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19/3/2015

Andrew Wright

Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Ottawa

PATRICK MIKHAIL is pleased to announce the launch of its new Montreal gallery on Friday, March 20, 2015. The gallery launches its 2015-2016 programming with two exhibitions of work by its gallery artists at its new location at 4445 Rue Saint-Antoine Ouest in the city’s Westmount district.

In the gallery’s main space, we present ANDREW WRIGHT’s new body of work, UNTITLED PHOTOGRAPHIC PICTURES. Through photography and sculpture, the project explores points of intersection and exchange between several pictorial idioms and practices. It runs concurrent to his exhibition presently on view at the Ottawa Art Gallery entitled “Pretty Lofty and Heavy All At Once,” and follows a career highlight in February 2015 in which his works were installed at the newly refurbished Canada House in London and launched at a ceremony in the presence of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II.

In the gallery’s supporting exhibition spaces, we present a selection of new works by Sara Angelucci, Jessica Auer, Scott Everingham, Jay Isaac, Thomas Kneubühler, Jennifer Lefort, Natasha Mazurka, Andrew Morrow, Amy Schissel, Cindy Stelmackowich, and Michael Vickers. The works have been selected to indicate new directions in each artist’s professional practice, and to signal new tendencies in the gallery’s upcoming programming.

In Untitled Photographic Pictures, Andrew Wright explores points of intersection and exchange between several pictorial idioms and practices. Printed using some of the latest print-making technologies, these monumental pictures suggest the grandeur of classical painting, and raise the question of photography’s relationship with a tradition of producing and exhibiting large-scale gallery pictures. On the other hand, as a series of “straight-from-the-camera” snapshots, this series was made using a uniquely photographic technique. The snapshot has become an important dimension of how we see and imagine the world today, and Wright contrasts this with the highly valued museum picture. The digital photographs themselves exhibit qualities that seem to emulate the effects of older lenses and photographic processes: inconsistencies, odd and unexpected optical effects, and the use of a pre-set, black-and-white treatment all contribute to evoking out-of-date, or even outmoded, pictorial concerns. The neglected and rural landscape captured in these photographs struggles to emerge as the subject of these pictures. Instead, Untitled Photographic Pictures explores an approach to photography in which ideas of the Romantic, the picturesque, and the monumental filter and condition our experience of the visible subject matter.

Ultimately, these photographs present themselves as straddling, and sometimes confusing, a variety of techniques and visual languages. Untitled Photographic Pictures is, in part, a series of landscape scenes. At the same, time this series is a further step in Andrew Wright’s ongoing investigation into the material and visual conditions that constitute photography as such.

Andrew Wright's artistic practice is multifarious and is characterized by breadth as much as it is by depth. Central to his inquiries are lens-based technologies and photographic techniques. In Illuminated Landscapes, Wright's images of pines, boulders and rock use artificial light to reconstruct a sense of the staged, the protected, the artificial and the segregated. The artist's objects and settings, both living and inanimate, are presented as pre-formed, illuminated and plastic.

By the simple addition of artificial light into so-called natural and even remote locales, his images encourage a reconsideration of existing space that is both disconcerting and beautiful. They posit nature as a series of vistas constructed solely for the eyes, designed to be consumed and knowable within the bright glow of highly controlled illumination.

Wright's work has appeared in exhibitions across Canada, Spain, Germany, the U.S., and the U.K. Essays, reviews, and illustrated discourses have appeared in publications such as Canadian Art, Border Crossings, PREFIX PHOTO, The National Post, and the Globe and Mail. His works are in private and corporate collections, as well as in the collections of Foreign Affairs Canada, Canada Council Art Bank, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Ernst & Young, Royal Bank of Canada, and Museums London. He has been nominated for the Sobey Art Award five times and was a semi-finalist in 2007. In 2011, Wright was the recipient of the BMW Photography Prize for Most Outstanding Exhibition at Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival in Toronto. He has a Master's of Fine Arts, Concentration in Sculpture, Photography and Installation, from the University of Windsor; an Honours Bachelor of Art, Visual Art and Art History, from the University of Toronto; and a Diploma in Studio Art from Sheridan College.

Image: invitation

Press Contact: montreal@patrickmikhailgallery.com

Opening: Friday 20 March 2015, 17.30-22-00 pm

Patrick Mikhail Gallery
2401 Bank Sree
Ottawa Canada

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