Monday, September 16, 2013

Ian McLean in "Weird" at Harbourfront Centre

Ian McLean, "A Concern For Safety", oil on canvas, 16 x 20", 2012

Loop member Ian McLean is included in the group exhibit, "Weird" curated by Patrick Macaulay at Harbourfront Centre opening September 20.


Trying to determine the source of inspiration for an artwork is a complex journey. The creative trajectory often appears random and strange because we attempt to make direct connections between the artistic result and the original motivation. When seeing something incongruous the mind attempts to sort out a pattern and, if connections are not immediately apparent, a common response might be to think,That’s weird, and leave it at that.
Not for the artist. The inconsistent and the absurd are often the stimulus for creation. Making connections between seemingly disordered or incompatible objects or events sets up an ideal breeding ground for creativity. When a person or thing appears in an unexpected context, seemingly misplaced, the faulty logic or framework begins to percolate in our imagination. How do we respond when things are not as they should be? Well, it is wonderment. It is weird.
These eight artists create work through a process of trial, error correction and mix-up. They are playing with perception and expectation. This exhibition celebrates the way that all art is weird and wonderful. The title Weird is not meant to demean the work or call into question the value of the creative process. It is an attempt to explore what is really at the core of all invention and insight. Stop, stare and question. Isn’t it all weird?
– Patrick Macaulay
Head, Visual Arts, Harbourfront Centre
Artists:

Jesse Bromm, Nathan Cyprys, Robert Hengeveld, Janet Macpherson, Ian McLean, Steve Payne, Derrick Piens and Darren Rigo

"Weird" Harbourfront Centre - September 21 to December 29, 2013
235 Queens Quay West
Toronto, ON
M5J 2G8
www.harbourfrontcentre.com
visualarts@harbourfroncentre.com


Thursday, September 12, 2013

Loop presents David Holt and Lanny Shereck


David Holt                                     Lanny Shereck
Illustrated History                          Studio Visits

September 14th – October 6th, 2013 | Reception: Sunday, September 15th, 2013, 1-4PM
loop Gallery is pleased to announce new exhibitions by loop members David Holt, entitled Illustrated History, and Lanny Shereck, entitled STUDIO VISITS.
Holt’s paintings in his fourth show at loop continue to be inspired by museum displays, historical archives, catalogs, and encyclopedias that invite multiple side by side visual comparisons within groups of art works, artifacts, archeological fragments, nature specimens, and other examples of natural and human history.
Holt has exhibited extensively and has taught for many years in the US, where he chaired the art department at Marymount College (later of Fordham University) in Tarrytown, New York. Since 2005 he has lived and worked in Toronto, teaching art at Upper Canada College.
STUDIO VISITS is an ongoing series of large and small oil paintings representing artists at work in their studios. Engaging a longstanding tradition of painting artists at work, Shereck offers a voyeuristic glimpse of the aesthetic sensibilities of painters, sculptors, and writers as defined by their relationship to a personal creative space.
Shereck is a Toronto-based artist and educator who has exhibited across North America. He has been a member of loop Gallery for 6 years and is represented by The Fran Hill Gallery in Toronto. His work has been placed in public and private collections all over Canada.
Please join the artist in celebrating the opening reception on Sunday, September 15th, 1-4pm. Learn more about Holt’s and Shereck’s work during a Question & Answer Session, Studio Practice and
Teaching Practice, moderated by Vesna Krstich, at loop on Saturday October 5th, at 7pm.

(right) David Holt, Wigs, acrylic on canvas, 2013. (left) Lanny Shereck, Howard in the Studio, oil on canvas, 2013

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Portrait forms and historical sources: David Holt's Illustrated History paintings at Loop, September 14 - October 6, 2013. 

 

Third floor portrait display at the Pioneer Memorial Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah


Many of the paintings for my exhibition, Illustrated History, were influenced by my encounters with different historical forms of portraiture and serial displays. An exciting recent discovery was at the Pioneer Memorial Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah, where portraits of 19th century Mormon pioneers cover the museum's walls (there are over 25,000 in the collection). They include some daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes but most are photographic crayon portraits, which combine elements of both photography and drawing, sometimes with fascinatingly awkward results.


Crayon Portrait, Negative Outline Process, Dark Chamber, from 1891 Annual Encyclopedia, D. Appleton and Co.

 
crayon portrait example, Florida Dept. Of State Div. of Library and Information Services


My paintings of pioneer women in this exhibition were based loosely on my Utah museum sketches, and on photographs accompanying the biographies in the mammoth four volume collection, Pioneer Women of Faith and Fortitude, published in 1998 by the International Society of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. 


David Holt-sketchbook pages, 4"x 6" each

 David Holt, Pioneer Women, 16"x30", acrylic/canvas, 2013


Another influence for me has been the tradition of portrait miniatures, especially from the 17th and 18th centuries, and their displays (typically together in groups) in museums, such as the display of the Thomson collection of miniatures at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The vast digital collection of miniatures in the Victoria and Albert Museum has been very helpful. Other good sources for Baroque era portraits and costumes have been a flickr photo set of 1,493 images of Tudor and Stuart People, the University of Toronto's  Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection of Hollar's etchings,


 Wenceslaus Hollar, Duchess of Lennox, State 1, 1645, Univ. of Toronto Libraries

and one of my favorite surprise finds, quirky but charming 17th century English Delftware portraits, such as those in the Gardiner Museum in Toronto.  


Gentleman, Brislington Portrait Charger, Delftware, 1690, Gardiner Museum, Toronto


David Holt - sketchbook pages, 4"x 6" each


David Holt, Baroque Heads, 30"x30", acrylic/canvas, 2013


For many years I have worked with subjects from natural history such as primates, fossils, plants, and birds, and have often used antique prints as sources. More recently I have been exploring ethnographic portraits, the history of anthropological museum displays, and representations of world cultures and costumes in early geographic atlases such as Oliver Goldsmith's A History of Earth and Animated Nature, 1848; James Pritchard's Natural History of Man, 1855, and M. F. Maury's New Complete Geography, 1907.

 frontispiece, Maury's New Complete Geography, 1907

Of course the early history of ethnographic representation and display is complex and interwoven with problematic ideas about race, evolution, and the politics of colonial power, which are the focus of much of contemporary postcolonial scholarship. Other modern efforts to correct misconceptions about race include UNESCO's 1978 Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice, Stephen Jay Gould's popular but controversial 1981 The Mismeasure of Man, and recent exhibitions such as  Human Zoos, the Invention of the Savage  at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, and the website Gene Watch by the Council for Responsible Genetics. Among others, Raymond Corbey's 1993 article, Ethnographic Showcases, 1870-1930, provides an excellent analysis of the role of the visual aspects of early ethnography (complete illustrated PDF version here).  Practices such as ethnic cleansing and genocide have made use of pseudosciences like eugenics, physiognomy, phrenology, social Darwinism, biological determinism, and criminal atavism, which were propagated in part through the use of ethnographic and racial anthropometry and through comparative and composite portrait photographs such as those made by Francis Galton (1822-1911) and Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909).

 anthropometric photograph of an Andaman child by Maurice Vidal Portman, c.1890s, British Museum 


 composite photographs of "criminal" features by Galton


Lombroso, Pazzi Criminali, from L'uomo delinquente, (Eng. trans. Criminal Man, 1911)


Still, many early publications such as Goldsmith's 1848 A History of Earth and Animated Nature, Auguste Racinet's 1888 Complete Costume History, and Freidrich Justin Bertuch's  Peoples of the World in Costume, c.1800, provide intriguing interpretations of world costume history.


from Oliver Goldsmith's Animated Nature, 1848


Holt- sketchbook pages, 4" x6" each

David Holt, Turbans, 26"x28", acrylic/canvas, 2013


Other of my paintings in the exhibition include portraits and paintings of groups of carved sculpture heads inspired not only by early ethnographic prints, but also by Neolithic and Oceanic sculpture.



 carved head from Borneo, early 20th century,  (Brian Stephenson)


More modern influences include works by artists such as those featured in MOMA's 1959 exhibition, New Images of Man, curated by Peter Selz, that emphasized the existential "human predicament" of the "disquiet man" at the end of World War II.  Quasi archetypal heads by Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti,  Edoardo Paolozzi, Leon Golub, and others such as Adolph Gottlieb (in some of his Pictograph paintings), Lester Johnson, David Park, and Hans Josephson, reveal traces of the monumental, the ancient, the quotidian, and the absurd in various measures.


sculptures by Hans Josephson in the Kesselhaus Josephson


Lester Johnson, Three Men, 1960


David Holt- sketchbook pages, 4" x6" each

David Holt- sketchbook pages, 4" x6" each


David Holt, Head Pair, 5"x7", acrylic/canvas, 2013


David Holt, Head, 6"x6". acrylic/canvas, 2013


Also in the exhibition are paintings derived from photographic records of Native Americans/First Nations peoples from archives such as the Rhinehart Collection at Haskell University, photographic portraits of Civil War officers, school yearbook and class photographs, and numismatic displays.

Images of the paintings for the exhibition can be seen on the Illustrated History page of my website https://sites.google.com/site/davidholtpaintings/.