dc3 Art Projects | 2015

2015

10567 - 111 Street, Edmonton, AB T5H 3E8 | 587.520.5992 | info@dc3artprojects.com | www.dc3artprojects.com

YELLOW HOUSE JUDE & BRENDAN GRIEBEL January 15 - February 14, 2015 2015 began with the premiere of Yellow House, a collaborative body of work by Jude and Brendan Griebel, as well as the launch of the accompanying artist book.

During a month long residency at Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina in 2013, brothers Jude and Brendan Griebel revisited prairie boyhoods and ramshackle outbuildings through the haze of memory, both whimsical and melancholic. Offered the entire contents of a three story former thrift shop and army surplus store to play in, they were drawn to an antique dollhouse that reminded them of the abandoned buildings they explored as children on prairie farms. Using the dollhouse as a stage in which to animate forgotten, broken and discarded objects from the museum collection, the resulting series of photographs form strange narratives involving isolation, foreboding and more than a little humour. 

The exhibition also includes a number of Jude Griebel’s small resin sculptural works, completed during a residency at the Spinnerei complex in Leipzig, Germany, that are part of an ongoing exploration of memory, museum and modeling practices through history and the combined humour and and horror of contemporary life.

Jude Griebel is a visual artist based in Sundre, Alberta, who is continually exploring history, artifact, and narrative through various media all around the world. His travels have most recently found him in Leipzig, Istanbul, and the mountains of Transylvania. Jude recently completed his MFA at Concordia, and his work has been collected and exhibited widely across Canada and Europe. He is the recipient of grants and awards from CALQ, AFA, Canada Council, and Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. In 2014 he was shortlisted for the prestigious Bronfman Award in contemporary art.

Brendan Griebel is Executive Director at Kitikmeot Heritage Society in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, where he was Senior Researcher and Archivist from 2009 to 2013. Brendan has been actively involved in archaeologic studies in the Arctic and in developing community skills and resources for the preservation of the unique and vibrant cultures in the area. He has extensive experience in museological practices and has been awarded artist residencies in North Carolina, Iceland, Nunavut and the Yukon. In pursuit of his PhD in Archeology (2013) from University of Toronto and his ongoing work in the north, Brendan has received grants and awards from SSHRC, University of Toronto and Nunavut Territory

UNMASKING STIGMA AN OPEN HOUSE February 26 - 27, 2015

In February, dc3 Art Projects was pleased to open our doors to Edmonton Oilers goalie Ben Scrivens and his Ben’s Netminders project. In partnership with the Edmonton Oiler’s Community Foundation, Schizophrenia Society of Alberta and Canadian Mental Health Association, Scrivens worked with local artists living with schizophrenia to bring awareness to issues around mental health. Richard Boulet and Mark Munan were the first two artists to work with Scrivens, designing and bringing to life custom NHL goalie masks through the airbrush work of Steve Nash at Eyecandyair. Scrivens wore the masks during the season and presented them at our open house along with examples of the artists works. Members of the public, provincial and regional mental health services community, Edmonton Oilers players and families, and the local art community had a chance to view the works before they were auctioned off, raising over $32,000 for the Schizophrenia Society of Edmonton and Canadian Mental Health organization.

MONSTROUS? Alysha Creighton and Nika Blasser, Janice Wright Cheney, Dana Dal Bo, Dana Holst, Shanell Papp, Tammy Salzl, Caitlin Thompson March 11 - April 4, 2015

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a story written by a very young woman that has touched our modern culture for centuries. Her animation of the horrors of society, class, and technology within one reluctant and ultimately doomed conception is a classical example of the subjectivity of the monstrous and a germinator of dc3 Art Projects exhibition Monstrous?. The creator, his creation, and the townspeople around all take the role of monster throughout the tale. All are understandably driven by their own needs and fears, yet each takes turn as failed beings.

Monstrous? is an exhibition inspired by Shelley’s novel and by the works of artists who use horror and unease to portray a sense of the monstrous within their work, most often balanced with elements of humour and beauty. What shape does the monster take within the viewers mind when presented with numerous characters and multiple points of view? Who or what is monstrous within any given situation is often a matter of perspective and time, changing with history and viewpoints?

PAPIER15 Zachari Logan, Mitch Mitchell, Tammy Salzl and Sara Tremblay April 24 - 26, 2015

For the third year, we were thrilled to participate in Papier15, the Canadian art fair devoted to all things paper and organized by the Association des Galeries d’Art Contemporain (AGAC).

Newly located in the vibrant Mile End area of Montréal, Papier15 offered the chance to visit some of Canada’s most passionate and innovative galleries, giving collectors and enthusiasts the opportunity to see works by hundreds of artists from around Canada and the world.

For Papier15, dc3 Art Projects presented works by Canadian artists Zachari Logan, Mitch Mitchell, Tammy Salzl and Sara Tremblay.

TAMMY SALZL THE CLEANSING April 22 - May 9, 2015 Galerie Popop, Montréal, QC Coinciding with Papier15, dc3 Art Projects debuted Tammy Salzl’s first large-scale immersive installation, The Cleansing, at the Belgo Building in Montréal.

Salzl's hand-wrought installation of painted and printed paper, video, sound and digital media brings her psychological spaces into an immersive realm. Based on small collaged paintings on paper, Salzl tells tales of contemporary life and anxieties through imagery reminiscent of children stories and fables.

Tammy Salzl is a Montréal-based artist who uses multiple media to explore psychological spaces within individuals and society. Mediating familiar but challenging imagery with rigorous attention to skill and craft, she unmasks vulnerabilities in both the subject and viewer through layers of paint, pigment, and collage. Salzl completed her MFA at Concordia in Painting and Drawing and has shown across Canada and in Berlin and Mexico.

GARY JAMES JOYNES BROKEN SOUND May 6 - June 13, 2015 dc3 Art Projects was proud to present Broken Sound, a new body of work by Gary James Joynes in his second solo exhibition at our Edmonton gallery space. Born from the death of older experiments with the physical nature of sound, Broken Sound is a meditation on life and on slowing down and being fully present within light and darkness, silence and sound.

Broken Sound comes from a forensic examination of the speakers muted by his exploration of cymatic sound forms. Using hand built mechanisms and specialized macro photography techniques he has documented the marks and scars of magnetic traumas experienced by the copper coils silenced by his experiments. Starting as pristine and golden in colour the linear order of wires slowly gives way to charring and chaos as flaws and sonic experience build up. Some of these speakers lived for months and others were silenced within minutes of life. All are memorialized in this new film installation and photographic series. 

This immersive environment features an eight channel voice and modular synthesizer composition accompanying four individual HD video projections created with a Buddhist parable in mind: An acolyte, seeking enlightenment, encounters a stone disc of almost infinite radius spinning silently on its horizontal access, as if falling from the sky. He devotes his life to the continual observation of this wheel, perfect in it’s smoothness and continuity. Foregoing all earthly experiences he hopes to bear witness to the single horizontal imperfection in the wheel. In silence and stillness he waits for a flaw to bring him to a greater state of enlightenment.

Gary James Joynes is an Edmonton based audio and visual artist who performs at major music events around the world as Clinker. He blends the beauty and physicality of the auditory and visual elements of sound live in performance and in rigorous and emotional photo and video installation works. His work has been exhibited and collected across Canada and the US including major solo installations in Montréal (2014), Calgary (2013) and Edmonton (2013). Joynes has been included in significant group exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Alberta including the 2013 Alberta Bienniale, and at Toronto’s Koffler Centre of the Arts. Recent major performances include CMKY Festival in Boulder Colorado, New Forms Festival in Vancouver, MUTEK_IMG at Phi Centre in Montréal. He performed his newest Live Cinema piece Soundbursting at ELEKTRA in Montreal May 15/15.

Special Thanks for supporting the creation of this work to: Canada Council for the Arts | Alberta Foundation for the Arts | Edmonton Arts Council

ROYDEN MILLS NO JOB MORE DANGEROUS AN EXHIBITION ON TWO SITES June 17 - August 1, 2015 In June, dc3 Art Projects presented Royden Mills’ No Job More Dangerous - An Exhibition on Two Sites in conjunction with Qualico Developments and EPCOR Tower. Through works in progress, process-based drawings for projects past and future, maquettes for upcoming public artworks and experiments in form, dc3 Art Projects was transformed into the sculptor’s workshop and idea storehouse as Mills shared his life and his work. Simultaneously, a collection of the Edmonton-based artist’s large-scale work occupied EPCOR Tower, along with a select view of work done by a small number of the students he has influenced through his teaching career. Curated by Justine Hartlieb-Power, this survey of younger artists creative practices gives insight into the important role that both student and teacher play in each other’s growth as artists, designers, architects and more.

Living, Creating, Inspiring and Teaching are cornerstones of being for Royden Mills, a near lifelong Edmonton area artist and instructor in Art and Design at University of Alberta. Mills had been trained in a school of rigidly formal ideology, has kept some of that dogma as true to him and opened himself to the influences of other mindsets. He has nurtured generations of young people in art and creativity and has been as available to learning from them as he is eager to teach. Mills has placed himself in the dangerous position of living, rather than existing, with all the joy and hurt that entails. Mills worked for British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, was admonished by him for making things well yet leaving out the riches of his own life and experience, and made choices to forge his own path through the wilds of a creative practice.

Royden Mills has shown widely across North America and has public and private artworks placed in London ON, upstate NY, California and throughout Alberta including upcoming public artwork in Edmonton’s river valley at Terwilligar Park. He continues to learn and share with young artists at University of Alberta, and mentor them into successes long after their formal relationship is done. Mills has won national teaching awards and seen his students receive prestigious awards and exhibitions at the International Sculpture Centre and Franconia Sculpture Park in Minneapolis MN. 

BRANDON VICKERD FALTERING MONUMENTS August 26 - October 8, 2015 Brandon Vickerd’s Faltering Monuments presented a series of sculptural works that subvert the expectation of the monument through intervention. Purposely diverse, his studio work straddles the line between high and low culture, acting as a catalyst for critical thought and addressing the failed promise of a modernist future predicated on boundless scientific advancement. Whether through craftsmanship, the creation of spectacle, or humour, the goal of his work is to provoke the viewer into questioning the dominant myth of progress ingrained in Western world views.

Brandon Vickerd is a Toronto-based sculptor and Professor of Visual Arts at York University. He received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in (1999) and his MFA from the University of Victoria (2001). Recent solo exhibitions include Art Gallery of Hamilton, grunt gallery in Vancouver and Ace Art in Winnipeg. He has received numerous awards and grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Ontario Arts Council. Vickerd was recently awarded a commission by the Edmonton Arts Council to create a public art project entitled Wildlife, which will be permanently installed in the Quarters Armature in 2015. 

TAMMY SALZL simplest of gestures August 26 - October 8, 2015

Tammy Salzl’s simplest of gestures featured a series of watercolour portraits that capture the complex psychological narratives of the sitters. Salzl depicts fellow artists, friends and family, striving to draw the viewer in with an affective experience that slowly evolves to alter the viewer’s perception, like ‘beautiful parasites’. Salzl paints figurative studies of what it means to be human in today’s world. She paints the stories that separate and isolate us as the other, and the commonalities we all share through an obsessive and often disturbing focus on posture and colour and flesh. She uses paint, oil or watercolour, as metaphor for our own bodies subject to forces of gravity, time and nature.

Tammy Salzl is an Edmonton-born, Montreal-based painter who received her MFA in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University (2014). Recent exhibitions include two person shows at Latitude 53 in Edmonton and FOFA Gallery in Montreal, solo shows at Union Gallery in Kingston, AKA Gallery in Saskatoon and solo show with residency at SlaM Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Salzl is a Tedeschi Scholarship recipient and has received grants and residencies from QALC, KIAC Centre in Dawson City, The Banff Centre and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

NUIT BLANCHE 2015 September 26, 2015 This all-night contemporary art event began in Paris in 2002 and has spread to cities around the world.

This was the first time Edmonton held Nuit Blanche, which included fourteen projects that existed for one night only, as well as independent projects throughout downtown. The streets of downtown Edmonton were transformed for the evening, with an estimated attendance of 52,000 people. dc3 Art Projects was proud to be involved in the following projects: Brandon Vickerd's Dance of the Cranes animated four high-rise construction site cranes on the Ice District site in a choreographed dance performance towering over the streets of downtown Edmonton.

Repurposing these utilitarian machines as the star performers, they came to life in a synchronized spectacle of motion.

Ali Nickerson's Blue Christmas served as an all-night workshop on Rice Howard Way, where the artist and her elves worked feverishly to hand-make gifts in response to visitors wish lists.

Gary James Joynes' Ouroboros, an immersive sound and video work, was presented in City Hall’s main foyer. The largest installation of this work to date, Joynes invited viewers to explore sacred sounds and imagery through the filter of a digital age.

ART TORONTO 2015 October 23-26, 2015

FEATURED ARTIST PROJECT TAMMY SALZL | THE CLEANSING The Cleansing is an immersive world of contrasts, a lovingly rendered world that captures the viewer with the superficial tranquility of an idyllic suburban home. Transported through an almost cartoonish painted red curtain, we enter another realm filled with sounds of singing birds, children, and church bells where things are strange and unnervingly familiar.

Using visual language familiar to us from fairy tales and fables, Tammy Salzl’s installation blends found and created video elements, audio, painting, drawing, craft techniques, highly worked print on paper and a unique sense of humour. Salzl’s characters are human, animal and somewhere-in-between. Simultaneously endearing and monstrous, they elicit a complicated emotional response. Salzl reflects our world with all it’s beauty and rawness back on us, telling stories as a way of asking questions and prompting us to ask questions of ourselves.

ART TORONTO SOLO To accompany Tammy Salzl’s Featured Project, we were pleased to present a solo exhibition of her work featuring an ongoing series of allegorical meditations on contemporary life. Salzl uses the trope of children’s tales and scavenged images of animals, internet famous for their otherness, to weave her contemporary visual tales. Lovingly rendered works in collage, gouache, and watercolour appear to offer near saccharine views of childhood but quickly reveal darker sides of human nature as humanized animals fall prey to animalistic children. Large oil on canvas paintings present contemporary fables, beautiful in delivery and haunting in content and image, and Salzl’s newest sculpture created for the fair, Making Ready, will be debuted.

ART TORONTO VERGE In the VERGE section, we were pleased to present the work of five emerging contemporary Canadian artists whose work is linked through chroma and an affinity for history, identity and obsessive detail.

Amalie Atkins Cindy Baker Gary James Joynes Travis McEwen Mitch Mitchell

EXHIBITING SOUND Co-curated by Scott Smallwood & David Candler Howard Bashaw, Courtney Brown, Marla Hlady, Gary James Joynes, Eleanor King, Stephan Moore, Scott Smallwood October 22 - November 14, 2015

In conjunction with the conference Exhibiting Sound, held at the University of Alberta on October 30 November 1, dc3 Art Projects presented Exhibiting Sound, co-curated by Scott Smallwood and David Candler.

What does it mean for sound to be exhibited? How can sound be regarded as an artistic medium?

Musical performances, of course are sound-based, but what about sound as a medium for exhibition?

Can sound be “shown� in a gallery?

The genre of sound art is not new but is still, perhaps, a medium without fixed definition. Sound takes time to process, being a temporal medium, and gives us clues about space and direction. Our language is based on the constraints and features of sound and, unlike the visual, is difficult to “frame”; presenting specific sound while blocking out other unwanted noise is a particular challenge.

The seven artists of this show all refer to sound in some way, either as primary material, as conceptual or “non-cochlear,” even as musical: all with the exhibition in mind. None of these pieces have a beginning or end, but all have something to say about sound. Sobey Award short listed Eleanor King’s pieces use the physical media of sound as visual object/tool. Courtney Brown, Scott Smallwood, and Marla Hlady’s work utilize sound directly as a source of play and discovery. Howard Bashaw’s graphical score and Stephan Moore’s Max code both show descriptions/prescriptions of how sound can be performed, either by machine or by human players and musicians. Gary James Joynes’ monitor based video creates an audio-visual melding of sensation that connect the eye and ear.

The conference Exhibiting Sound was held at the University of Alberta, October 30 to November 1, and featured Keynote speakers Barbara London (Former Curator, Musum of Modern Art), Stephan Moore (Sound Artist / Composer / Lecturer, Northwestern University) and Jeff Todd Titon (Emeritus Professor of Music, Brown University). More information about the conference is available at exhibitingsound.ca

TĂŠTE JAUNE November 21 - December 19, 2015 In November, dc3 Art Projects partnered with TĂŞte Jaune for their second annual design show, featuring emerging and top designers from across the prairie provinces. The juried selection of furniture, homewares and industrial design was paired with artwork by Cindy Baker, Ruth Cuthand, David Garneau, Travis McEwen, Mitch Mitchell and Tammy Salzl.

“Tête Jaune Design Show is an exhibition from and for the Canadian Prairies. We want to create a platform for designers to share their work with you, and we hope to open the discussion of what constitutes a “prairie aesthetic”. We believe that our environment influences what we create, and through our work we might better understand the place we call home.”

– Brandon Webber & Carmen Douville, Founders, Tête Jaune

2016 UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS InFocus Curated by Alexis Marie Chute February

Amalie Atkins March - April

Cindy Baker March - April

Ruth Cuthand March - April

Sean Caulfield May - June

The Industry Show June - August

Tammy Salzl September - October

Scrappy November - December

10567 - 111 Street, Edmonton, AB T5H 3E8 | 587.520.5992 | info@dc3artprojects.com | www.dc3artprojects.com