May 2006

Requicken: Glenna Matoush

Carleton University Art Gallery: 15 May – 27 August 2006

Glenna Matoush My Great Grandfather, Chief Yellow Head, Who’s Buried Under McDonalds on Yonge Street in Toronto (1995)

Born on the Rama Reserve in Ontario, the Ojibway artist Glenna Matoush studied art at the Elliot Lake School of Fine Arts, the University of Alberta and the Guilde Graphique in Montreal in the late 1970s and 1980s. Matoush raised her family in Mistissini, Quebec, and has since become a resident of Montreal, where she has long been active in both the arts and Aboriginal communities.
Trained as a printmaker but now working primarily as a painter, Matoush’s expressionistic style moves fluidly between the figurative and the abstract. Her work is informed directly by nature; she often collages birch bark, leaves, earth, and stones into her paintings. Matoush addresses contemporary social and political Aboriginal issues in her work, including the environmental destruction she has witnessed in Cree territory in Northern Quebec, and the despair caused by AIDS and the reclamation of culture. ...

http://www.carleton.ca

French Master Drawings. From Manet and Degas to Matisse and Picasso

Staten Museum for Kunst: 12 May - 8 October 2006

Pablo Picasso, Naked Woman lying by Window, 1971.

This exhibition provides a rare insight into the Royal Collection of Prints and Drawing's rich selection of drawings by French 19th and 20th century Masters. Moving from works by Gustave Moreau, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the dawning Impressionism in Degas, Cézanne, and Gauguin to later 20th century icons like Matisse, Picasso, and Picabia, the exhibition provides a nuanced picture of one of the most breathtaking chapters in art history.

http://www.smk.dk

Lydia Schouten: „Le jardin secret” (The Secret Garden)

Ludwig Múzeum: 12 May – 2 July 2006

“A group of people pass through the forest, bird-watching. Their excursion, which provides a way of escaping reality and seeking the beauty of existence, lasts from early morning till late at night. As the cyclical tour advances, the atmosphere becomes unclear, the people ultimately transformed into wanderers. They hang around a place, stirring under leaves, knocking at trees. Occasionally someone disappears in the woods for a period of time, only to join the group again in another forest. Now and then an animal appears, observed by the group, while mist starts to rise and fill all the screens, followed by a mini-drama. The plot brings about a sense of uncertainty and threat. With the end of a mini-drama, the image automatically returns to the wandering in the woods. It is a tour doomed to failure, in which the inability to change the status quo is translated into attempts to talk to birds and nature. ...

http://www.ludwigmuseum.hu

Lyn Carter - Textiles to camouflage the everyday

Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery: Friday, May 12, 2006 To Sunday, June 25, 2006

Lyn Carter's work combines an intricate textile surface with unusual forms. Pattern becomes a codified language that is stretched like a skin over undulating and pendulous shapes. For this exhibition the artist has created ornate fabric sleeves that cover and contain inanimate everyday objects - in this case Dollar store plates, bowls and platters. The artist arranges these pregnant pouches in elaborate mappings or constellations on the wall of the Gallery. ...

http://www.tomthomson.org

Back/Flash

Dalhousie Art Gallery: 12 May to 2 July

David Garneau video still from Black Pepper 1999 image courtesy of the Walter Phillips Gallery

Back/Flash is an examination of aboriginal media art ranging from early video production to ground-breaking video installation, virtual reality, net art, and digital works. By turns amusing, accusing, enlightening and provocative, this exhibition presents installations by Thirza Cuthand, David Garneau, Zachery Longboy, Mike MacDonald, Buffy Saint-Marie, and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, as well as computer-based works by Skawennati Tricia Fragnito and Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew and single channel video by Cat Cayuga, Dana Claxton, Stephen Foster, Zacharius Kanuk. Steven Loft, Darlene Naponse and Shelley Niro. ...

http://artgallery.dal.ca

Seeker, Sentry, Sage: Shades of Islam in Contemporary B.C. Art

Maltwood art museum & gallery: May. 11, 2006 - Jun. 19, 2006

From May 11-June 19 the Maltwood Art Museum and Gallery will introduce contemporary artists whose lives have been influenced by Islam and are now living in British Columbia. The art works by the fifteen artists in this exhibition evoke multiple cultural influences, from numerous branches and historical periods of Islamic contexts. With family roots and histories that spin threads among India, Afghanistan, Africa, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Iran, England and Canada, some are descended from families who arrived in Canada generations ago; others arrived a few decades ago. ...

http://www.maltwood.uvic.ca

Hofburg hosts exhibition by Russian artist Mikhail Evstafiev

Hofburg Congress Centre in Vienna, Austria: through May 2006

An exhibition of paintings by Russian-born artist Mikhail Evstafiev titled "Somewhere else" will be showing at the Hofburg Congress Centre in Vienna, Austria, through May 2006.
Over 30 paintings presented in the show have been created since 2003, when the artist moved to Vienna from Washington, D.C.
Mikhail Evstafiev's paintings and photographs have been exhibited in different countries, including in Austria, China, Russia and the United States, in places such as the State Kremlin Palace, the Maly Manezh Exhibition Hall and the Central House of Artists in Moscow, and in the Grand Central Terminal in NYC.

http://www.evstafiev.com/

Charles Sheeler: Across Media

National Gallery of Art, Washington: May 7–August 27, 2006

Charles Sheeler Classic Landscape, 1931 Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth 2000.39.2

This is the first exhibition to focus exclusively on the complex, often paradoxical relationships between photography, film, drawing, printmaking, and painting that were so central to Sheeler's art. A celebration of the formal clarity and beauty of Sheeler's works, the exhibition will build on a core of masterpieces recently added to the National Gallery of Art collections, including the magnificent painting Classic Landscape, 1931, the masterful Conté crayon drawings Interior with Stove, 1932, and Counterpoint, 1949, as well as three striking examples of the artist's "Doylestown" photographs. Highlights include the finest works from the series of paintings and drawings inspired by Sheeler's photographs of the River Rouge plant, commissioned by Ford Motor Company in 1927. Also featured is Manhatta (1920), a collaboration between Sheeler and Paul Strand that is regarded as the first avant-garde film made in the United States. The exhibition will conclude with images inspired by Sheeler's experiments with montage in the 1940s and 1950s. ...

http://www.nga.gov

The Painted Photograph

Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography: 5 May to 19 November 2006

David Bierk Petrified Tree, California 1989 Oil on photographs on canvas 133.4 x 91.4 cm Collection of Elizabeth Bierk Photo: Michael Cullen, Trent Photographics

This exhibition presents the beautiful works of David Bierk, Sarah Nind, and Jaclyn Shoub that mix photography and painting. Their use of both media expresses contemporary concerns about the relationship between ideas of nature and culture, originality and appropriation, and tradition and modernity. Sarah Nind understands the photograph as an accurate, albeit static, reproduction of reality, one that must be augmented in order to convey ideas of a more spiritual nature. In the work of Jaclyn Shoub, painterly processes provide a way to intervene with imagery in order to create a more personal statement about the subject matter. The anxiety and sense of loss linked to technology is explored in the work of David Bierk. By incorporating direct references to art history and painting, Bierk offers the viewer a sense of tradition and lasting cultural values. The photograph, as a modern technology and image-making device, therefore, is in direct dialogue with its pictorial antecedents. ...

http://cmcp.gallery.ca

Making China in China Paul Mathieu

RICHMOND art gallery: May 2 – June 1

The evolution of Paul Mathieu’s ceramic practice is articulated over the history of its production. He does not simply make ceramic pieces, functional or otherwise, rather the fabrication is a part of his observation and interrogation of the place of ceramics and pottery in the world and in art. He has worked with serial production, commodification and the consequent questioning of originality and authenticity. The works in this exhibition have been produced in a factory in Jinghezhen, China, a city that has many factories and workshops that have been functioning for 1,000 years. Mathieu first visited this area of China eight years ago and returned annually to produce this work in the factories. ...

http://www.richmondartgallery.org