherine Bates, Nycol Beaulieu, Kate Busch, Peter Hoffer and Sean Rudman), other, more formally abstract works suggest vast landscapes that blur the boundaries between earth and sky (Dominique Goupil).
“The landscape genre in art history is directly linked to the development of secular thinking, to an affirmation of man’s position in the world”, states Hedwidge Asselin, guest curator at the McClure. What role does the representation of landscape play in a society dominated by new technologies ? The strict geometry and linearity inherent to the technological world is, in a sense, threatening to the environment and consequently has intensified our appreciation of nature.

Born in Montreal, Hedwidge Asselin has taught philosophy and art history in several colleges and universities in Quebec. Ms. Asselin has been a member of the Association Internationale des critiques d’art for over twenty years and has published articles in several art magazines, including Vie des arts, Etc. Montréal, Espace and Vanguard. Ms. Asselin is often invited to curate exhibitions and to participate in selection committees for exhibitions such as the Symposium de la jeune peinture de Baie-Saint-Paul and Les Femmeuses.

David Hall Cityscapes

Vernissage: Thursday, October 2 at 6 pm
Exhibition: October 3 to 25, 2003
Artist’s talk: Thursday, October 9 at 7:30 pm

Exhibition Press Release:

Montreal artist David Hall presents a new series of landscape paintings that combine real and invented buildings within fictitious urban settings. Hall juxtaposes the disparate styles of European, North American and Asian cities, from Modernist skyscrapers to Medieval churches, to show how power and lack of power are symbolized through architecture and urban organization.
Hall’s paintings reveal a rich, varied surface of oil paint in which selected areas are sanded away. What remains is a ghostly image that is either repainted or left vague. The juxtaposition of non-representational marks next to detailed figuration sets up a tension central to the exploration of fantastic and archetypical vs. accurate depictions of real spaces.

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1959, David Hall received a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver, and a Masters of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. In addition to his studio practice, David Hall teaches in the Fine Arts department of Dawson College. His paintings are included in the collections of the Musée des beaux arts de Montréal, Musée du Québec, Canada Council Art Bank, and several other public and private collections. David Hall is represented by Lilian Rodriguez Gallery in Montreal.

Patrick Bureau and Micheline Durocher Transmission

Vernissage: Thursday, October 30 at 6 pm
Exhibition: October 31 to November 22, 2003
Artist’s Talk: Friday, November 7 at 7:30 pm

Exhibition Press Release:

The exhibition, Transmission, features new works by Patrick Bureau (wood and porcelain sculpture) and Micheline Durocher (digital photography). Both artists deal with notions of communication and play that derive from early gendered experiences. Using repetition and visual motifs, they make visible what is invisible and unnamed.
Patrick Bureau’s intricately crafted sculptures resemble oversized sophisticated toys, obsessively assembled. Strewn on the floor like childhood building blocks, bearing titles such as Perpetual Motion Machine and Time Machine #2, they appear to be components of fantastic mechanisms that, once set into motion, would burrow through space and time.
In Reading Lessons, Micheline Durocher’s series of large-format digital photographs portray tattoo-like markings embedded in and on the artist’s neck and skin. The markings are recognizable as seemingly innocent illustrations from children’s schoolbooks. Here however, the images suggest a disturbance in communication, in the ability to speak. Durocher’s deliberate, staged gestures seek to expel the childhood images from an internal vocabulary to the surface of her body.

Patrick Bureau’s sculptures have been exhibited nationally and internationally. His work is in a number of private and public collections, including the Musée du Québec. Bureau received a BFA in Art Education from Concordia University as well as a BFA in Ceramics from the Alberta College of Art & Design. He currently teaches ceramics at the Visual Arts Center.

Micheline Durocher has presented her work across Canada including recent solo exhibitions at Gallery 44 in Toronto and Vu in Quebec. Her work has been collected in both private and public collections. She earned an MFA degree from Concordia University. She currently teaches in the Fine Arts department of Bishop’s University and the Visual Arts Centre.

Frankie Miller and Cynthia van Frank Recent Work

Vernissage: Thursday, November 27 at 6 pm
Exhibition: November 28 to December 20, 2003

Exhibition Press Release:

The McClure is pleased to present a duo exhibition of recent work by Montreal painters Frankie Miller and Cynthia van Frank. Working in still life and portraiture, the artists examine acts from the everyday, nourishment and the body in repose, that occur both intimately and socially.
Frankie Miller’s bold, contemporary still lives of food create a parallel between culinary and painterly sensuality. Various stages of meals, from fruit to soup, are situated in semi-abstract colour fields suggesting tabletops. The non-narrative context and the rough, painterly application of materials creates a heightened perception of the physical properties of familiar subject matter.

Working in oil pastel on paper, Cynthia van Frank renders her subjects with compassion, often placing them in poses of abandonment or nurturing, with particular attention given to the vulnerability of human flesh. In several of the paintings, a woman with closed eyes lies on root covered forest ground, integrated into her environment; nonetheless, a feeling of isolation lingers.

Frankie Miller and Cynthia van Frank received Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees from Concordia University (in 1982 and 1984 respectively). Miller previously studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. Following her undergraduate degree, van Frank also studied in the USA at the New York Studio School in 1985. Miller and van Frank’s paintings may be seen in several private and public collections including the Musée du Québec Collection prêt d’oeuvres d’art.

Éric Simon Old School / New School

Vernissage: Thursday, January 8 at 6 pm
Exhibition: January 9 to 31, 2004
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, January 15 at 7:30 pm

Exhibition Press Release:

The McClure Gallery is pleased to present Old School / New School, a new series of portrait paintings by Eric Simon. Simon situates the tradition of portraiture in the context of identification photography. Each work is comprised of sixteen paintings documenting various points of view of the subject rotating on an axis.
Governments, financial institutions and corporations have always gathered vast amounts of information in order to better understand and control individuals. Today ID cards, customs controls, credit research and the increased presence of surveillance cameras, in addition to the various means of identification used by the police (mug shots, composite portraits, fingerprints, etc.) are part of our daily existence. While these documents are not considered within the domain of art history, they are nonetheless part of a history of the representation of individuals. In this sense they are revealing of the way people are perceived in a given society at a given time.

Eric Simon lives and works in Hudson, Quebec. He received a BFA from Concordia University in 1984 and an MFA from Université du Québec à Montréal in 2000. He participated in the 2001 Symposium international de nouvelle peinture in Baie-St-Paul and in several production residencies at the Atelier d’estampe Sagamie in Alma. Simon’s work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. He teaches drawing, painting and printmaking, currently at John-Abbott College.

Suzanne Olivier Le grand théátre des saisons

Vernissage: Thursday, February 5 at 6 pm
Exhibition: February 6 to 28, 2004

Exhibition Press Release:

The McClure Gallery is pleased to present a new series of large-format oil paintings and dry pastels by Suzanne Olivier. Olivier paints landscapes of the imagination, fantastically melancholic, sun-drenched or tormented, and always completely unreal. Her sprawling, lushly coloured paintings illustrate her poetic sensitivity to the rhythms found in nature. The viewer is immersed in a sensual world of fields and water, trees and shrubs, skies and mountains.

Suzanne Olivier, born in Montreal, presently lives and works in Godmanchester, Quebec. She received a fine arts degree from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in 1965. From 1967 to 1975 she worked in the animation department at the National Film Board, and from then on she has devoted herself to painting. Olivier has presented her work in numerous exhibitions including solo exhibitions at La Folie des Arts Gallery in Montreal and Marianne Friedland Gallery in Toronto. Her work is included in many public collections including those of the Canada Council Art Bank, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Teleglobe Canada and Xerox Canada. Suzanne Olivier is represented by La Folie des Arts in Montreal and La Malbaie.

Patrick visentin phylum

Vernissage: Thursday, March 4 at 6 pm
Exhibition: March 5 to 27, 2004
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, March 11 at 7:30 pm

Exhibition Press Release:

The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by Patrick Visentin. Visentin’s current practice examines the nature of visual imagery used in science. Imagery produced by and for the scientific community often goes unquestioned by the untrained as well as the trained eye. In this recent series of digital photographs, Visentin has created and documented his own Phyla of organisms. Six small colour lambda prints and six large black and white laminated ink jet prints of amoeba and tentacle-like organisms float against stark white or black backgrounds. Art and science, often polarized as two distinct worlds, coalesce in Visentin’s use of organic hand-crafted sculptures as subject matter for smooth, digitally altered and laminated prints.
Creativity: Germinating and Developing Artistic Ideas
In conjunction with his exhibition, Patrick Visentin is giving a workshop at the Visual Arts Centre on Sunday, March 21 and 28, from 10 am to 5 pm. $ 185 + materials. Through the use of drawing, collage, sculpture and print, students will extend and explore the nature of the work of art, with an emphasis on developing new projects from already existing works.

Patrick Visentin is an artist and educator living and working in Montreal. He received an MFA in Print Media from Concordia University in 2001, a BFA from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick and a BA from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose work can include anything from drawing, print and photography to video, installation and performance. He has participated in various group and solo exhibitions throughout Canada and the United States. His work is included in both private and public collections including La Bibliothèque National du Québec. Visentin recently co-curated Shout at Eternity, a group exhibition of over 40 artists in Montreal

Annual Student Show

Vernissage: Thursday, April 1st at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 2 to 17, 2004

Exhibition Press Release:

Students registered in the School of Art’s winter session are invited to exhibit their work in our Annual Student Exhibition. The exhibition, which includes hundreds of works in a wide variety of media, gives students the experience of seeing their work in the context of a professional gallery. It also provides an opportunity for students and public to see the great diversity of creative activity that takes place at the Centre.

David Lubell epi fromes

Vernissage: Thursday, April 22 at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 23 to May 15, 2004
Artist’s talk: Thursday, April 29, 7:30 pm

Exhibition Press Release:

The McClure Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Quebec artist David Lubell. Situated in the artist’s ongoing investigation of aquatic environments and more recently, epiphytic plants, Epi formes is a series of ten large-format acrylic paintings influenced by the sensual lines and hues of the orchid plant. Bold elliptical, rectangular and organic forms, oscillating between figuration and abstraction, fill the surface of the canvas. Layers of brush marks undulate over the paintings similar to the movement of these aerial organisms in the wind. A colorful mixture of brush metaphors and figurative forms, these paintings reveal transitory shards of depicted moments.

Born in Montreal, David Lubell lives and works in Baie D’Urfé. He received his BFA in 1983 and MFA in 1986 from Concordia University. His work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions primarily in Quebec. In addition to his art practice Lubell has extensive experience teaching drawing, painting and printmaking at several art schools including Vanier and Dawson Colleges and Concordia University. He currently teaches at John Abbott College in St. Anne de Bellevue. His work may be found in various collections including the Canada Council Art Bank.

Collective Visions a fundraising exhibition

Vernissage: May 20
Exhibition: May 19 to 29

Exhibition Press Release:

The McClure Gallery walls are red again; over 100 works hang salon style, from a miniature Marian Wagschal to a large Dana Velan in the fundraising exhibition, Collective Visions. Opening vernissage and gala event take place May 20th; tickets are $25.00. Exhibition runs from May 19th to 29th. Call 488-9558 for more information or visit our web site at www.visualartscentre.ca
`”This is our third Collective Visions fundraiser”, notes director Victoria LeBlanc. “We kick off the exhibition with a gala evening; and there’s usually a line up to get in because this is a rare opportunity to see the works of some of Montreal’s best artists gathered together in one space and the prices are very, very reasonable.”
The Visual Arts Centre is a non-profit cultural space and special fundraising events are crucial to the Centre’s continued operations. “We’ve been around for almost 60 years,” comments LeBlanc. “Our School of Art teaches over 3,000 students annually. We employ over 50 Montreal artists part time on our faculty. Our McClure Gallery has become one of Montreal’s most respected venues for contemporary art. We have outreach programmes, summer camp for kids, workshops, lectures, poetry readings, etc. We really do contribute to the cultural life of this city.”
Sixty percent of the proceeds go to support the Visual Arts Centre. Thirty percent of each sale of artwork is for the artist. Ten percent supports the Centre’s Outreach activities that offer specialized courses to teens at risk or with special needs.
Over 100 artists are participating, including, among others, Harold Klunder, Marion Wagschal, Andrea Szilasi, Michael Merrill, Renée Duval, Barry Allikas, Peter Hoffer, Dennis Ekstedt, John Drew Munro. John Heward, Alison Katz, Eric Simon, Micheline Durocher, Sara Gersovitz, Pierre Henry, Mary Hayes, Yechel Gagnon, Dana Velan.

Juliana España Keller culebra

Vernissage and Gala Evening Exhibition: June 4 to 23, 2004
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, June 10 at 7:30 pm

Exhibition Press Release:

The McClure Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Montreal visual artist, Juliana España Keller. The exhibition includes both a video installation and photographic light boxes.
In the large gallery: culebra: eye of the needle, a digital video projection immerses the viewer into the physical world of the tattooed woman. Keller suggests that the tattoo has transformed in concept from a mark of patriotism or rebellion to a more potent symbol of self-exploration, social status and self-empowerment.
In the small gallery: woman willing to defend her hotel displays one large sculptural light box and two smaller mounted light boxes illuminating photographic images of the artist during a performance in Mexico city in 2003. The performance concentrates on the points of friction between public and private realms.
Artist’s talk: The public is invited to a slide presentation by the artist on Thursday, June 10th at 7:30 pm. Keller will discuss her work in installation, performance, video and photography, in the context of representation, identity and a reconsideration of traditional portraiture and masquerade.

Born in England, Juliana España Keller lives and works in Montreal. She received a BFA in painting and drawing (2000), and an MFA in sculpture from Concordia University (2003). In 2003, Keller presented a solo exhibition at Art Mûr Gallery and participated in Voila Québec, a Mexico-Canada exchange, in Mexico city. In the same year she participated in a residency at the Atlantic Centre for the Arts in Florida and presented a video work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Keller has also curated exhibitions in Montreal including The Transpecies Collective in 2003.
More information can be found on her website: JULIANAESPANAKELLER.COM

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