Categories
Exhibitions 2020 - 2021

xX_My_Paintings_UWU_Xx@hotmail.com

Hannah Paige

Gallery View:

Artist statement:

My work aims to capture the technological world and internet culture through the medium of paint. Often times, my art is used to critique and relate art conventions and art history to digital landscapes. This practise also stems from the impulsion to document fleeting digital phenomenon that may be erased by technological advances. The digital images presented in the medium of paint creates a humorous meta-narrative involving the viewer and the image. Exhibition xX_My_Paintings_UWU_Xx@hotmail.com reflects these themes. I have dubbed this genre of art Cyber Pop Art, and I hope that these pieces can become a catalyst to modern-day pop art.

To begin, the piece Untitled – Paint is a critique on painting and photography in the form of an old Windows XP laptop. The painting depicts the classic windows desktop photograph Bliss being obscured by the open Paint software window. Within the painting window is a an abstract painting form. This is nostalgic for kids from the early 2000s, as it was common for children to scribble within the paint application and then fill the lines in with colour using the paint bucket tool.

Forged Painting is a meta painting replicated from a screenshot from the video game Animal Crossing Wild World (2005) on the Nintendo DS. Within the game, the player may purchase paintings that are duplicates of paintings from real-life art historical canon. For instance, the player may purchase paintings such as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, and many more. When purchasing these works, the player must decipher if the painting is the original or a forgery by identifying the discrepancies of the painting. If the player buys a forged work and tries to sell it to the shopkeepers Timmy and Tommy, the player will be presented with the text “This is a forged painting!…forged.”

After Edward Ruscha is a parody work on pop artist Edward Ruscha’s OOF. Additionally, the title After Edward Ruscha is a play on Sherrie Levine’s work After Edward Weston, where Levine appropriated photographs by Edward Weston in order to give new context to the work. Much like the original OOF painting, After Edward Ruscha displays the three-letter word POG in virgin ultramarine blue and light cadmium yellow paint. The word POG is used in the gaming community, particularly on the online streaming platform Twitch. POG stands for play of the game and is an abbreviation of PogChamp. These words are used in order to refer to excitement or hype. If a viewer were to type :pog: into a Twitch chat, the text would convert into an emoticon of a man’s face filled with surprise and excitement. This is similar to typing “<3” in a text and having it convert into a heart emoticon. With that being said, the canvas parallels the keyboard. The word POG on the canvas elicits the emoticon in the viewers brain, much like the typed work on the keyboard present the emoticon in a chat. Similar to OOF, the painting does not need to depict an image because the text forces the image to appear in the viewers mind rather than visually in front of them.

Wingdings is based on an old Windows 95 screen. The aim of this piece was to document the aesthetic of old desktops. This work documents the iconic old teal green desktop background that was common in mid 90s desktop computers, akin to modern day colour block paintings by Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko and Yves Klein. Furthermore, there is a secret message written in the font WingDings on the desktop that reads “LOL this generic green background was actually really hard to paint. not as hard as these wingding characters tho. what even are these XD?”. This work was created as a companion piece to Untitled – Paint. Displayed on a smaller canvas than Untitled – Paint, the work shows the changing of screen display sizes as technology has advanced.

Finally, the three Word Art paintings are pieces taken from a wider incomplete series of paintings that I have been working on that reflect the word art options from Microsoft Publisher 2007.

Instagram: @xx_hann_art_xx

Categories
Exhibitions 2020 - 2021

A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

The following exhibition consists of work created by the Specialized Studio cohort of 2020/2021.

Categories
Exhibitions 2020 - 2021

Technology and Failure


Emma Ongman

Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan once argued that it is not the content of a message that holds importance; but instead, the characteristics of the medium itself. In other words, “the medium is the message”. 

In his essay, Neo-Materialism, Part I: The Commodity and the Exhibition, Joshua Simon points out that the world is full of commodities that influence how we interact with the world. There is no better example to use here than the technology that is currently allowing me to write this statement and currently allowing us to communicate with one another from our homes and through our screens as we survive a global pandemic.

In this exhibition, I am interested in exploring the potential of photographic technology beyond its intended use and its capability to imitate real life. More specifically, I am interested in creating photographs that speak to their own creation. Technology and Failure is an installation that consists of scans of corrupted images that were misprinted, scratched, and covered in dust and fingerprints.


emmaongman.com | @emmaongman

Categories
Exhibitions 2020 - 2021

Working On it


By Emily Escoffery

Virtual Reality Gallery (above): click on the arrow to enter the scene, click and drag to change your point of view.

This body of work explores both colour and the application of paint.

Follow Emily on Instagram here.

Categories
Exhibitions 2020 - 2021

Recuperare

Recuperare

Mary Kroetsch

“To Recover”

Heading out from your home today, you return and it’s gone.  Nothing left.  It is not hard to visualize this with one global catastrophe happening upon another and affecting many lives left homeless.  It could be a natural disaster or war, but when it is safe to return, you rummage through what is left, looking for pieces of you to salvage, hoping for just one thing of what was.

Home has and always will be where your story is.

Preserve what was

Archeological Dig

Build what can be

Categories
Exhibitions 2020 - 2021

Some Thoughts on Colour

Rylee Rumble and Emily Escoffery

Emily and Rylee are both painters currently continuing to develop their practice within Specialized Studio. Their work shares similarities when exploring the properties of colour in relation to shape and memory. Rylee’s paintings comment on how colour interacts with the expression of feelings through careful colour consideration, mixing, and application. Emily’s paintings aim to explore the boundaries between the digital and the painterly, and they are mainly focused on the movement and colour of shapes. She uses already established techniques with non-traditional subject matter to create non-objective pieces that examine the painting process. Enjoy!

Categories
Exhibitions 2020 - 2021

What’s in a Name?

Anne Munroe

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In this work, Anne Munroe draws on her lived experience and the narrative; exploring themes of identity, time, memory and the body. Working with a variety of mediums, the inspiration for this body of work began with a Celtic History course at University of Guelph where she discovered Ancient Irish-Runic, or Ogham script, which dates back to about 400 AD. This enlivened her interest in her own genealogy and our ancient heritage. One compelling feature of this script is that the Celts have an oral tradition similar to some other ancient cultures. This script is found on memorial stones in at least two locations: Southern Ireland and Southern England, where two branches of her family once lived or are living. Munroe makes use of Christian names from the Loney family of County Longford dating back to about 1848 and into the present. The family surname in Ancient Irish was Luan, in translation, “warrior”. The Irish were some of the first in Europe to make use of surnames which appeared about 900AD.

The second feature of the Ogham script is that for the most part, it is generated from one symbol, like a rectangular bar, which is arranged on the horizontal or oblique and numbering one to five on the sides of a fissure in a standing stone to represent 24 different sounds. The rock is chosen because it contains this fissure and a somewhat flattened section adjacent to the crack so that the inscription is unencumbered by ragged edges. A mark on the left side of the stone, will represent a different sound if it is placed on the right side. Another feature of the script is its connection to time beyond the historical; the time in the doing. Munroe discovered this process is slow, and can be meditative, even though she worked with a template, a brush and paint as opposed seeking the right marker, and working chisel on stone where these characteristics might be more pronounced. The formation of the rock, or “standing stone” is also slow- molded by nature.

As time passed, the early Celtic masons began to “dress” the stones more in keeping with memorial stones of today with a smooth, flat surface to write on. This exhibition makes use of some of Munroe’s genealogy to illustrate the script as well as the transition in the selection and preparation of the stones. Her idea was to make use of the gallery space, including seams in corners and over doorways, to create an immersive experience for the viewer.

Categories
Exhibitions 2020 - 2021

Drive By

Abbigail Withers

Broken, falling down, and split apart, but still remarkable.  

Drive By came to life as my family and I were in quarantine. Trying to keep sane but not permitted to leave the house, we adopted a new ritual of going on Sunday drives. Once a week, my family and I left the house, left the worries of the pandemic behind, and drove through the enchanting country roads surrounding my rural hometown. Not wanting to leave the safety of the protective bubble that was our family’s van, each photo in this series was shot from a moving vehicle. The broken-down barns were later edited and split apart to mirror the separation from our friends, family, and loved ones during the pandemic.  

Many of the broken barns look as though one gust of wind could bring them down, yet they stand strong and firm. These barns have stood for years despite the winds’ attempts to bring them to collapse, and they will continue to stand for many years to come. My hope is that individuals can look at the barns in Drive By, remember the strength that they too possess, and stand strong and firm against the winds that threaten to beat them down.  


Barn 1

Barn 2

Barn 3

Barn 4

Barn 5

Barn 6

Categories
Exhibitions 2020 - 2021

The Wedge

Melanie Leader

A letter to you

Hi,

My name is Melanie. Better known as Mad Mel, like Mad Max. I am in my final year of the Studio Art program. My time in the program has been a wonderful journey of self-discovery. The stars aligned to find my strongest area in sculpture. 

I work in the welding and woodworking areas, and use other materials such as foam and plaster. My work occupies space and time to create a visual language that speaks to the viewer in a contemporary sensibility. 

Working with geometric principles to define volume and mass, I interlock planes and punctuate open spaces into a three dimensional abstract.

This sculpture is called The Wedge and it is the first virtual 3D rendered sculpture made by the Zavitz Gallery team. You can find more information about how it was created and other 3D rendering options here.

@missmadmel

Categories
Exhibitions 2020 - 2021

Apology tour

APOLOGY TOUR

by Maeve Hind and Alexa Collette

APOLOGY TOUR is about acceptance

APOLOGY TOUR is a show created to release judgements about ourselves, and release a need to apologize for who we are. Through this process, we have released the need to apologize for having mental illness, for being in the way, for needing something, for crying. In creating APOLOGY TOUR, we had the opportunity to have compassion for ourselves and one another. Through painting, writing, sculpting, and video we were able to gain insight into these “things” we find ourselves constantly apologizing for. It has given us the time and space we needed to develop a relationship with ourselves where we can begin to stop fighting with that which we cannot change, and to accept every part of ourselves.

So here we are.