Tilted Brick Gallery Association
2020 EXHIBITION ARCHIVES
RHYTHMIC DISORDER: THE COINCIDENTAL RELATIONSHIP OF THINGS
DREW EILERS
January 4 - February 1, 2020
Heavily influenced by abstract painters such as Pollock, De Kooning, and Richter, Eilers begins and finishes many of his paintings in a single studio session. Working quickly, responsively, and expressively, he endeavours to clear his rational, thinking mind and work more from intuition and instinct, in an effort to allow the paint itself to come alive on the canvas and lead him through the process.
COLOUR, NATURALLY
ANNE FETTERLY
February 7 to March 7, 2020
Anne Fetterly’s artwork is as much about the process of making it as it is about the colours, textures, and details we see in the gallery. In her studio, she’s reviving ancient methods and practices, using the same plants and mordants that fibre dyers have used for thousands of years in some cases. She trained in the fibre department of the Alberta University of the Arts and became fascinated with the history of fabric and textile colours and their cultural contexts and meanings over time. Traditional dying processes most often use organic material like flower petals, leaves, or roots in combination with common chemicals as mordants, which draw out various pigment effects and fix the colour into the fibres. What at first might appear to be a rustic or simple process bears infinite variation dependent on subtle changes to any number of elements involved: the organic matter, the mordants, the heat or length of time the fibres are left to sit, and how different fibres respond differently to each of these variables.
DAILY PRACTICE
JAMES MCDOWELL and SARAH PIKE
‘Daily Practice’ is Tilted Brick Gallery’s first offering of an exhibition in this online format. The exhibition was posted online in April 2020.
This exhibition represents the tenacity of two Columbia Basin artists who have committed to producing a piece of art in their respective practises, every day for a year. One could say that many of us have a daily practice – the same thing the same way, every day. We go to work. Take children to school. Play a sport. Pick children up. Look after loved ones. Everyday. Everyday. In a certain manner of speaking this exhibition acknowledges that thing that we tighten up our laces for and get after, each and everyday. These two artists, through considerable effort and determination, speak to the boundlessness of human creativity and the very heart of human condition: to be creative.
MADE WITH CLAY
ROBIN DUPONT and ANDREA REVOY
‘Made with Clay’ was our second online exhibition, posted in May 2020.
ROBIN DUPONT. Most of the work in this show takes its seeds from this reflection. Many of the pieces are inspired formally by the shape of the head of the shovel or other implements. My grandfather was the only crafts person in our family. I spent a great deal of time with him as a child. He retired from the fire department when I was a young boy and did not rely on his craft to support himself. The things he made seemed more about the act of doing than the actual product.
A sort of “trust the process” mentality. He had a furious work ethic. Although I put much more emphasis on the final product, I do find meaning in the act of doing. I trust the process whole heartedly and learn from it everytime. My practice is very labour intensive, I move thousands of pounds of clay through my fingers a year and fire most of it with wood that I have processed with my own hands. This process (labour) is meaningful. Time to reflect on all aspects of the work, slow time, to reflect on perhaps formal issues with a piece or technical problem I’m looking to get past.
I do not enjoy all of this labour but I do find it has value and these objects are in some way made as a homage to it…. And my grandfather.
ANDREA REVOY. I am always attracted to humorous, whimsical and colourful things full of texture patterns and flowers with a bit of an edge. I like creating things that evoke the feeling that there is a story it is trying to tell whether hidden, real or imagined. Quality workmanship, attention to detail and a sense of humour are at the core of all my pieces.
YOU ARE HERE
BARB FYVIE
July 24 to September 5, 2020
In YOU ARE HERE, Columbia basin artists Sandy Kunze and Natasha Smith each offer us a window into their personal relationships with the place where they live. Kunze’s works in this show arise from a deep affection for the landscape around her Creston Valley home. She often paints en plein air, assembling a makeshift studio somewhere out in the wilderness and then working quickly to capture a feeling of the place on her canvas. The resulting paintings describe both the scene before her and also an expression of her feelings in and about that place. In a similar devotion to her Kootenay home, Smith’s mixed media works incorporate elements of the natural surroundings more concretely. She often works with the palpable impressions of leaves and feathers or other treasures found out in nature. Alongside these elements, a fluid and expressive approach to mark-making and choices of medium features prominently in the works presented here.
A RING OF WALL AROUND THIS WOOD
MIA AND ERIC
September 11 to October 18, 2020
Mia Rushton and Eric Moschopedis are a Calgary-based collaborative duo whose practice often resembles the work of ecologists or anthropologists in its logistical and practical appearance. In the process of making this exhibition, the two have performed tasks that might better fit in the natural sciences: collecting data in the form of film footage or physical specimens, observing natural phenomena and recording their findings diligently, and consulting with knowledgeable locals to gain insight and gather more data. The results of these investigations are the tender and precise works displayed in the gallery.
IT’S ABOUT HER
BARB FYVIE
October 30 to December 11, 2020
Karen Klassen is a Calgary-based figure painter. This body of work is heavily motivated by a desire to elevate the subjective experience, and subject-hood, of the women pictured. In her working on the paintings, Klassen felt herself contemplating the lived experience of these figures from her family, and their own personal histories. Each painting, then, is an act of devotion to the hard work and dedication that these women contributed to their families, and an effort to honour their wholeness and complexity as people, each living her own life. For Klassen, it has been evident that the first-hand lived experience of these matriarchs was not always a high priority, nor maybe much considered at all by the people they fed, tended, and loved.