Season 2015 – 2016
October 2 to 24, 2015
November 20 to December 16, 2015
MacLean Navigations
Vernissage: Thursday, January 7 at 6 pm
Exhibition: January 8 to 30
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, January 14 at 7 pm
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Navigations featuring the recent work of Maclean. Approximately seventeen oil paintings are included in the exhibition. Here, as in the past, Maclean explores the symbolic potential of painting through the visual language of road signs, astronomical charts and the geometry of constellations. His work represents a continuing meditation on our relationship to modernity, the land and modern industrial civilization.
While the most familiar aspect of Maclean`s work is the road sign imagery – in particular his
A R Tstop signs (2000-2001) – in this exhibition the artist moves back and forth from the obviously iconic to more recombinant metaphors, resulting in a resonant navigation or negotiation of themes. Maclean notes, “I am as inspired by mundane everyday urban fabric and other material detritus as I am by historical works of masters and dabblers in art history.” He subsequently quotes, borrows and steals from his various sources, in the hope of stumbling upon “unexpected results that will confound as much as they may please.” Maclean`s paintings are often as reductive visually as they are poetically enigmatic. Indeed, it is through such formal simplicity and equilibrium that he is able to visually articulate the confounding reflection he seeks. In What on Earth is Going On, the road and its signage have been deconstructed such that any collective interpretive language or strategy through which we might negotiate the world is effectively collapsed. In works such as The Way (after Vincent), the conflating of art historical references with the starkness of urban signage suggests the way forward is far from clear; the transformed iconic tree provokes a profound reflection on our contemporary world. Maclean`s on-going exploration of these themes is undertaken in a singular painterly language that is both visually honed and arresting.
Maclean has been working in Montreal since 1996, shortly after completing his undergraduate degree in fine arts at the University of Manitoba earlier that year. He has exhibited his work with Galerie Roger Bellemare (now Galerie Roger Bellemare and Christian Lambert) since 2004. He lives in the Mile End with his wife and son.
Dil Hildebrand Whilst Hanging From a Round Planet
Vernissage: Thursday, February 4, 2016 at 6 pm
Exhibition: February 5 to 27
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, February 11 at 7 pm
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Whilst Hanging From a Round Planet featuring recent paintings and collages by Dil Hildebrand. Hildebrand’s paintings and drawings centre on the architectural and constructed image. The paintings that comprise the main part of his work mimic the scale and structure of architecture, framing the body in life-sized patterns. Inspired originally by ancient Roman trompe-l’oeil frescoes and informed by a diversity of other influences and interests including Henri Matisse and modern architectural movements, Hildebrand explores the shared lineage of architectural formation, in particular, the window / door motif, with painted images.
This exhibition takes its title from a passage in The Nature of the Physical World by physicist Sir Arthur Eddington. He describes how the seemingly simple act of entering a room becomes a series of complex reflections for the physicist, as he considers the role that gravity, the rotation of the earth around the sun, and the fourth dimension all play in the movement of his body into a constructed space, writing:
“I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun – a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet, head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body.”
The artist notes that such paralyzing ambivalence can in a sense serve to describe “the act of making and perhaps even encountering paintings – a physical revulsion to the prospect of being transformed by the experience.” The sense of the body’s instability in motion described so eloquently by Eddington finds its parallel in the dizzying experience of entering the pictorial space of Hildebrand’s paintings and collages, where the illusion of varying planes of space is contradicted by punctuations of flat line, and textural elements are just as likely to be realized by the collaging of materials as by the skillful painting of a convincing illusion. Such corporeal instability in viewing the work is both enriched and countered by the artist’s carefully nuanced palette which adds an element of resonant poetry to the mix.
Dil Hildebrand is an artist living and working in Montreal, Canada. Hildebrand’s work has been shown internationally and has been collected by major public institutions throughout Canada. Hildebrand is an MFA graduate of Concordia University, Montreal, and has been awarded a number of distinguished grants and awards including the International Residency at Acme Studios, London UK (2013); the Canada Council for the Arts (2010); the Banff Centre Thematic Residency (2009); Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2009) and was winner of the RBC National Painting Competition (2006).
The artist would like to thank Pierre-Francois Ouellette art contemporain and Canada Council for the Arts.
Sonia Haberstich Accepter le désordre
Vernissage: Thursday, March 3, 2016 at 6 pm
Exhibition: March 4 to 26
The McClure gallery is pleased to present the recent work of Sonia Haberstich, in which some three-hundred richly coloured sculptural and painted elements come together as a dynamic installation. The artist creates an environment where visual and tactile interactions between different forms are at the centre of the viewer’s experience. The installation suggests possible visual parallels such as with certain pathologies, cells in mutation, or photographs taken under a microscope.
The visceral and visual impact of these hybrid installations is multi-layered, provocative. The artist notes that, often, the paths we follow to access buried things are tortuous. Visible worlds are governed by invisible forces. The depths of the oceans and the bowels of the earth, the infinitesimally small, and the infinitely far are manifested around us by unpredictable actions. The inner body shelters secrets which appear at the surface in completely unexpected ways. An incessant war is waged in service of the maintenance of a constantly oscillating equilibrium, an equilibrium that keeps us alive.
“My paintings surprise me. I paint in order to see them emerge. They seem to originate from a generally foreign place. I think of my mother. Of illness. Of bacteria. Of viruses. Of the past. Of secrets. Of past thoughts. Of silence. Of confidential meetings. Of decisions made in secret. And of all the things that get away to break out at the surface.
I pour streams of paint. I make objects with plaster and cover them with colour. All of these forms co-habit the exhibition space. I know nothing more than this. Words slide off of these surfaces. It is not necessary to know anything more.”
Sonia Haberstich obtained a BFA in 2004 and a MFA in Painting from Concordia University in 2008. She has had many solo exhibitions and her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions in Quebec and abroad. Sonia Haberstich has received many grants and her work has been the subject of publications. She lives and works in Hudson, Quebec.
Annual Student Exhibition
Vernissage: Thursday, April 7, 2016 at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 8 to 23
Students registered in the Visual Arts Centre’s School of Art are invited to exhibit their work. The exhibition includes a variety of media and gives students the opportunity to exhibit in the context of a professional gallery. It’s also a chance to appreciate the great diversity of creative activity that takes place at the Centre.
galeriemcclure@centredesartsvisuels.ca
Philippe Caron Lefebvre Instinct
Vernissage : Thursday, May 5th, at 6 pm
Exhibition : May 6 – 28, 2016
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present the recent work of Montreal artist Philippe Caron Lefebvre. This installation-based exhibition includes several large-scale sculptures together with collage and graphic wall pieces. Made of diverse materials including wood, ceramic, and polyurethane, Caron Lefebvre’s work walks the line between figurative and abstract, natural and artificial, primeval past and fantastical future.
A central theme is the concept of mimesis as an evolutionary process in nature, wherein plants and animals survive through biological adaptation, learning to grow and change in relation to their environments. This mimesis goes beyond simple imitation, involving the position of the body in space, the acquisition of language, mental processes, and synchronicity.
The artist is also inspired by science fiction literature and its themes of alternative futures, dystopian societies, new technology, and alien life-forms. With the strange, hybrid forms of his artwork, the artist transforms the exhibition space into a futurist ecological system, where wood is transformed into rhizomatic structures and polyurethane moulds itself into artificial coral reefs.
Philippe Caron Lefebvre holds an MFA from Concordia University and a BFA from UQAM. His works have been exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions in Québec, Mexico and Japan. He recently undertook residencies in Japan and in Mexico. He lives and works in Montreal.
Jaswant Guzder Navigating East West Hybridities
Vernissage: Thursday, June 2, 2016 at 6 pm
Exhibition: June 3-23
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, June 16 at 7 pm
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present the work of Jaswant Guzder, artist, writer, internationally renowned psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. This exhibition showcases a large number of works on paper created over several years.
Guzder’s art is intuitive and expressive. She employs the simplest of means: ink, watercolour, brushes and paper. To these she may add collage. Intermittently, she works on large canvas. Regardless of surface, the fluid mediums of ink and watercolour are perfectly suited to the articulation of a world beyond the ordinary, a watery psychic realm where boundaries are loosened as the self shifts in constant metamorphosis.
Much of Guzder’s artwork flows out of, and responds to her clinical work with refugees who have suffered displacement, loss and trauma. Their plight and stories of migration, however, are also hers. A child of South Asian parents, she understands first hand the diasporic struggle to belong, the quest for identity and the urgent need to define home.
The artist creates in series; the work may take a month, a week, a day. Such intense immersion encourages free association, plummeting the artist into a place where intuition, memory and felt experience converse and reveal. She continually navigates “east/west hybridities,” working with themes of exile, displacement and vulnerability and mining a wealth of cultural cosmologies, ideas and memories towards a visual mythos that poetically explores the struggles of transcultural identity.
Dr. Jaswant Guzder is Head of Child Psychiatry and Director of Childhood Disorders Day Hospital at the Centre for Child Development and Mental Health, Senior Consultant and former founding Co-Director of Cultural Consultation Service, Director for Family Therapy Residency Fellowship in Family Therapy at the Jewish General Hospital Department of Psychiatry. She is Professor, McGill Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, Associate of McGill School of Social Work and psychoanalyst involved in clinical work, teaching, research and global mental health projects (mainly in Jamaica and India currently). Despite her many professional activities, she has sustained an active art practice that reflects her work with multicultural communities and refugee populations. Guzder has exhibited her work widely over the years in Canada and abroad in both group and solo exhibitions as well as contributing illustrations and cover designs for books and publications. Jaswant Guzder received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013 in recognition of her outstanding contributions to McGill and to the community at large.
Navigating East West Hybridities – Jaswant Guzder
68 pages (53 colour reproductions)
french / english
ISBN: 978 –1-926492 -09-4
McClure Gallery, 2016
available: amazon .ca
$ 24.95 + tx
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