Inside by Blackwood Gallery

Inside

Mark Bell, Pierre Dorion, Dorian FitzGerald, Sara Hartland-Rowe, Maria Hupfield, Denyse Thomasos, and Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky

Curated by John Armstrong January 14 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; March 1, 2015

Blackwood Gallery University of Toronto Mississauga

Sara Hartland-Rowe Sparrow in Midwinter (2015), Detail Acrylic, ink, polyester organza, paper on wall 457 x 970 cm

Inside By John Armstrong

Over the past sixty years or so, artists have sought to merge easel painting and its secondary support, the wall, in many ways. Indeed the whole gallery, or “white cube,” has been engaged, questioned, and at times, dramatically altered. Artists have created “wall works”; stridently temporary installations that extend the reach of painting to an architectural scale, physically occupying the viewer’s entire visual field and illusionistically unsettling the gallery architecture. Painting has been placed in conversation with sculpture and space—it may serve as applied relief on the wall, lean against or even break through the wall—in order to intensify physical presence and pictorial illusion. Artists have combined painting with other visual forms such as still photography, projection, performance, and text—again, associations that seek to expand and confound the language of painting. In creating an experimental exhibition that reflects the diversity evident in contemporary Canadian painting, I thought I might draw on recent painting installation practices in order to avoid some of the problems group exhibitions often present. Paintings are conventionally rendered on a textile support stretched over a rectilinear frame, and a curatorial selection of paintings, even by markedly divergent artists, runs the risk of being undermined by this shared format. The similarities can subtly skew an individuation of each artist’s work. My answer to this potential dilemma was to invite artists to make paintings that, through a variety of formats, physically and conceptually engage the Blackwood Gallery’s two exhibition spaces and the multiple contexts of the University of Toronto Mississauga’s suburban campus. Another focus of the exhibition was an exploration of the historical and contemporary tradition of paintings that represent interiors, real or invented. In the history of Western art, we might think back to the medieval inventiveness of Giotto’s quattrocento cut-away dollhouses that serve as settings for didactic Christian narratives, the stilled quiet and balance of Johannes Vermeer’s seventeenth-century patrician interiors, or Édouard Vuillard’s fin-de-siècle portraits of his family’s visually busy wallpapered home and 6

dressmaker’s shop. More recently, the austerity of Sol LeWitt’s instruction-based wall drawings from late 1960s would give way to the exuberant colour of his room-engulfing painted geometries of the 1990s. Examples of even more contemporary work might include the formal ordering of paint-covered found objects inside and outside the paint-covered gallery in the work of Canadian-American artist Jessica Stockholder, or German artist Matthias Weischer’s jarringly artificial, cut-andpaste stage-set interiors that draw on images from interior design magazines. Indeed, these examples of the evolution of interior painting all came up in my discussions with the Inside artists who see themselves as working inside a genre with historical reach as well as in the current moment. With an initial premise of asking the artists to consider the gallery and the campus, another catalyst for some of their work was a 1986 mural made by then-UTM student Denyse Thomasos in the campus’s soon-to-be-demolished North Building. In the 1980s when Thomasos was a student, the University of Toronto held investments in apartheid-era South African companies. In 1983, the university’s African and Caribbean

Jessica Stockholder First Cousin Once Removed or Cinema of Brushing Skin [JS 327] (1999)

Matthias Weischer Simultan: Fernsehturm (Televisiontower) (2004)

Students’ Association, of which Thomasos was a member, formed a divestment committee that was active throughout the eighties. Her 1986 mural, Till the River, recounts a loose, symbolic narrative of student struggle through to resolution. The protagonists in the mural were either members of the artist’s family or members of the African and Caribbean Students’ Association. The original plan for Inside was to include excised sections of Till the River on their cinderblock-wall supports, extracted during the North Building’s planned 2015 demolition. However, the demolition was delayed, and the building and mural sealed off during the run of Inside. Alternatively, the inclusion of Burial at Gorée, a mural-scaled 1993 painting by Thomasos, offered a further meditation on the vexed nature of African and North American history. Most of the artists in the exhibition practice easel painting, and are known for their searching, and at times playful, interrogation of a variety of architectural spaces. These artists have periodically taken on the challenge of creating temporary or permanent wall-works in order to extend and challenge their own painting production. Others come to painting as a way to underline an architectural intervention that draws on a range of practices, such as drawing, sculpture, design,

or craft. Several of the artists painted directly on the Blackwood’s walls or floor while other artists exhibited mural-sized paintings or more intimately scaled easel paintings. All of these artists connect painting in its many guises—from illusionistic or schematic tableaux to a celebration of paint’s physical nature—with built interior spaces to prompt a reconsideration of painting’s longstanding critical and poetic engagement with the rooms we inhabit.

Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing #1157 (2005)

Installation view of Inside with works by Sara Hartland Rowe, Dorian FitzGerald and Mark Bell

mark bell In Reverse Obsolescence (Deerfield Hall), Toronto artist Mark Bell created a perspectival rendering of the atrium interior in the University of Toronto Mississauga’s recently constructed Deerfield Hall (2014, Perkins + Will Architects) reimagined in a future state of ruin. Bell’s idea was prompted by his contemplation of the impending destruction of Denyse Thomasos’s 1986 mural. Bell applied this endgame moment to the newly built Deerfield Hall adjacent to the 1960s-era North Building and its Thomasos mural. In Bell’s wall work, Deerfield Hall was not purposefully demolished due to obsolescence but suffers benign romantic neglect. It was recast in a gritty, tenebrous charcoal drawing reminiscent of the eighteenth-century Italian artist 10

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons, a suite of grim black-and-white etchings that depict labyrinthine, subterranean penal architecture. In creating Reverse Obsolescence, Bell used a chalk line tool to draw the orthogonal perspective that structures his precise if crumbling interior view of Deerfield Hall’s atrium—a view he derived from the architects’ speculative rendering of the space prior to construction. In the finished work, Bell sprayed sections of the wall with water, allowing the denser areas of charcoal to bleed into one another, creating greater contrast in some areas while obliterating information in others in order to suggest the artwork’s deterioration. The illusion of water damage to the wall work

Mark Bell Reverse Obsolescence (Deerfield Hall) (2014), In-progress

Left: Mark Bell Reverse Obsolescence (Deerfield Hall) (2014), Detail Right: Mark Bell Reverse Obsolescence (Deerfield Hall) (2014), Installation view Chalk and nail on wall 457 x 867 cm

was echoed in the depiction of the atrium’s lower level as filled with floodwater and floating detritus. Some exhibition viewers noted that Bell’s drawing appeared to be unfinished and constantly shed charcoal and chalk dust. Bell’s pronounced use of one-point perspective refered to the schematic and artificial construction of space found in Christ Washing His Disciples’ Feet (ca. 1545–55), a mural-scaled painting by Venetian Renaissance artist Jacopo Tintoretto in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario that Bell has long been fascinated by. In a cheeky gesture that punctuated the contrivance of perspectival calculation, Bell left the nail in the wall that marks the artwork’s central

vanishing point and served as an anchor for his myriad chalk-line snaps. Another historical reference was Nazi architect Albert Speer’s plan of designing public buildings with their eventual decay in mind, to mirror the aesthetic and romance of ancient Roman ruins. Bell’s Deerfield Hall could not be confused with once-imperial picturesque Rome; rather, we saw a multi-storied atrium in a university academic building depicted as an unadorned rationalist grid that might be found in a shopping mall or hospital. In an ironic twist, Bell’s Reverse Obsolescence may be an editorial comment on the reach and interchangeability of contemporary architectural vision rather than a prediction of a particular building’s future. 11

Pierre Dorion Blackwood ll (2014) Oil on linen 183 x 137 cm

Pierre Dorion The two photo-based easel paintings by Montreal artist Pierre Dorion depict architectural details of a café lounge area in front of the Blackwood’s e|gallery—a long, thin gallery located in the University of Toronto Mississauga’s award-winning Communication, Culture and Technology (CCT) Building designed by Montreal architects Saucier + Perrotte in 2004. The CCT Building is very much a hallmark Saucier + Perrotte design, with large angular volumes of matte black–painted metal set against a soaring glass curtain wall that presents stunning views to the forested UTM campus. Dorion’s intimately scaled Blackwood I (2014) depicts an inconspicuous ceiling corner as seen at eye level from an adjacent overlook onto the café outside the e|gallery. As much an homage to the intricacy and inventiveness of contemporary architecture as a recognition of a camera’s inability to accurately capture differing light sources, the painting registers soft mauve and drab green shadows that fall on this minimalist juncture of a white wall and ceiling lit by a slot of indirect fluorescent lighting as well as by daylight from an adjacent glass-curtain wall. One element that distinguishes the CCT Building from other Saucier + Perrotte projects are its “accent” avocado-green glass wall panels, some of which are opaque, while others are frosted glass with fluorescent backlighting that reflect an acidic green. These colours are an extrapolation of the range of greens found in the distinctive camouflage-patterned bark of the two mature London planetrees located in the CCT Building’s courtyard. Dorion’s larger Blackwood II (2014) is based on the artist’s photograph of a backlit frosted-glass panel on the exterior wall of the e|gallery. In the painting, the CCT Building’s novel wall treatment is cropped out of its architectural context and painted in careful gradations that emphasize the luminescence of the translucent wall while suggesting an ethereal rejigging of the vertical stripe paintings of the Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman. In both Blackwood I and II, Dorion has shifted the actual colour of a white ceiling corner or sharper acid green of a backlit wall panel in greyed pastels that evoke a mid-century domestic interior, the palette that Dorion most often employs.

The idea of using a shifted and harmonious palette indicative of interior design is intentional, but the artist’s customary approach is to not paint an accurate reproduction of an observed interior setting or other motif. What Dorion’s palette accurately depicts is the colour alteration that his source images go through when printed by a budget-rate photo finisher near his Montreal studio. The severe economy of Dorion’s painting technique of thin transparent glazing creates a near-photographic tonal gradation that, while a product of Dorion’s considerable painterly expertise, like his printed photographs’ inaccurate colour calibration, adds yet another technological dissimulation. Reflecting Saucier + Perrotte’s creatively approximate transformation of London planetree bark to architecture, Dorion makes his interior detail views seem strangely familiar.

e|gallery exterior glass wall panels with fluorescent lighting. Saucier + Perotte, Communication, Culture and Technology (CCT) Building, University of Toronto Mississauga (2004)

Pierre Dorion Blackwood l (2014) Oil on linen 61 x 46 cm

Installation view of Inside with works by Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky and Pierre Dorian

Dorian FitzGerald Over the course of the exhibition, Toronto artist Dorian FitzGerald periodically returned to work on one panel of a diptych painting that lay in the middle of the Blackwood’s floor. The photographic source for his Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-François Daigre, Rue du Bac, Paris (2011-) is a two-page photographic spread from the October 1989 issue of Architectural Digest depicting a sumptuous 1970s Parisian sitting room. The photograph accompanies a retrospective article celebrating the internationally acclaimed work of the Paris and New York interior-designer team, Rybar and Daigre. In FitzGerald’s painting of the lavish interior, we see several times over—due to the mirrored panelling on the room’s walls and ceiling—a gilded Regency mirror, a Roman portrait bust, two Louis XV chairs, and many other objets d’art. We might now look on this mish-mash of anachronistic juxtaposition as anything but the exercise of good taste, despite the imprimatur of Architectural Digest. As with Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar, images of stale-dated lifestyle excess and the 16

display of ostentatious wealth are explored in many of FitzGerald’s paintings. Inside allowed viewers access to a partial recreation of FitzGerald’s studio, and the opportunity to better understand his novel working process. FitzGerald dissects and compresses his source images through digital contour tracing using vector graphics. He sets the complexity of this contour analysis to produce a digital drawing that looks like an overly intricate paint-by-number sketch that he transfers onto his painting surface. FitzGerald then traces contour lines around each shape and, with the painting in a horizontal position on the floor, either teases his paint up to the edge of each shape with an awl or applies a bead of transparent caulking on the contour lines to create a reservoir area that he then fills in with a pool of paint. He uses liquid acrylic paint for its levelling properties and, for accuracy when applying the paint, squeeze bottles with superfine silk-painting nozzles. In the gallery, if FitzGerald is not at work, we encounter his squeeze-bottle palette, industrial-grade power caulking gun, and other tools set out on an

Opposite: Dorian FitzGerald Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-François Daigre, Rue du Bac, Paris (work in progress, 2011-), Installation view Acrylic and acrylic caulking on canvas mounted on board; wooden painting platform, acrylic paint, caulking gun 320 x 396 cm Right: Dorian FitzGerald Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-François Daigre, Rue du Bac, Paris (work in progress, 2011-), Detail

Dorian FitzGerald Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-François Daigre, Rue du Bac, Paris (work in progress, 2011-), Detail

Following page: Dorian FitzGerald Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-François Daigre, Rue du Bac, Paris (work in progress, 2011-), Detail

adjustable platform that positions the artist above the artwork facilitating access to any part of the painting. To encounter the artist on the platform, at work, kneeling or bent over the horizontally positioned artwork on the gallery floor demystifies the illusion of sumptuousness Rybar and Daigre sought to create, and reminds us of the role of painstaking labour in the crafting of an artwork. FitzGerald’s forty-two–colour palette is based on his analysis of several divergently printed copies of the October 1989 issue of Architectural Digest purchased on eBay. The compressed image, as well as the restricted palette of tinted blacks, mahoganies, and golds, all transform and degrade the source image, suggesting mass-market reproduction and circulation of carefully crafted veneers of the “good life.” FitzGerald is also mindful of his own complicity in elite consumerism: his museum-scaled artwork offers a backhanded and self-reflexive critique of painting’s snug relationship to the contemporary art market and trends in interior design. The finished painting would indeed be too large for most domestic interiors to accommodate. 17

Sara Hartland-Rowe Sparrow in Midwinter (2015), Detail Acrylic, ink, polyester organza, paper on wall 457 x 970 cm

Sara Hartland-Rowe Halifax artist Sara Hartland-Rowe builds shifting narratives with collaged images to survey humanity’s conduct and foibles. Hartland-Rowe collects poignant or troubling news photographs—a toddler dressed as a suicide bomber, a crouching child afflicted by famine, a female police officer deferentially supporting a stooped woman in distress—to use as source material for her drawings. In Sparrow in Midwinter (2015), approximately half of Hartland-Rowe’s protagonists were sketched by the artist on her travels (to and from Mississauga in the present case) or as she moves through Halifax as a commuter, sits in public spaces, or pauses to record events in her workday. In stark contrast to her news image sources, these subjects of Hartland-Rowe’s observational gaze are often pictured in routine activities—shopping, walking, and conversing. Hartland-Rowe draws in ink on transparent, pastel-tinted cut-out shapes of polyester organza that maintain the intimate sketchbook scale of her initial drawings. She comes to an exhibition with a great many more drawings than she will use and creates her multi-vignette configurations during the installation process. Hartland-Rowe organizes these overlapping gesture drawings into groupings that share certain formal or thematic similarities: physical movement—all the figures make theatrical hand gestures; disjunctive narratives—a child in rags running past an armed soldier is juxtaposed with a young boy feeding a slice of bread to a swan; age and gender—two young men 21

Sara Hartland-Rowe Sparrow in Midwinter (2015), In-progress

Above: Sara Hartland-Rowe Sparrow in Midwinter (2015), Installation view Acrylic, ink, polyester organza, paper on wall 457 x 970 cm Left: Sara Hartland-Rowe Sparrow in Midwinter (2015), Detail

kiss and embrace, a hoodie-wearing male youth sniffs glue, a young Caucasian man looks with nervous admiration at a young man of African descent. Hartland-Rowe’s drawings are composed of economical gestural marks that do not always quickly reveal the image’s content, and indeed her wall work, with approximately thirty groups of drawings, required repeated viewings to take in fully. From the decidedly local and terrestrial, we move on to the larger-scale motifs that the artist drew and painted directly on the wall. These elements spoke to current global disparities of wealth, culture, religion, and social practice in broadly metaphoric terms. The artwork’s principal motif was an arc of coins falling and spinning across the wall from left to right. This balletic tumble signified the “heads or tails” nature of fate

and the role of chance in determining such grand binaries as success and failure, abundance and scarcity, salvation and purgatory. The ellipses of the foreshortened coins were drawn with dexterous assurance using willow charcoal and a string anchored by pins at two fixed points; then, the coins were given form with layers of painted and offset-printed watercolour, which allowed destiny an evanescent, even seductive, quality. For Hartland-Rowe, the wall work’s many diminutive protagonists’ fate was determined by underlying geopolitical forces rather than by a transcendent flip of a coin. Through this seemingly purposeful kingdom of prosaic activity and “newsworthy” vignettes, a stylized rainbow-spectrum wind form blows. The artist thinks of this wind as omnipresent ether, the intermingling of an inscrutable firmament with the everyday. 23

Maria Hupfield East Wind Brings a New Day: Revisited (2015), a super-graphic wall work and installation by Brooklyn artist Maria Hupfield, juxtaposed images of the Ontario landscape with sculptural elements reflecting Anishinaabe culture. The central element in the installation was a textured clear vinyl shower curtain on which Hupfield has cheekily painted a version of Group of Seven forerunner Tom Thomson’s The West Wind (1917) in the “Indian Group of Seven” member Norval Morrisseau’s equally iconic 1970s Woodlands style. Hupfield’s painted outline of The West Wind’s iconic wind-swept pine seamlessly combines Thomson’s curvilinear Art Nouveau stylization with Morrisseau’s biomorphic flat patterning. Hupfield, who grew up on Georgian Bay, felt regional and cultural kinship with The West Wind, the Algonquin Park landscape that served as its model, and the Woodlands school of painting. 24

She also found, however, that these historical— and in the case of the Group of Seven, transplanted European expressions—to be inadequate vehicles for her understanding of the landscape she grew up in and now knows from the perspective of living at some distance away. Seeing a version of The West Wind’s storm-battered pine in a setting of domestic décor (and personal hygiene) was bracing. Yet it was also humourous, set against a drawing of a Thunderbird smudged on the wall and lit by a dangling pink light bulb. A red electrical cord connected to the light bulb was suspended from a piece of plywood set perpendicular to the wall that ingeniously served as both a lighting bracket and the Thunderbird’s head. Further along, a quartet of pine two-by-four studs leaned against the wall. Echoing the suspended light

Opposite: Maria Hupfield East Wind Brings a New Day: Revisited (2015), Detail Right: Maria Hupfield East Wind Brings a New Day: Revisited (2015), Detail

bulb’s pink glow, Hupfield painted the backs of these studs fluorescent pink, an effect that cast warm reflections onto the wall; the front of each individual stud was painted in one of the traditional Anishnaabe colours of the four compass directions—red, yellow, black, and white—echoing the super-graphic rendering of water and sky on the wall. The artist’s reinvigoration of traditional material culture though bricolage and invention was intended as a celebration of the legends and traditions she references. Hupfield included a number of objects in her installation that she has previously used in her performances to combine references to Anishinaabe practices and storytelling as well as to the history of performance art and contemporary culture. Perched atop one of the pine boards was a felt pyramid decorated with gold metal

jingles, noisemakers first handcrafted by Ojibwa women circa 1900 from rolled chewing tobacco lids that were then sewn onto dresses and used in a healing dance. On the floor was a black felt circle, the implied site of a performance—or, in the artist’s words, a portal or site of transformation—upon which sits a pair of gold lamé evening gloves; taped to the wall above was a matching gold Mylar survival blanket. Drawings of the artist’s crouching silhouette appeared on the wall at floor level, indicating her presence while she worked on the installation. Had we been present to see the performance the artist left the remnants of, we would surely have witnessed Hupfield hybridizing, internalizing, colouring, and eventually bringing the Indigenous and European grand narratives of the natural world indoors to overlap in a state of conditional coexistence. 25

Maria Hupfield East Wind Brings a New Day: Revisited (2015), Installation view Drawing media, latex paint, shower curtain, survival blanket, tape on wall; latex paint on wood; light with socket and cord; felt with metal jingles; evening gloves on felt 457 x 914 cm

Denyse Thomasos Burial at Gorée (1993) Acrylic on canvas 281 x 542 cm

Denyse Thomasos Burial at Gorée is a mural-scaled painting of a chaotic and perspectively contradictory interior space that New York artist Denyse Thomasos created in 1993. From 1990 though 1995, Thomasos lived in Philadelphia, where she wrestled with balancing her developing concerns in abstract painting with her continuing interest in exploring the implications of her identity as a Trinidadian-Canadian living in the United States. Thomasos was mindful of the international reach of Trinidad’s colonial history of slavery and indentured servitude, which subjugated indigenous Caribs, Africans, and South and East Asians, and found parallels in Philadelphia’s colonial history. Thomasos’s paintings that preceded Burial at Gorée specifically (and less abstractly) represented the eighteenth-century slave ships that transported kidnapped Africans from the Guinea coast to landings along the Delaware River. In some of these large-scale paintings, her motifs included the claustrophobic sleeping platforms of slave ships, and in others, representations of the ships’ looming hulls. An attitude of disquiet and menace is present in Burial at Gorée, with the black-and-white gestural brushstrokes that she described in 1993 as “lashes of a slaver’s whip.” 1 Thomasos built her dramatic layers of orthogonal perspective over many painting sessions, to slowly create a constructed space that neared a point of congestion. She characterized this congestion as being both 28

Denyse Thomasos Burial at Gorée (1993), Detail

a visual phenomenon, as well as a physical reality: the risk of too many strata of painted marks merging to become an undifferentiated, inexpressive mass of flat acrylic paint. The space depicted in Burial at Gorée is Thomasos’s interpretation of the “slave castles” that held enslaved Africans prior to transportation from the West African coast. Thomasos’s original title for the painting was Displaced Burial, a reference to her father’s 1987 death in Trinidad and subsequent interment in Mississauga. Some years later, she renamed the work, connecting it to the Isle de Gorée, an island off Dakar, Senegal, which was used as a debarkation point in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Burial at Gorée is specifically informed by the architecture of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, in use from 1829 through 1971.2 The prison’s novel radial design was widely imitated; it also featured separate confinement for inmates in cells each with a large skylight representing the “Eye of God.” 3 The penitentiary now serves as a museum, and was first opened for tours in 1988.4 Thomasos visited the penitentiary, and was struck by the isolation of the prisoners from one another, the multiple perspectives offered by its centrifugal hallways, and the religious moral overlay embodied by each cell’s skylight. For Thomasos, this prison embodied the ongoing racial isolation of African Americans, who to this day are disproportionately represented in both American and Canadian prison populations. Burial at Gorée’s perspectival confusion is indebted to Eastern State Penitentiary’s architecture, as is the skylight—a feature in each cell—visible in the upper left-hand corner of the painting as a beam of light.

1. Based on my notes from a 1993 conversation with Denyse Thomasos in Philadelphia. 2. “Eastern State Penitentiary,” Wikipedia, as of July 30, 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_State_Penitentiary. 3. Ibid. 4. “Timeline,” Eastern State Penitentiary, accessed August 4, 2015, http://www.easternstate.org/learn/timeline.

Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky In Don’t be sad that it is over, be happy that it ever began (2015), San Francisco artist Rhonda Weppler and Toronto artist Trevor Mahovsky 1 recreated a contemporary poster-and-knickknack-covered UTM student dorm wall in drippy (mainly black) enamel paint over mesh-and-plaster forms. This panoply of memorabilia and pop culture was an interconnected and self-supporting bas-relief sculpture that sat on the floor and leaned up against the gallery wall, straddling the traditional terrains of sculpture and painting. Weppler was an undergraduate student at UTM and lived in the campus’s residences in the mid-1990s; some of the treasures either included in or alluded to in Don’t be sad are renditions of 32

the objects she displayed in her room—a dreamcatcher, a large comb, and a reproduction of a John Singer Sargent painting. While in residence at the Blackwood, Weppler and Mahovsky viewed on-line images of contemporary UTM dorm rooms as well, and their artwork reflects this research in objects such as a sport fan’s foam hand or an inflatable valentine heart. The posters in the sculpture reflected the standard formats and sizes of posters and postcards that students might purchase from market-style vendors that periodically appear on university campuses. The artists painstakingly created a number of stencils through which to spray paint cut-out silhouette images onto their sculpted posters, snapshots,

Opposite: Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky Don’t be sad that it is over, be happy that it ever began (2015), Installation view Epoxy, enamel, polymerized gypsum on cheesecloth and aluminum armature 244 x 291 cm Right: Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky Don’t be sad that it is over, be happy that it ever began (2015), In-progress

and magazine pages. This included, for example, the poster for the mid-1990s musical Rent, a picture of two young women mugging for the camera, and pages from the magazine Short Hair Styles. Weppler and Mahovsky intended the work to comprise a span of source material from the mid-1960s through to the present day, ranging from the youth movement’s concern for alienation to counterculture social and political awareness. To some viewers, the marijuana-leaf postcard and the peace poster with a dove may suggest 1960s experimentation with psychedelic drugs and the anti-war movement, the Union Jack with sewn-on badges evoke 1970s punk. To others, these symbols have moved out of time and are now

neutralized as very general—and heavily commercialized—pop cultural references. In a tonguein-cheek gesture, the contemporary moment is indicated by various images from the Vancouver-based, anti-consumerist Adbusters magazine, such as the magazine’s January 2015 “Crisis of Aesthetics” issue cover with an image of a donut with pink icing and sprinkles. The title of the work is a maxim and Internet meme based on a variation of the Dr. Seuss quote, “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” While this thought is undoubtedly saccharine, it does suggest the earnest spirit with which decorating an undergraduate dorm room wall is undertaken. This important rite of passage presents the undergrad 33

John Singer Sargent Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-86)

to their new peers in order to let them better understand an individual’s range of interests—to signal who they are, or perhaps more accurately, who they want to be seen as. Don’t be sad also referenced the history of Western painting and sculpture: the string of gaudy pink Chinese lanterns plugged into a sham electrical outlet allude to the American portrait painter John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885–86), which depicts two young girls intently lighting lanterns in a garden in the early evening; the lanterns’ rosy light gently warms the girls’ faces and hands. In Don’t be sad, Weppler and Mahovsky have painted pink light reflected on the wall behind their string of lanterns to recreate the light cast onto the girls by the Singer Sargent. Weppler and Mahovsky’s covert reference to an image of young girls’ unselfconscious concentration while in a “garden” reiterates their motif of the transition from youth to adulthood that dorm 34

room students negotiate. We, however, in looking at the lanterns, may simply see a dramatic if humourously garish lighting solution. Don’t be sad was entirely painted in matte black to indicate that we are seeing the dorm room at night. The sculpture’s overall form, a black bas-relief, is a paradoxical nod to the modernist austerity of the American mid-twentieth-century sculptor Louise Nevelson, who created shallow sculptural montages of wooden offcuts spray-painted matte black. The only glossy black surface in Don’t be sad is a long, thin mirror that reflects a painted single point of greenish-yellow light—perhaps that of a flashlight held by the viewer metaphorically peering into the memory of a dark room.

1. Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky initially developed their collaborative practice in Vancouver from 2004 to 2012.

Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be sad that it is over, be happy that it ever began (2015), Detail

Artist Biographies

Mark Bell (Canadian, born Toronto, 1964) completed his undergraduate studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1989, and in 2009 received a Masters degree from Chelsea College of Arts in London, UK. A selection of his solo exhibitions in public galleries include: Detail, Harbourfront Gallery, Toronto (2007); The Truth About Falling, YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto (2006); History Painting, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2003); and Information Passagegallerie, Vienna Künstlerhaus, Austria (2001). Group exhibition highlights include: More Sad Presentiments, Open Studio, Toronto (2012); Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, The Bear Gallery, London, UK (2009); and Copycat, Kenderdine Art Gallery, Saskatoon (1997). He has attended a number of artist residencies in Canada and Europe: Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ballycastle, Ireland (2006); Pouch Cove, Newfoundland (2002); Galichnick Art Colony, Macedonia (2002); Atelierhaus des Bundes, Vienna, Austria (2001). Bell is one of the founding members of the artist collective Painting Disorders. He lives in Toronto where he is represented by General Hardware Contemporary. markcroftonbell.com

Pierre Dorion (Canadian, born Ottawa, 1959) completed his Bachelor in Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa in 1981. His first solo exhibition was held at the Yarlow-Salzman Gallery, Toronto, in 1984. A brief selection of his subsequent solo exhibitions in public galleries include: Autoportraits 1990–1994, Centre international d’art contemporain (CIAC), Montreal (1994); Pierre Dorion, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (1995, toured); Pierre Dorion: Peinture et photographie, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (2010); and Pierre Dorion, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2012, toured). Group exhibition highlights include: Aurora Borealis, CIAC, Montreal (1984); Anninovanta, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy (1991); and À ciel ouvert: Le Nouveau Pleinairisme, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City (2012). In 1997, Dorion was awarded the Prix Louis-Comtois from the City of Montreal. He lives in Montreal and is represented by Galerie René Blouin in Montreal, Diaz Contemporary in Toronto, and Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. galeriereneblouin.com diazcontemporary.ca jackshainman.com

Dorian FitzGerald (Canadian, born Toronto, 1975) completed his Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History at Sheridan College/University of Toronto Mississauga in 2001. A selection of his exhibitions in public galleries include: The Painting Project, Galerie de l’UQÀM, Montreal (2013); Quebec and Canadian Art, 1980–2010: New Acquisitions, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (2011); Empire of Dreams: Phenomenology of the Built Environment, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); Carte Blanche: Volume 2 – Painting, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2008). FitzGerald lives in Toronto where he is represented by Clint Roenisch, Toronto. clintroenisch.com

Sara Hartland-Rowe (Canadian, born Kampala, Uganda, 1958) completed her Bachelor of Arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in 1990, and her MFA at University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993. A selection of her solo exhibitions in public galleries include: Look to the Living, Mount Saint Vincent University Gallery, Halifax (2012); Spin, Measure, Cut, Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, Canning, Nova Scotia (2008); All things good and pure, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax (2007); The Prince, Durham Art Gallery, Durham, Ontario (2004); Last Judgment, Dalhousie University Art Gallery, Halifax (2002); Days Are Where We Live, Museum London (2000). Hartland-Rowe has exhibited across Canada and abroad, and has received grants from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism and Culture. She has recently completed a major commission for the Halifax Municipality titled Travellers (2014) at the Dartmouth Bridge Terminal. Hartland-Rowe lives in Halifax. sarahartlandrowe.com

Maria Hupfield (Canadian, born Parry Sound, 1975) is Anishnaabe (Ojibwa) and a member of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History at Sheridan College/University of Toronto Mississauga in 1999, and her MFA at York University in 2004. Her work was featured in the solo exhibition, Strange Customs Prevail, at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Brandon (2011). Group exhibitions include: Land, Art, Horizons: Land Reflected in Contemporary Native American Art, North American Native Museum, Zurich, Switzerland (2014); Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3/Contemporary Native North American Art from the Northeast and Southeast, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2012); Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, Vancouver Art Gallery (2012, toured). In 1995, she founded the community arts program 7th Generation Image Makers, Native Child and Family Services of Toronto. She is a 2014 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and a member of Social Health Performance Club and Panoply Performance Lab, Brooklyn. Hupfield lives in Brooklyn and is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal. mariahupfield.wordpress.com huguescharbonneau.com

Denyse Thomasos (Canadian, born Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 1964; died New York City, 2012) completed her Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History at Sheridan College/University of Toronto Mississauga in 1987 and her MFA at Yale University in 1989. A selection of her solo exhibitions in public galleries include: Kingdom Come, Oakville Galleries (2011); Epistrophe: Wall Paintings by Denyse Thomasos, Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke (2006, toured); Hybrid Nations in Swing Space: Wallworks, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2005). Group exhibitions include: Bird Watching, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn (2006); Painters 15, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2003); Quiet as it’s Kept, Christine König Galerie, Vienna, Austria (2002). Thomasos was the recipient of numerous awards and artist residencies including a New York Foundation for the Arts Award (2008), Bellagio Foundation Residency (2001), Yaddo Residency, Joan Mitchell Award (1998), Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1997), and a PEW Foundation Fellowship (1995). In 2007, she was named the first recipient of the Genevieve McMillan/Reba Stewart Chair in Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, which recognizes outstanding contributions made by women artists. Thomasos’s estate is represented by Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto. olgakorpergallery.com lennonweinberg.com

Curator Biography

Rhonda Weppler (Canadian, born Winnipeg, 1972) and Trevor Mahovsky (Canadian, born Calgary, 1969) have worked collaboratively since 2004. Weppler completed her Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History at Sheridan College/University of Toronto Mississauga in 1997. Mahovsky completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Calgary in 1992. Both artists have MFA degrees from the University of British Columbia, where they met in 1996. Weppler and Mahovsky initially developed their collaborative practice in Vancouver from 2004 to 2012. Prior to the beginning of their collaborative practice, Weppler’s work was exhibited in Art Hypermarkets: Contesting Consumerism, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy (2004), and Domcile, Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA), Seattle (2004). Mahovsky’s work was shown in Crossing the Line, Queen’s Museum of Art, New York (2001), and he has written for exhibition catalogues and journals such as Artforum and Canadian Art. A selection of Weppler and Mahovshy’s collaborative solo exhibitions in public galleries include: Veneers + Walks, MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie (2014); Weppler and Mahovsky, Acme Project Space, London, UK (2014); The Searchers, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton (2012). Group exhibitions include: Wabi Sabi, Alter Space, San Francisco (2014); Persuasive Visions, Vancouver Art Gallery (2013); It Is What It Is, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2010). Their project All Night Convenience, commissioned for the 2012 edition of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, has also travelled to Atlanta’s Flux Night (2013) and Detroit’s DLectricity (2014). Residencies include: Acme, London, UK, (2014) and Artspace, Sydney, Australia (2011). Weppler and Mahovsky were 2014 recipients of the Glenfiddich Prize, for which they completed a residency at Glenfiddich Distillery in Dufftown, Scotland. Their practice continues after relocating to different cities: Mahovsky lives in Toronto, Weppler in San Francisco. They are represented by the Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto.

John Armstrong (Canadian, born Toronto, 1955) completed his undergraduate studies at Mount Allison University in 1978, and received a Masters degree from Chelsea College of Art in London, UK, in 1980. Armstrong has taught painting since 1982 in the studio division of Art and Art History, a collaborative Honours B.A. program between Sheridan College in Oakville and the University of Toronto Mississauga. Over the past ten years, he has collaborated with Paris artist Paul Collins: their paintings on photographs, videos, and publications have been on view in a number of solo and group exhibitions in Canada and Europe: Bill Boyle Artport, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto (2014); Plug In ICA, Winnipeg and Surrey Art Gallery (both 2013); General Hardware Contemporary, Toronto, Varley Art Gallery, Markham, and the Art Gallery of Mississauga (all 2012); and the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, Toronto (2010). Armstrong was a member of the Board of Directors of Mercer Union from 1991 to 1997, and has curated exhibitions for Mercer Union, The Textile Museum of Canada, and Harbourfront Centre, Toronto; Artspace, Peterborough; and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston. He has published many exhibition reviews and articles for C Magazine; his writing has also appeared in ArtsAtlantic, BorderCrossings, Canadian Art, Parachute, and the Globe and Mail, as well as in a number of exhibition catalogues. He lives in Toronto where he is represented by General Hardware Contemporary. johnarmstrong.ca

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List of works

Mark Bell Reverse Obsolescence (Deerfield Hall) (2014) Chalk and nail on wall 457 x 867 cm Courtesy of the artist and General Hardware Contemporary, Toronto Pierre Dorion Blackwood l (2014) Oil on linen 61 x 46 cm Courtesy of the artist and Diaz Contemporary, Toronto; Galerie René Blouin, Montreal; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City Pierre Dorion Blackwood ll (2014) Oil on linen 183 x 137 cm Courtesy of the artist and Diaz Contemporary, Toronto; Galerie René Blouin, Montreal; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City Dorian FitzGerald Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-François Daigre, Rue du Bac, Paris (work in progress, 2011-) Acrylic and acrylic caulking on canvas mounted on board; wooden painting platform, acrylic paint, caulking gun 320 x 396 cm Courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto

Sara Hartland-Rowe Sparrow in Midwinter (2015) 457 x 970 cm Acrylic, ink, polyester organza, paper on wall Courtesy of the artist Maria Hupfield East Wind Brings a New Day: Revisited (2015) Drawing media, latex paint, shower curtain, survival blanket, tape on wall; latex paint on wood; light with socket and cord; felt with metal jingles; evening gloves on felt 457 x 914 cm Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal Denyse Thomasos Burial at Gorée (1993) Acrylic on canvas 281 x 542 cm Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky Don’t be sad that it is over, be happy that it ever began (2015) Epoxy, enamel, polymerized gypsum on cheesecloth and aluminum armature 244 x 291 cm Courtesy of the artists and Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto

Curator’s Acknowledgments

I thank the artists for their receptiveness to my invitation to create new work for Inside, as well as for the experience of sharing the development and creation of their artworks both in the studio and in the gallery. Site-responsive commissions are, by their very nature, time-sensitive and collaborative: the Inside artists thoughtfully met both these challenges. The initial plan for a site-responsive exhibition of contemporary Canadian painting rose out of productive discussions with Christof Migone during his tenure at the Blackwood Gallery as director/curator. The gallery’s current director/ curator, Christine Shaw, was unstinting in her support of and enthusiasm for the ideas behind Inside. Exhibition coordinator Juliana Zalucky kept me, the artists, and other exhibition contributors on track, and cheerfully assumed organizational responsibilities. Curatorial assistant/collections archivist Joanna Sheridan contributed her editorial skills and assured the security and proper handling of the artworks. Designer Matthew Hoffman ingeniously developed the idea of eight individual exhibition invitations reflecting the work in progress for the exhibition of each artist or artist team as well as one view of the empty Blackwood Gallery waiting to be filled. Art and Art History students Alexandra Coulson and Cathy Griggs ably assisted with the creation of Mark Bell’s wall work. Olga Korper, Aaron Guravich, and the Olga Korper Gallery staff were most accommodating

in arranging the loan of Denyse Thomasos’s Burial at Gorée. My thanks also to Ms. Thomasos’s family—Jennie Thomasos, Lisa Thomasos, Gail and Gerry Luciano, and Samein Priester—for their gracious support. The text of this catalogue greatly benefitted from the perceptive comments and suggestions made by Christine Shaw and publication editor Bryne McLaughlin. Publication designer Drew Lesiuczok created a complementary balance between text and the abundant exhibition documentation. My colleagues on the Blackwood Gallery Advisory Board support the gallery, its programming, and staff in many crucial ways. My appreciation and thanks to Ana Maria Bejarano, Sonja Hidas, Kajri Jain, Vikas Kohli, Laura Krick, Evonne Levy, Louise Noguchi, David Poolman, Michael Spaziani, Alison Syme, and Laurel Whalen. Visitors were introduced to the exhibition by the Blackwood’s informed and cordial work-study students Paul Selva Raj, Alexandra Coulson, Laura Krick, Noor Naqaweh, Winnie Wuyanjing, Ksenia Vendrova, Brittany Gerow, Elham Numan, Asem Harun, Matthew Morales, and Kayla Tremblett. Sheridan Associate Dean Michael Rubinoff allowed me the time and space in my schedule to carry out the exhibition. Ben Portis helpfully provided me with many wise suggestions for mounting the exhibition. Sarah Quinton’s encouragement and editorial moxie was, as ever, invaluable. –John Armstrong

Gallery Acknowledgments

Copy Editing: Bryne McLaughlin Photography: John Armstrong Graphic Design: Drew Lesiuczok Printing: Sonic Print ISBN: 978-0-7727-8215-1 Cover: Mark Bell Reverse Obsolescence (Deerfield Hall) (2014) Blackwood Gallery Director/Curator: Christine Shaw Exhibition Coordinator: Petrina Ng Curatorial Assistant/Collections Archivist: Alison Cooley Inside Job During the course of the exhibition, the Inside artists participated in two recorded panels discussions moderated by John Armstrong. Inside Job 1: Wednesday 14 January with Pierre Dorion, Sara Hartland-Rowe, Maria Hupfield, Rhonda Weppler in the Kaneff Centre at the University of Toronto Mississauga Inside Job 2: Thursday 12 February with Mark Bell, Dorian FitzGerald, Trevor Mahovsky in Annie Smith Arts Centre Mezzanine at Sheridan College. This exhibition program and publication was made possible with core financial support from: the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Department of Visual Studies (UTM), and the Sheridan Faculty of Animation, Arts and Design.

Contextual image credits John Singer Sargent Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-86) Oil on canvas, 174 x 153.7 cm © Tate London 2015 Jessica Stockholder First Cousin Once Removed or Cinema of Brushing Skin [JS 327] (1999) Site-specific installation, J.S. McLean Gallery, The Power Plant, June 25 - September 6, 1999 Photo Credit: Cheryl O’Brien Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY. Matthias Weischer Simultan: Fernsehturm (Televisiontower) (2004) Oil on canvas 200 x 290 cm Photo: Uwe Walter, Berlin Courtesy Matthias Weischer Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing #1157 (2005) Acrylic on wall Part of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Swing Space series of commissioned wallworks, 2005 Drawn by Asmir Ademagic, assisted by Alicia Coutts, Martina Masek and Candy Minx Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto © The Sol LeWitt Estate / SODRAC 2015 Photos: Photographic Resources, AGO

Blackwood Gallery University of Toronto Mississauga 3359 Mississauga Road Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6, Canada 905-828-3789 www.blackwoodgallery.ca blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca