Tonight at dc3: Just Draw

Tonight, our board member David Candler’s new space is hosting an opening for a show of drawing works including lots of friends and members of Latitude 53, from around town and beyond:

Featuring works by François Morelli, Richard Boulet, Mark Mullin, Cindy Baker, Sean Caulfield, Yusuke Shibata, Daniela Schlüter, Tammy Salzl, Travis McEwen, Gary James Joynes, Dana Holst, James Birkbeck, Adam Fuss, Paul Freeman and Blair Brennan.

Just Draw is an examination of how drawing is used in contemporary creative practices. Markmaking can occur in many media and all levels of complexity but very often has its origins in drawing – for film, video, sculpture, installation, painting, craft, architecture. In graphic novels, video games, zines photography and performance arts drawing allows additional venues for communication. Within Just Draw I have hung a wall in salon style with works from my collection and some brought in for the exhibition. I love drawing and have collected and shown these pieces in a similar manner in my own home. They are a tumult of images and line that tell me different stories and deliver new delights daily. Drawings connect me to the artists’ hands in a way unique to the medium – they are informal and intimate and fill my heart. Just Draw.

The show will be up until November 15. Read more about it at http://dc3artprojects.com.

Arrows and Bullets Comb my Hair

On right now at Gallery @ 501 in Sherwood Park is Arrows and Bullets Comb my Hair, an exhibition of drawings, collages, and prints done by three artists whose works I really enjoy: Blair Brennan, Patrick J. Reed and Richard Boulet.

Almost all of the works are presented as a series and read as equal parts obsession and catharsis, making visible the lived experiences of each artist. Intensely personal, the works reflect both private mythologies and symbolic cosmologies not entirely accessible to the viewer. Recurring images and themes become touchstones that serve to bind each series together and point cryptically to the stories that appear to lie beneath the surface.

There is an honesty to these works that comes as a result of the spontaneous and seemingly unpolished nature of them. Drawings done with ink or paint, collages made from the detritus of everyday life, a re-purposed Styrofoam tray transformed into a print matrix: the materials and processes used by Brennan, Reed and Boulet are deliberately low-tech, heightening the immediacy and visceral quality of their projects. Many of the illustrations have an abject or disturbing quality to them which may come in small part from the contents, but more so from the uneasy feeling of being unwittingly exposed to someone else’s diary.

Boulet interprets Mahfouz

Read more →