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13/2/2015

Two Exhibitions

Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge

Graeme Patterson: Secret Citadel

This latest body of work by Graeme Patterson tells a nostalgic story of two characters who embark on a series of bittersweet adventures. From childhood to adulthood, stages of life are conveyed in idiosyncratic animated videos that accompany large sculptures containing highly detailed miniature worlds. Each of the sculptures reflects on a stage of life. Though Patterson focuses on male friendships, viewers can relate to the subtleties and complexities inherent in all close relationships.

Figures of a bison and a cougar represent Patterson and a childhood friend who moved away. The animals are central characters throughout the loose, yet highly complex narrative that is a point of connection for all the works in the exhibition. In The Mountain, the childhood homes of the young friends are recreated. Viewers can peer inside tiny windows to see rooms decorated as Patterson remembers them from the 1980s, with furniture and flooring made from tiny Popsicle sticks, and scraps of fabric used for carpet and curtains. In Grudge Match, comprised of a set of gymnasium bleachers, scenes of high school sports are played out in the projection. Viewers are invited to sit on the first three rows of the bleachers to watch the animation. Two charred bunk beds are joined to form Camp Wakonda, which is populated with dramatic scenes from Patterson's memory including a school bus crash and tiny projected flames. Player Piano Waltz is a functioning player piano that represents the completed transformation to manhood. A modified cylinder plays Patterson's own composition, which is activated along with projections when viewers deposit a dollar coin. Atop the piano is a model building in which the bison and cougar now enact the pastimes of adulthood.

To conclude the experience of this exhibition, viewers are encouraged to watch Secret Citadel, a 30-minute animation that plays continuously. This piece brings together the many scenes within each sculpture, and evokes the vulnerabilities of friendship and of loneliness, love and loss.

Graeme Patterson lives in Sackville, New Brunswick. Since graduating from NSCAD in 2002 his work has shown nationally and internationally including several solo exhibitions at significant Canadian art galleries. Some of his recent accomplishments include; 2012 Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (media arts), Atlantic finalist for the 2014 and 2009 Sobey Art Award, finalist for the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award, and a 2011 Juno award nomination for album package of the year.

Graeme Patterson: Secret Citadel is co-produced by the Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH) and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS) and is co-curated by Melissa Bennett, Curator of Contemporary Art, AGH and Sarah Fillmore, Chief Curator, AGNS. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the city of Lethbridge.

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Antonia Hirsch Negative Space

Antonia Hirsch's practice testifies to a long-standing engagement with the quantitative, spatial and syntactic systems that structure an understanding of our universe. The opposite of chaos, cosmos can be defined as a complex and organized system: the ordered universe. Hirsch's work often relates these ordering structures to embodied and visual experience, considering how the ideological nature of these representational systems expresses itself through particular forms of abstraction.

Negative Space is an exhibition of new work that investigates the interrelation of inner and outer worlds. As the title indicates, the works consider the space around and between subjects and systems. The installation includes images and objects whose origin ranges from astronomy to contemporary mobile devices acting as points of departure to address a complex network of speculative ideas. The exhibition's exploration of seeing and believing manifests in evocations of outer space and devices, such as the Claude glass (or black mirror) used by 18th and 19th century landscape painters, that simultaneously pull the user into an interior world while projecting worlds away. This thread between inner and outer space continues in Hirsch's dramatic anamorphic video projection of an asteroid hurtling through a black void. On closer inspection, the asteroid reveals itself to be a far more terrestrial entity - an old potato, pocked and wrinkled. Together with a framed image of the genuine article (Asteroid 433 Eros) and a glass screen with the ambiguous profile of either the asteroid or the potato drawn upon it, the viewer finds their reflection similarly thrust into the fold.

As all cosmologies attempt to understand the implicit order within a whole, Hirsch's work opens up a space for speculation on desire and human experience. Taking up a history of reflection, Negative Space sets forth inquiries into the contexts of technology, philosophy and creative practice, questioning how we and our devices - both historical and present day - favour the image over the "real."

Hirsch is a Berlin based artist, writer and editor. Her work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Power Plant, Toronto; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Tramway, Glasgow; and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, among others, and is held in the public collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, and Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry, Miami Beach. Her writing and projects have appeared in artecontexto, C Magazine, Fillip, and The Happy Hypocrite. She is the editor of the anthology Intangible Economies (Fillip, 2012).

The exhibition Negative Space is a catalyst for a parallel publication operating between an artist book and a topical anthology that will be released by SFU Gallery in 2015. Edited and introduced by Hirsch, it contains conversations and texts by artists, writers, and theorists.

Negative Space is organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in collaboration with SFU Galleries. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.

Image: Graeme Patterson, Secret Citadel, 2013

Press Contact:
Nicole Hembroff, nhembroff@saag.ca

Opening: February 14 at 8 PM

Southern Alberta Art Gallery
601 Third Avenue South
Lethbridge, Alberta

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