www.dc3artprojects.com \ 10567 – 111 Street \ Edmonton, Alberta T5H 3E8 \ Canada
www.dc3artprojects.com \ 10567 – 111 Street \ Edmonton, Alberta T5H 3E8 \ Canada
Gallery Artists
Cindy Baker
Travis McEwen
Richard Boulet
Mitch Mitchell
Blair Brennan
François Morelli
Paul Freeman
Mark Mullin
Gary James Joynes
Tammy Salzl
Craig Le Blanc
Daniela Schlüter
Cindy Baker, whatever BITCH whatever, latch hooked rug, mixed fibres, 2009
Cindy Baker Interdisciplinary and performance artist Cindy Baker is passionate about gender culture, queer theory, fat activism and art theory. Baker considers context her primary medium, working with whatever materials are needed to allow her to concentrate on the theoretical, conceptual and ephemeral aspects of her work. She believes that her art exists in its experience, and not in its objects. Some of Baker’s biggest interests are skewing context and (re)examining societal standards, especially as they relate to language and dissemination of information, and she perceives a need for intervention and collaboration, both within the art world and in the community at large. She is currently based out of Lethbridge, Alberta, and has shown widely across Canada and the US in public venues, artist run centres and a myriad of surprising spaces.
Cindy Baker, Mighty Men and Mistress Maker, life-sized bed installation with etched plexiglass drawing templates, 2012
Cindy Baker, Dominatrix drawing template, 2012
Mighty Men and Mistress Maker, the colourful interactive sculptural installation by Cindy Baker, deals with internal desires and awakenings through a childhood drawing toy for boys. Codified toys are a focus for both parents and children when play doesn’t fall within heteronormative lines. Baker recalls her brother playing with the male approved Mighty Men and Monster Maker toy while she and her sister were relegated to Fashion Plate, the Barbie equivalent, which entailed creating differing outfits for the same idealized body type. In her creative practice Cindy has frequently questioned the gender and body stereotypes of contemporary society, and in this piece she gets to do both. The life size toy allows viewers to bring to life their own idealized “playmate” from any combination of lesbian and feminist archetypes and the original “Mighty Men” forms. In order to do so, the viewer has to actively crawl over and around the single bed using the drawing templates and crayons to animate their two dimensional friend, bringing to mind games of both adults and children.
Baker has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally and is currently completing graduate studies at University of Lethbridge.
Richard Boulet, Schizophrenia, cross-stiched panel, mixed fibres, 2008
Richard Boulet Richard Boulet has worked and lived in Edmonton for the past nine years. He has a BFA from the University of Manitoba School of Art, Winnipeg, and an MFA from the University of Alberta, Edmonton. Boulet has exhibited at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg; Creative Growth, San Francisco; Keyano College Art Gallery, Fort McMurray; Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary; Ace Art Inc., Winnipeg; and the 2007 Alberta Biennale. Boulet was the subject of an exhibition, Stitched and Drawn, circulated by Alberta College of Art and Design's Illingworth Kerr Gallery and curator Wayne Baerwaldt from December 3 2012 - March 10 2013. Featuring the multifaceted work of Canadian artist
Richard Boulet, Stitched and Drawn highlights the artist’s use of quilting and crossstitching techniques to address his personal history of schizophrenia and broader issues of mental health. Formally trained in painting, drawing, and sculpture, Boulet aligned himself with poetic, literary and linguistic explorations of conceptual art of the 1960s, when he was a young adult working on an architecture degree in the early 1980s. Boulet's art is decidedly self-reflexive; his labour-intensive working process provides him with an opportunity to contemplate the past and, stitch by careful stitch, to put things right. As Boulet explains, "To use quilting and cross-stitching in a body of work that alludes to the psychological dilemmas of addressing personal traumas seems appropriate, in that there is a strong sense of comfort and self-care in these two techniques. Richard continues to work in crossstitch and quilting as well as maintaining an active solo and collaborative drawing practice exploring issues of personal and queer identity, health and illness. Richard Boulet, Prodigal Part Four (detail), cross-stiching and quilting with cloth and mixed fibres, 2010
Blair Brennan, works from Scara Privata, mixed media drawing installation, 2008
Blair Brennan Blair Brennan (1959 Edmonton, Alberta) received a B.F.A. from the University of Alberta in 1981. His sculpture, installation work, photographs/photo-based works, drawings, book works and other works on paper have been exhibited nationally in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His work was featured in both the 1996 and the 1998/99 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art (exhibited in Edmonton and Calgary) and in recent thematic group exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Calgary (Made in Alberta, 2013), Southern Alberta Art Gallery Lethbridge (2012), Art Gallery of Regina (Graphic Visions, 2008); Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver (Too Many Words, 2007); Harcourt House Gallery, Edmonton (New Alchemists: Catherine Burgess and Blair Brennan, 2007) and Cambridge Art Galleries, Cambridge, Ontario (Wordsmiths, 2006). Brennan's work is represented in numerous private and public collections including the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), the Canada Council Art Bank
(Ottawa), the Glenbow Museum (Calgary), the University of Alberta (Edmonton) and the Winnipeg art Gallery. Artistic collaboration and writing are important facets of Brennan's practice. Early in his career Brennan worked with the Edmonton-based nationally acclaimed dancer/choreographer Brian Webb to develop a series of highly ritualistic collaborative performance/ installations performed and exhibited in Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa. Brennan has recently teamed with Brian Webb, Sean Caulfield, Roy Mills, and Montreal choreographer Isabelle Van Grimde on a performative environment premiered at Galerie UQAM May 2012. Brennan has contributed writing to various Canadian arts and cultural publications (Artichoke, Border Crossings, C -- International Contemporary Art, Cameo, RACAR and Mix) and was recently invited to contribute a piece to Visible Language (vol. 42.1), a Blair Brennan, Baiting Jonah, Trapping Cain, Haunting Ahab, installation view with branded leather, branding irons and knives, 2007
journal published by the Rhode Island School of Design. Brennan lives and works in Edmonton where he is involved with various art galleries and the local arts community as a teacher, writer and agitator. He has held numerous board, committee, volunteer and paid staff positions and is currently Executive Director of the University of Alberta's FAB Gallery. He is currently
Blair Brennan, Some I Rip, branded drywall and branding irons, 2013
preparing for a solo exhibition at dc3 Art Projects for Spring 2014.
Paul Freeman, Long-bills, archival inkjet print on Lexjet sunset, edition of 3, 2004
Paul Freeman Independent visual artist, Paul Freeman is the Artistic Director at the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts, an art centre for artists with developmental disabilities in Edmonton and a drawing instructor at the University of Alberta in the Department of Art and Design. Freeman received his BFA from The Alberta College of Art & Design (Calgary) in 1998, and his MFA from the University of Alberta (Edmonton) in 2005. He is the recipient of numerous academic awards, scholarships and grants, and his work has been exhibited in public and private spaces across Canada. Freeman recently (November 2012 – February 2013) showed a large sculptural installation at the RBC New Works Gallery at the Art Gallery of Alberta and is the beneficiary of generous support through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Edmonton Arts Council and was recipient of the 2012 Eldon and Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize. Freeman was featured in a solo exhibition December 2012 to January 2013 at dc3 Art Projects titled
Selected Mutations whereby his previous 15 years of work were contextualized in the face of his ongoing creative practice exploring found materials, found images, manipulation and mutations.
Paul Freeman - Artist Statement Working in sculpture, drawing and a variety of digital media, my art practice currently focuses on the tensions emerging around genetic technologies and its effect on our feelings about the dissolving biological boundaries between genders, species etc. and dominance or control in general. My most recent work, especially the pen and ink drawings on brown paper, is about how often we use mind control tricks on each other and how we manipulate surroundings or perceived cause and effect to alter behavior in others. Between thinking about mind control as conspiracy theorists fear it, and mind control as it is practiced through everyday interactions, especially between adults and children, these drawings emerge from thinking about common ways in which we manipulate our surroundings or the perception of cause and effect to influence behavior.
Paul Freeman, Cervus Ejectus, sculpture installation at the Art Gallery of Alberta, 2012-13
Gary James Joynes, Alluvium (from the Topographic Sound Series), C-Print diptych on Dibond, 2013
Gary James Joynes Gary James Joynes, also known by his performing moniker Clinker, has been active in the electronic and experimental music performance community for years. His latest live cinema work Peregrination was recently included in the 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art and has been performed in Waterton Park, Saskatoon at AKA Gallery's Sounds Like Festival and will be part of the Soundasaurus Festival in Calgary in November 2013. He has more recently embarked on a broader artistic exploration using his analog synthesizers and custom made machines to create visual sound as photograph/drawing/sculpture hybrids along with immersive and unending installation environments for reflection and deep listening/viewing experiences. Joynes' newest visual work was presented in a solo exhibition entitled Topographic Sound at Edmonton’s dc3 Art Projects in early 2013. This exhibition also included his critically acclaimed work Ouroboros which had its world premiere at Toronto’s Koffler Centre of the Arts international exhibition Spin Off:
Contemporary Art Circling the Mandala in September 2011. His sound and visual installation Frequency Painting: 12 Tones premiered at the Latitude 53 Art Gallery in January 2011 and was a featured exhibition at Calgary's Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts and Beakerhead Festival during the month of September 2013. His second room filling installation Soundbursting No. 1, was shown at Edmonton’s Harcourt House main gallery space from March 1 to April 14, 2012. Joynes' work has been collected by private and institutional collections in Canada and the United States and he has been the beneficiary of grants and residencies from Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Edmonton Council for the Arts as well as the Banff Centre. Gary James Joynes, installation views of 12 Tones and Ouroboros (below), 2012 and 2013
Joynes' performing and recording career includes several collaborative projects as
well as his solo work as Clinker. An abbreviated list of Clinker’s sound and video work performed and exhibited in Canada and abroad in festivals and events includes Soundfjord re/flux Sublimated Landscape / Sonic Topology @ ICA London (London, UK), Emmedia Sonic Boom 2009 (Calgary), The Banff Centre – Interactive Screen (2008 & 2007 editions) and the 2008 Leonard Cohen International Festival, Tanzstartklar Festival 2008 (Graz, Austria), New Forms Festival 2007 & 2003 (Vancouver), Sprawl – Interplay_4 Festival 2007 (Amsterdam, Dublin, London, Bristol), Roulette Mixology Festival 2010 (New York), MUTEK Festival 2003, 2007, 2009 (Montreal), and Standart 2003 (Madrid, Spain).
Craig Le Blanc, installation view of What Makes a Man at dc3 Art Projects, 2013
Craig Le Blanc Over the last decade Craig Le Blanc’s artistic practice has evolved from the association of art and sport to the study of masculinity, virility and the male archetype. Le Blanc investigates these relationships in the context of games, sport, merit and heroism. He utilizes objects native to sports culture to communicate on the masculine identities and social ideals associated with sport, vigour, and individual achievement. Le Blanc is recognized for his public artworks commissioned by the City of Edmonton, City of Sherwood Park and City of Calgary, and his monumental 2011 piece Henri was cited as one of the year's top public art works in America by the Public Art Network.
Le Blanc received his MFA-CMD from the University of Calgary in 2011 and his BFA (1997) in painting and sculpture from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He spent a portion of this time in Paris, studying at the influential L’Ecole Nationale Superiere des Beaux Arts. There he deviated from painting completely, delving into the world of three-dimensional and conceptual art. Le Blanc was awarded at the 2004 Edmonton Mayor's Luncheon for Business and the Arts with the Enbridge Emerging Artist Award for the Visual Arts. Le Blanc was also named the 2003 Edmonton Artists' Trust Fund Helen Collinson Award winner for the Visual Arts. He was included in 2002 presentation of The Craig Le Blanc, installation view of Vanity Fare at the Art Gallery of Calgary, 2013
Alberta Biennial of
Contemporary Art. He currently lives and works in Calgary where he had a survey show of works at Art Gallery of Calgary (2013). He was featured in dc3 Art Projects September show What Makes a Man with Travis McEwen.
Craig Le Blanc, Self-Portrait, powder-coated steel, 24” x 240” x 1”, 2013
Travis McEwen, Untitled (from Heterotopias and Sunburns), oil on linen, 20” x 16”, 2012
Travis McEwen Fierce colour, imaginative and ambiguous characters, and a blurred expression of traditional gender stereotypes characterize Travis McEwen’s approach to painting. Currently enrolled at Montreal’s Concordia University in the renowned painting and drawing MFA program, Travis is preparing for shows in artist run centres across Canada. Travis mines contemporary queer visual culture and historic closeted publications for images that ferment into his small and potent watercolours—imaginary portraits that straddle the gender spectrum. Figures, faces and colours that confound our social construct of gender allow for other ideas beyond the male female binary. Travis McEwen - Artist Statement As a painter who often works from notional subjects, I am continuously exploring my own visual and emotional responses to ideas and conceptions surrounding otherness, exclusion and normalcy and how they intersect/interact with the ideas and constructs of gender and sexuality. I create and invent individual and isolated portrait subjects as a structure to exemplify and communicate the emotional
Travis McEwen, Pink Face and Green Panties (l-r), watercolour on paper, 2013
psychology related to these ideas. These subjects are youths, people discovering themselves, people whose bodies are betraying them and becoming different without their consent. And yet these isolated subjects are already marked by sociality— the ungainly, fraught relationship of the self to itself here has been fashioned by its encounter with social pathologies. The inner experience of selfestrangement begins with the encounter with another. The paintings’ titles seek to re-stage this relationship between the external remark and the internalized insecurities and self-understandings of the subjects themselves. In as much as the work is physical, visceral and psychologically weighted, I am trying to create figures that exist in a landscape or universe where the fantasy of the perfectibility of the human body is met with the reality of ambiguity, imperfection and abnormality. My work does this by drawing upon the resources of uncertainty and fragility. My hope and goal is that my work engages the viewer in a complex emotional response, beginning with an immediate sense of intimacy and sympathy continuing through a deepening awareness of the beauty and fragility of the subject. My work itself up to this point has been characterized by an engagement with traditional methods of painting and image making. I engage the formal elements of constructing a compelling portrait — size, colour and light, paint handling— to enable the conceptual source of the image to communicate itself to the viewer.
Mitch Mitchell, Distance Arc, quilted newsprint, silkscreen, rust, inflation system and electronics, 2012
Mitch Mitchell Mitch Mitchell has just been appointed as an Assistant Professor of Print Media at Concordia University in Montreal and is an interdisciplinary print-based studio artist originally from Springfield, Illinois, USA. His visual research focuses on remarks and identities of industry, trade and globalization surrounding material and objects through the role of print and the graphic multiple. His multiple bodies of work range from small photogravures to large-scale warehouse installations. Prior to joining Concordia's Faculty of Fine Arts he taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Memorial University and the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Mitch has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Canada, the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Portugal and New Zealand. He has represented Canada in numerous biennials and was named Curator of Contemporary Canadian Graphic Print for the 2012 Novosibirsk Graphic Triennial in Russia. He has been an artist in residence at various cultural institutions including the Frans Masareel Centrum in Belgium, Atelier d'estampe Imago in New Brunswick and the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Quebec. Mitch has collaborated on numerous visual arts research projects with universities and
Mitch Mitchell, The Metropolis Chronicles: Chicago 1954 Part I, archival inkjet on somerset
artists, funded by multiple granting agencies (SSHRC, Canada Council and Edmonton Arts Council). He has received numerous awards for his studio practice and has been included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Berardo Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, and Shenzhen Art Museum in China.
Mitch Mitchell, The Metropolis Chronicles: Chicago 1954 Part II, archival inkjet on somerset satin, 2012
Mitch Mitchell, installation views of Distance Arc, quilted newsprint, silkscreen, rust, inflation system and electronics, 2012
Mitch Mitchell: The Silence, by Sarah Fillmore As one views the sublime, deeply haunting printed works in Mitch Mitchell’s Cities of the Prairies and The Longing Focal, there is a profound sense of silence. Strange when considering visual work, that sound or a lack thereof should come into play, and while Mitchell’s work is soundless, it is not mute. As one reads page after wordless page in these seductive books, one image melts into the next and a sense of foreboding and unrest takes hold. Small, subtle characters emerge above and beneath quiet, tense surfaces and a story of desolation, danger, and seduction unfolds. The danger is intangible, a prickly awakening of one’s “spidey senses” as what one reads as landscape morphs into a human skin, a frozen lake, a deserted quarry, and back to a snow-covered field. It’s difficult to tell if the surfaces in the image are organic or manmade, if they are of the present or future. Their eerie skin is flesh-like, but a frozen, lost, post-apocalyptic kind of flesh. There are piercings in this dermis, and dark forms lie under its surface. The few bright, electric spots of light burn coldly on barren flesh. What rests beneath the skin? What happened here? Where are we? What are we left with? Is it silence? We search for the real in what we see. We want truth in documentary media, photographs and documents of the world around us. Canadian documentary photographer Edward Burtynsky darkly and beautifully captures the ravages of industry at specific places on the planet. Butynsky’s straight photography offers viewers site-specific views of the environmental impact manufacturers have had on China, India, Canada, and the United States. Mitchell makes a point of removing all points of reference within his prints- scale, horizon, physical markers that might help his viewer link the image to a specific time or place, a particular scene. In so doing, his scenes become universal and strangely personal, deeply intimate. Mitchell’s truth is manipulated. He digitally alters the photographs he takes of scenes he constructs in his studio using the detritus of his surrounding environment; latex, wire and bits of candy and rubber. His pilgrimage for truth led him to duplicity, to creating an ethereal landscape and prickly skin. These prints reveal a mature understanding of our precarious standing on this planet. While unwilling to take an overtly political or environmental stand, his work warns of a place that may be all that is left after we take from it what we see as “ours” – tellingly eerie, foreboding, and dangerous places. These prints speak viscerally, of the body, of our humanity and of the thin skin we share with our surroundings. Despite their dark, quiet sensibility, these prints are revealingly erudite. Fillmore is the Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia & Curator of the Sobey Art Award
François Morelli, works from the Aquarelle Series, watercolour on paper
François Morelli Montreal’s François Morelli is a polymath senior artist with his MFA from Rutgers University (1983) in New Jersey. Morelli is a Professor of Art and the Graduate Program Director at Concordia University, Montreal; he has been actively exhibiting across Canada and internationally for over 30 years. He has an extensive showing history of sculpture, performance, video and, most recently, massive drawings. During formative periods, while teaching, commuting long hours and building a family he used ink watercolour and paper to express and process. Never shown publicly, these works from mid 1980s to early 2000s are delicate and beautiful drawings with deep connections to past and future work. Repeated use of armature–like forms echoes his performative sculptures and rubber stamped print works, his later work on the Belt Head series of performative drawing and print and the mammoth pink drawings done during a 6 month residency in New York City in 2011.
François Morelli, from the Pink Drawings series, watercolour on paper, 2011
Morelli is best known for his hybrid sculptural/graphic installations and peripatetic performances. He develops found imagery and objects into web-like structures that sprawl and engage with architecture and social space. His intimate drawings and discreet sculptures, while focusing on the human figure, address its psychology, sexuality and power relationships. François' project, Home Wall Drawing (l'art de manger) (2004), conducted in France, involved the barter of 22 rubber-stamped wall drawings in people's homes for home-cooked meals. Table d'hôte (2007), at the Hamilton Art Gallery, used hand-stamped porcelain plates to address the fragility of domestic space through ornamentation and pattern. Hand to Mouth Drawing (2008) incorporated belt-head prostheses that drew on the gallery walls.
François Morelli, Web/toile/portable I, performance, 1999
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Mark Mullin, It’s a Family Thing and Caught Under A Collapsing Light (l-r), oil paintings on canvas, both 2012
Mark Mullin Calgary based painter Mark Mullin has been teaching painting and drawing at the Alberta College of Art and Design for the last 10 years while maintaining a very active studio practice in painting, drawing and printmaking. Mark received an MFA in painting and drawing through Concordia University in 1998 and his BFA in 1991 from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He has shown throughout Canada and the US and has collectors throughout North America and Europe including the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Art Gallery of Alberta, Glenbow Museum and numerous corporate and private collections. Mullin was a finalist in the 2004 RBC Painting competition and has recently acted as judge in the 2012 competition. He continues to explore an abstracted world through the
lusciousness of paint and intense colour in his large scale oil on canvas works. In parallel, his drawings engage through quiet and subtle conversation using forms derived of cartooning, graphic novels, scientific illustration and pure imagination. A solo exhibition of Mullin's most recent work opens October 24th 2013 at Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary and he will have a solo exhibition in Spring Summer 2014 at dc3 Art Projects looking at the past 15 years of work including pieces borrowed from private, institutional and corporate collections from across Canada. Mark Mullin - Statement My recent work attempts to offer a multiplicity of references that straddle notions of what constitute the abstract and the representational. Though calculated in their placement and execution, the arrangement of reoccurring forms make little literal sense yet possess enough fleeting familiarity to engage the viewer in a game of deduction. Somewhere a narrative lurks. Yet whatever gains are made by reading into possible allusions (to biological/atomic forms, urban graffiti, comic books, Celtic knots), a summation of either original intent or final result is to rest quizzically out of reach. That which declares itself so apparently forthright and boisterous perhaps conceals as much as it reveals. The vocabulary of forms and surfaces seem to necessitate and command their exact locale within their spatial field, yet are conditioned by a sense that catalytic chain reactions push the paint - paint as organic form and symbol of abstract form - out of bounds.
The paintings assume a presence that refuses to function typically as an illusionistic window where paint describes form. The Mark Mullin, detail of Flock, mixed media drawing, 2012
thick, woven brush-stroke
structure suggests an organism undergoing catalytic proliferation, rapidly regenerating itself and spreading beyond the painting’s perimeter, whereas the work’s girth seems a necessary counterpoint to the packed surfaces with their conflicting temperaments and stylistic knuckle balls. Writhing tubular forms negotiate for space and control with flat, monochrome circles. These seemingly playful works are to teeter on the edge of a pending crisis. Their frivolous "silly" colours and forms negotiate within their allotted sector, but to alter the present dialogue might kick start an uncontrollable system meltdown. Here our unseen abstract reality (the place of 'superstrings' fashioned in bathtub toy colours) is hinged upon the ridiculous which is also the imperative. This dialectic establishes a state of suspended animation, as if the paintings are being made and unmade at the same time. Another way of stating this is that the paintings seem to be forever under construction or deconstruction, falling apart and coming together.
It is my strategy that the origins and references for these works change with interpretation. An organic thread-like filament of paint appears biological, then shifts to Japanese writing found on food packaging, then again to tag-like names from street graffiti. Pockets of deep recessive space dissolve, suggesting a "pre-world", which in turn is swallowed by replicating forms, oddly autonomous yet keenly interested in symbiosis. No form settles into character for long before an alternate proposition comes to light. The result is something of an impenetrable "catch me if you can" engagement. The act of looking becomes a fool's game of defining.
It is my hope that the works' resiliency lies with the dilemma posed by their flippancy and self concern; the dilemma of deciding whether the paintings are all smiles and teasing, or deeply dismissive of any claim to a place in the serious canon of painting. Perhaps if a cartoon of molecular activity were capable of being haunted, it would look and function like these paintings.
Tammy Salzl
Tammy Salzl, The Compromise, oil on canvas, 60” x 72”, 2010
Tammy Salzl is a Montreal based painter and MFA candidate in Concordia University’s Painting and Drawing program. Salzl recently returned from a residency and exhibition at SlaM Gallery in Berlin (August 2013) and is currently showing at Union Gallery in Kingston, ON and dc3 Art Projects' Our Families:The Impact of Contemporary Family on Art in Edmonton, AB. AKA Gallery in Saskatoon hosted Tammy Salzl: Into the Woods in the spring of 2013; in Spring 2013 she was featured in a two-person show at Concordia’s FOFA Gallery. She has shown in solo and group shows across Canada, was awarded honourable mention in the 2011 Kingston Prize, Canada’s national portrait competition and is a 2013 Kingston Prize Finalist. Salzl is a Tedeschi Scholarship winner and has received grants and residencies from QALC, KIAC Centre in Dawson City Yukon, the Banff Centre, and Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
Tammy 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. Our stories run through her work as a narrative: sometimes overt and enhanced by natural surroundings and supporting cast, and at other times whispered and nearly invisible but for the expression of face and body and raw flesh. Tammy Salzl, Mother’s Daughter, charcoal, gouache and collage on paper, 25” x 20”, 2010
Tammy Salzl, Fights Like a Girl, watercolour on paper, 24” x 20”, 2013
Daniela Schlüter, etching with mixed media, 2011
Daniela Schlüter Daniela Schlüter’s creative research explores scientific language, such as chromo somatic genetic maps, in contrast with the material, tactile and subtle presence of the hand-made mark, in order to raise questions about the ways in which contemporary language is used to describe elusive and complex ideas such as self-consciousness. In the context of much current scientific research, this is a pressing issue as there can be a tendency to reduce complex human experiences, such as emotion, into the language of scientific data. Newer work incorporates ideas of familial and individual memory, and the failings of cultural remembrance on a global level.
Since 2010, Schlüter has been involved with the interdisciplinary project Perceptions of Promise: Biotechnology, Society and Art, an exhibition of artistic research made in response to scientific inquiry revolving around the genetic sciences. Perceptions of Promise brought together international artists and scholars from several fields of study and the exhibition traveled to multiple locations including the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City. Schlüter is based in both Germany and Canada and has exhibited her prints, drawings and video projections in Europe, Canada and the United States. Recent exhibitions include such venues as: Katholische Fachhochschule in Münster, Germany; Kunst Daniela Schlüter, etching with mixed media, 2011 gegen Rechts, Kreishaus, Borken, Germany; and E3 Gallery, New York City. Schlüter grew up in Germany and studied art at the Ruhrakademie Schwerte and the Fachhochschule Münster, Germany before completing her MFA in Printmedia at Concordia University in Montreal. She has spent the last four years as an Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the University of Alberta and returned to Germany this summer.
Daniela Schlüter, installation view of drawings in Perceptions of Promise, Glenbow Museum (Calgary) 2011