The Art Dealers Association of Canada Inc. (ADAC) is a national not-for-profit
organization founded in 1966. ADAC is the only National Association of art dealers representing artists throughout Canada. ADAC maintains
a high standard of connoisseurship and adherence to ethical practice within the profession. Dealers are selected for their knowledge and
scholarship in their respective fields of expertise.
The ADAC mandate includes stimulating the art market in Canada, and encouraging the awareness of the visual arts both nationally and
abroad.
Squint is the first in a series of installations in which Tyson Parks invents new processes to explore the relationship between form, image, motion, time, perception, and memory. This series of invented process artworks is called "Mnetractoscopes"; a term coined by Parks, taken from Latin and Greek etymology, which roughly translates to "viewer(s)" that "draw or pull" from "memory". This naming serves as homage to early animation devices such as the pre-historic Thaumotrope, Joseph Plateau's Anorthoscope, or Eadweard Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope. Parks puts forth the idea that the development and dissemination of these types of devices through the end of the 19th Century brought about a significant change of self-awareness in human kind that led directly to the modernist revolutions in science, art, philosophy, and technology in the 20th Century.
Squint is composed of a sculptural object; a replica of a familiar everyday object that has been distorted and twisted beyond recognition and into abstraction and that sits atop a stand, slowly rotating. A camera films the object in motion, sending a live video feed of its view to a computer. Just above the camera is what Parks calls a "transformative mirror"; a projected screen that shows a processed view of the live camera feed. In this virtual reflection of the space, the public that is present and circulating within the room are abstracted, while the sculptural object is de-abstracted and revealed in its original and recognizable form.
Central to Parks' work is an investigation of communication, perception, and translation. The artist questions how new perspectives expose hidden relationships and how we might problem solve around the limitations of available perspective. According to him, it is through the discovery of the limitations and functions of our visual processes that allows us to communicate, collaborate and coexist in new and different ways.
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Tyson Parks is an American artist and technologist. He employs new technologies to create complimentary paradigms of experience such as audio and visual perception, virtual and actual reality, and inter-dimensional relationships. He takes conceptual and cross-modal inspiration from his experience as a photographer, videographer, electronic musician, VJ, digital visual artist, teacher, and creative programmer.
December group show featuring snow themed artwork by the following artists:
Margot ARISS
Gathie FALK
Sky GLABUSH
Will GORLITZ
Lawren HARRIS
Simon HUGHES
Natalka HUSAR
Wanda KOOP
Doris McCARTHY
Clark McDOUGALL
Charles PACHTER
Diana THORNEYCROFT
"This summer I acquired a painting where snow was the dominating force. As we put it on the rack for storage (as you can't sell snow in July), it came to me I could curate a December show with snow, or the colour white, as the main theme.
I have sought out new connections to curate what I feel is a great overview of what we all love: snow in December. Snow in March, not so much. From Murray Favro's projection sculpture to the mighty Lawren Harris mountains, this exhibition will blow a gust of acknowledgment that Canada and snow are forever synonymous." Michael Gibson
VIEW IMAGES OF THE EXHIBITION HERE: http://gibsongallery.com/exhibitions/snow-show
This exhibition highlights the diversity of a Canadian artists' treatment of snow. In the middle gallery we will feature traditional landscape paintings: a rare 1924 panel of Emerald Lake by Group of Seven member Lawren Harris, 1970s watercolours and iceberg paintings by Doris McCarthy, and early 1945 snowy paintings by St. Thomas artist Clark McDougall.
The main gallery, on the other hand, will offer different viewpoints of our typical "snowy landscape" and will include painting, watercolour, photography and sculpture. Gathie Falk has created a new papier mache sculpture of 14 snowballs, a glistening monument to a favourite childhood wintry past time, Murray Favro's projected construction Winter, Window, displays his mastery of observation and inquisitive play and Margot Ariss sculpts clay letters and forms that suggest cloud forms and snowbanks.
A few painters provide variations on the diverse Canadian climate: Sky Glabush's White Out painting creates a overall sensory experience of tiny snow flakes in a warm suburban light, Wanda Koop majestically weaves bands of white paint across the canvas in Interweave (White on White), Will Gorlitz examines a hypothetical near-future ice age in his Elephant painting, Simon Hughes explores common stereotypes of Canada's north in Aurora Borealis Simulation Dome No 1 and Natalka Husar's First Snow combines exquisite painting on an abandoned Soviet era needlepoint.
"The Snow Show" is not without humour or afraid to explore Canadian mythology. Diana Thorneycroft's photograph In Algonquin Park combines a classic Group of Seven painting with dolls and toys in order to teach the important lesson every Canadian child ultimately learns: do not stick your tongue on a frozen flag pole. Finally, Charles Pachter, the master of stylized Canadian pop icons, takes the Canadian Moose and places him, you guessed it, in a snowy landscape.
Exhibition Continues -- November 30 - December 28, 2013
This group exhibition highlights works from historical and contemporary photographers, all of whom have provided visual examples that attest to the splendour of summer. Mounting this exhibition in the winter months allows viewers to relive glories of past summers, and serves to tease us with a taste of what’s to come in six months.rn
rnWe will feature a selection of works by Lutz Dille, Franco Fontana, Albert, Kish, Ivaan Kotulsky, Charles Matton, Gerald Pisarzowski, Elizabeth Siegfried, George S. Zimbel and others. rn
At zero eight hundred hours, March 2010, the air dusty and already acrid with avgas and exploded ordinance, a convoy was to deploy on foot from Forward Operating Base Masum Ghar in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, with aid for a nearby town. They would then join a convoy of LAV-25s and Afghan National Army trucks on patrol. Strapping on his helmet, Maskull Lasserre asked, on a scale of one to 10, how dangerous the mission would be. A participant in the Canadian Forces Artists Program, with Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, Lasserre wanted to experience everything possible in his two weeks. He also, however, wanted to know the chances he’d be coming back without his legs. But the answer was always a blasé, “It’s busy.” Such is our capacity to normalize even the extreme reality of war, where the sterile air of antiseptic from the trauma wards reminds you it’s kill or be killed. Everything is of consequence.
This realization numbed Lasserre for months upon his return. Cognizant of the incredible capabilities of his body, he struggled to find necessity and value in much of his life in Montreal. It’s taken him three years to address this experience. *Perimeter* marks his first attempt.
Accelerating established themes in his practice, Lasserre is stepping outside his “comfort zone.” Unlike his work rooted in subtraction, such as the exquisite skeletons carved into common tools in *Fable* (PFOAC Toronto, 2012), Lasserre has assumed the role of engineer, building “uncompromising” formal compositions. These pieces continue his project to re-imagine the potential of material to create “a new fact in the world,” but never has he distanced his work so far from the safe idioms of art, what he calls “processed product.” No, these four works are “absolutes” and “nothing if not sincere.”
Perhaps it’s the mechanical militarism, but Lasserre’s project recalls the Futurists. Lasserre went to Afghanistan because he enjoys struggle, the revelations of pushing material beyond convention, exposing new value that questions our existing implicit notions of worth. As such, Lasserre echoes the Futurists’ call to “break out of the horrible shell of wisdom” and their declaration, “Except in struggle, there is no more beauty.”
Yet, the Futurists divined its art to arm the masses, a new weapon. A century later, Lasserre’s project is one of disarmament. Crafted with the impeccable care for which Lasserre has made his name, the wholly believable “make-believe” objects in *Perimeter* neutralize, by way of uncanny encounter, “the big normalizing machine” that is humanity.
That Laserre’s work becomes normalized as art exposes its implicit tragedy. And it’s the tragedy of war, too. Our stalwartness to normalize, as a coping mechanism, restricts both human and machine to singular purposes, revealing, as philosopher Paul Virilio posits, that progress is really consensual sacrifice. This is the sacrifice soldiers say civilians cannot fathom. Yet *Perimeter* creates a potential confluence, a space of empathy in which Lasserre disarms our will to normalize, offering a moment for re-evaluation given the magnitude of ways to encounter the world.
