MCCLURE GALLERY

Current Exhibitions

Oscar Varese
3D Painting
Vernissage: Thursday, December 3 at 6 pm
Exhibition: December 4 to 23
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, December 10 at 7 pm

Feedback, a new series of work by Oscar Varese, presents “three dimensional paintings” that combine sculptural concerns with a poetics of painting. The work is loosely inspired by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, and the artist’s search for a new visual language.

Purposely avoiding any narratives, the works take their cue from the Minimalist considerations of the object itself, offering a neutral and immediately physical relation for the viewer. And yet within the same moment colour, scale and proportion are meant to trigger emotion, experience and memory. Recognizing these contradictions, the works are concerned with finding a delicate equilibrium between positive and negative energies, while also acknowledging the subtle, unexpected directions that may arise between those boundaries.

The works investigate issues of social transformation. Alluding to McLuhan’s theories, Varese notes that the Technical Revolution characterized by fragmentation, specialization and rationality, has given way to a new threshold or paradigm. “Where the Industrial Revolution is seen as an extension of our physical, outer bodies, the Electric Revolution becomes an extension of our nervous system – mainly an information system, and above all a feedback system.” It is within this collision/transition of distinctly different worlds that Varese maintains his search for a visual language giving expression to a spiritual belief – the possibility of finding balance within chaos.

Upcoming exhibitions

[ Download our season's 2009-2010 pamphlet in Pdf 2,75 MB ]

Ian Shatilla
Defeating Victory
Vernissage: Thursday, January 7 at 6 pm
Exhibition: January 8 to 30
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, January 14 at 7 pm

Out of Ian Shatilla’s painterly universe, fairytales emerge. At the time they were written and transmitted, these tales were contemporary and reflected an immediate political context. Through candy-coated aesthetics, Defeating Victory intends to elicit a re-questioning of the political and social context of our times.

New works by Simon Bossé, Kristin Eiriksdottir, Jim Holyoak and Patrick McEown
Curated by: Éric Simon
Vernissage: Thursday, February 4
Exhibition: February 5 to 27
Curator’s Talk: Thursday, February 11 at 7 pm

Éric Simon brings together the work of four artists all of whom are preoccupied with the interface between books and their drawing practice. Artists’ books, graphic novels or poetry - each artist’s visual work reflects these textual interests.

Sylvian Bouthillette
Vernissage: Thursday, March 4 at 6 pm
Exhibition: March 5 to 27
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, March 11 at 7 pm

Sylvain Bouthillette’s work emerges out of a meditative process and the adoption of a certain lifestyle, especially when it comes to questions of aesthetics. His work seeks to place us in a space that encourages us to see things anew, from a point of view that is, at one and same time, intelligent, cutting and constantly curious.

Annual Student Exhibition
Vernissage: Thursday, April 1 at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 2 - 21

Students registered in the Visual Arts Centre’s School of Art are invited to exhibit their work. The exhibition includes hundreds of works in a wide variety of media and gives students the experience of seeing their work in the context of a professional gallery. It’s also a chance to appreciate the great diversity of creative activity that takes place at the Centre.

John Fox
Refiguration
Curated by: Sandra Paikowsky
Vernissage: Thursday April 29 at 6 pm
Exhibition: April 30 to May 22
Curator’s Talk: Thursday May 6 at 7 pm

This selection of paintings and works on paper by John Fox (1927-2008) signifies his return to representational imagery from the late 1980s to 2007. His evocative people, places and things suggest the incidents of contemporary existence rather than its grand narratives. Fox’s painting is about colour and the intense materiality of colour is a metaphor for his objectifying the enduring emotions of the commonplace.

Max Wyse
Vernissage: Thursday May 27 at 6 pm
Exhibition: May 28 to June 19
Artist’s Talk: Thursday June 3 at 7 pm

Max Wyse’s work is founded on two principal elements: a very personal pictorial language and the creation of layered compositions, foreground to background on plexiglas. His work, which is composed of disparate objects and hybrid beings scattered in unspecified spaces, proposes a certain symbiosis between the human body and the bodies of other animals.