the edition 2015
edition 2015
clockwise from top left: Paul Beliveau, Colin Smith, Andy Dixon, Dana Claxton, and Alan Switzer.
paul beliveau
Vanitas: Hommage a Malevitch, Paul Beliveau, inkjet print, 11 x 11 in. 2015
Béliveau’s approach to creating art has been best described as “pictorial archaeology,” as his work references a database of literally thousands of personal and historical photographs. With painstaking accuracy, Béliveau paints culturally significant artifacts such as his own book collections, placing volumes on Friedrich, Futurism, and Van Gogh beside the poetry of Friedrich von Schiller and Beethoven. Although Béliveau says he values ambiguity (“I do not like to name or designate things”), his painting style illustrates a deep reverence for preservation, precision and clarity. Béliveau says, “I like to use painted books as strategy against loss, even though worn books evoke the passage of time and reveal one’s own finiteness.” In the wake of the Vanitas series, the work proposed for Edition II is a tribute to Vladimir Malevich, a tribute to black and white, to constructivism. The occasion lent itself well to play on figurativeabstraction paradoxes through stacked books . Few images but words and forms. What better way to pay homage to one of the greatest artists of the 20th century ?
colin smith
Motel Bowler, Colin Smith, inkjet print, 11 x 14 in. 2015
Colin Smith is an award winning documentary photographer, whose work has been featured diversely through corporate collections, mainstream news and entertainment media, and campaigns by important aid organizations. Smith’s most critically-acclaimed body of work is his camera obscura series. Created by completely blacking out a room and then allowing light in only through a pinhole sized opening, which floods the room with an upside-down projected image, Smith’s photographs are striking in their uncanny juxtaposition of interior and exterior. These works are a hybridized simulation, representing projected, reflected and photographically captured imagery, with multiple vantage points all expressed in a single shot. Smith is currently working on two key features of his camera obscura series. The piece in The Edition 2015 “Motel Boler” focuses on motel rooms and their reflected respective Canadian Western landscapes, while his “Abandoned Landscape” works are strangely bucolic intrusions of vast wildernesses, and the ruined architecture found within them.
allan switzer
Horizon, Allan Switzer, inkjet print, 11 x 14 in. 2015
Allan Switzer, a Vancouver artist, was born in Calgary in 1955. He is not only a product of Vancouver sensibilities and a philosophy degree from York University, but also a by-product of the second generation Conceptualists’ of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, who made up a large part of the ECIAD faculty during his time at school. Allan utilizes the motifs of abstraction, minimalist grids, stripes and images, and fonts and these works can be read as complex systems of reference, effecting a collision of signs and elements of disparate painterly discourse. The specific interrelationships of these appropriated parts leave meaning residing not in some essence or identity but precisely in the interplay of the various elements. Allan continues to explore and engage with utopian ideals of the 1960’s and 1970’s in this specific piece, “Horizon”. His studio practice develops a methodology utilizing multiple layers of imagery and patterns that attempts to mimic machine made world of digital media. The work Horizon is a distillation and purification of this ongoing exploration.
dana claxton
Wild Magic, Dana Claxton, inkjet print, 11 x 14 in. 2015
Dana Claxton works in film, video, photography, single and multi channel video installation and performance art. Her practice investigates beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. Her work has exhibited widely: the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre, Sundance Film Festival, Eiteljorg Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, AU). She has taught at Emily Carr University, University of Regina, Simon Fraser University and currently teaches in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia. Her work is in major collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Canada Council Art Bank, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Winnipeg Art Gallery. Known for her bright, slick and visually delicious photography, Dana Claxton features a silkscreen print; entitled “Wild Magic�, which speaks volumes on how Indigenous iconography has been consumed by popular culture. Claxton is part of a generation of First Nations artists who employ strategies of contemporary art to address the impact of history on the present.
andy dixon
Summering II, Andy Dixon, inkjet print, 11 x 8.5 in. 2015
Andy Dixon’s hot pink and turquoise composition is painted with acrylic and oil pastels to create a romantic nostalgic feeling of summer. Andy creates fine work full of vibrant unconventional colour. Andy Dixon makes brightly colored paintings that recall a Fauvist sensibility, with subjects that draw on a range of art historical tropes, like reclining nude females, still lives of flowers, and Renaissance royal portraiture. Specific choices like line treatment, composition, and a certain seeming self-consciousness about his historical sources make Dixon’s work fresh. “ - Interview Magazine “Vancouver- based artist Andy Dixon’s latest works obviously borrow subject matter from the greats — Rousseau, Matisse, Picasso — even as a punk sensibility permeates them. Hues are outrageous and paint is coarsely applied. His warped appropriations invite the viewer to invent a new understanding of the subjects.” - The Vancouver Sun