Articles Tagged ‘Paul Gessell’

THE ARTFUL BLOGGER: Come June 2013, the city-run Karsh-Masson Gallery will close the doors at its current location

By Paul Gessell

A look inside Karsh-Masson Gallery during Maria Lezon's 2010 exhibition "The Lounging Soap Opera." Maria Lezon @ KM, 2009-2010.

The Karsh-Masson Gallery will cease operations, at least at its current ByWard Market location, in June next year.

The gallery, which is run by the City of Ottawa, moved to 136 St. Patrick St. in 2003 after initially operating for 10 years in the former City Hall on Sussex Drive. That building now houses offices of the Foreign Affairs Department.

Karsh-Masson may re-open somewhere else after leaving the market but the city’s top cultural officials, including Debbie Hill and Nicole Zuger, aren’t answering questions. Queries to them were forwarded to the city’s corporate communications office.

“The five-year lease at 136 St-Patrick will expire in June 2013 and the City won’t be renewing at that location,” city spokesman Michael Fitzpatrick said in an email. “The City is now investigating options for an alternate location.”

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  |  September 26, 2012 at 9:59 am

THE ARTFUL BLOGGER: The National Gallery acquires Casting Jesus, a “brilliant and hilarious” film-within-a-film

By Paul Gessell

Christian Jankowski, "Casting Jesus," 2011. Performance at Santo Spirito, Rome. © Luise Müller-Hofstede, courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery.

What did Jesus really look like?

This is a question that has bedevilled artists for the past 2,000 years. Generally, he is depicted as a man of average height, with a beard and a bearing varying from gaunt to beatific. But maybe he was short. Or chubby. Or preferred a close shave. And just how big was his nose?

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and other apostles tell us, in the Bible, what Jesus said and did. But they don’t really provide a physical description. So, artists have had to use their imagination.

This brings us to the brilliant and hilarious film, Casting Jesus, by German artist Christian Jankowski that has recently been acquired by the National Gallery of Canada and is currently on exhibition until the new year.

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  |  September 21, 2012 at 1:50 pm

THE ARTFUL BLOGGER: Jonathan Hobin is being eyed by Time Magazine — and debuts his latest exhibit at the Shenkman Arts Centre

By Paul Gessell

"The Ring" has never been displayed in Ottawa. Photo by Jonathan Hobin.

I have to admit that Orleans is not my favourite destination, especially when road crews are repairing a car-swallowing sinkhole on Highway 174 and motorists are sent on perplexing detours badly in need of proper signage.

But enough about my problems. Despite the detours and despite the fact Orleans is not a frequent destination for art lovers, there is a good reason to head east to the Shenkman Centre and see the latest exhibition by Ottawa’s photo-artist extraordinaire, Jonathan Hobin.

The Hobin exhibition, Attic Urchins, at the Shenkman Centre is in the gallery run by the Ottawa School of Art. There you will find about a dozen of Hobin’s craftily staged photos.

Some of these images will be familiar to Hobin’s fans. Some are from his Mother Goose series in which costumed children acted out various nursery rhymes. Some of these rhymes veer into the dark side. In Jack and Jill, young Jill seems to have had a very bad fall, indeed. Her knees are skinned and she appears to be crying tears of blood.

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  |  September 14, 2012 at 8:45 am

THE ARTFUL BLOGGER: Sneak peek! How Quebec’s Revolution Sexuelle will infiltrate Ottawa’s Nuit Blanche

By Paul Gessell

This mischievous image of Thauvette’s work will appear in her Festival X-Nuit Blanche exhibition. The beauties pictured are all saucy shots of Thauvette. By Genevieve Thauvette.

Back in 2008 when I first met Ottawa artist Genevieve Thauvette, I wrote a column naming her as the most interesting discovery of the year, based largely on her debut exhibition of photographic self-portraits at the Dale Smith Gallery.

Thauvette was soon making headlines by winning a gold medal for artistic photography at the cultural competition at The Francophone Games in Beirut and from her devilishly dark staged photos of The Dionne Quintuplets, with Thauvette simultaneously appearing as all five girls. Prints from that series can be found in some of the best art collections in the area, including the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Then Thauvette moved to Toronto and dropped out of sight. So did Dale Smith Gallery. So Gallery St-Laurent+Hill corralled Thauvette and became her dealer. Her first show there is called Les Filles du Roy and is set to run Sept. 18 t0 26, overlapping with both the citywide photography extravaganza Festival X and the city’s first ever Nuit Blanche Sept. 22.

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  |  September 8, 2012 at 8:45 am

THE ARTFUL BLOGGER: How to pose nude while fully clothed — Carleton University Art Gallery’s latest exhibit

By Paul Gessell

"Wall Street" by Cara Tierney.

Cara Tierney seems to take the Bible, or at least one passage, to heart: Go Forth and Multiply.

That is exactly what this emerging artist has done. She has created a series of staged photographs in which she plays all the parts in the narrative. Sometimes Tierney poses alone. In other images, there are several versions of Tierney interacting with each other like a group of remarkably similar looking best friends.

The result is an intriguing exhibition at Carleton University Art Gallery titled Go Forth and Multiply.

Some of the photographs have a vaguely familiar look. That is because Tierney has recreated poses by such artists as Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli and Canada’s Edwin Holgate from the Group of Seven. The models in the originals were nude. Tierney tends to pose clothed, wearing a T-shirt that says Nude.

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  |  August 28, 2012 at 1:30 pm

THE ARTFUL BLOGGER: Canadian photographer David Trattles goes to the German rodeo — and he’s got a book to prove it!

By Paul Gessell

Local photographer David Trattles hopes to crowd-fund German Rodeo, a book of photos about Germans living out their dreams of being cowboys. Photo by David Trattles

Globe-trotting Canadian photographer David Trattles walked into a German bar one day and encountered a man pretending to be an Apache brave named Listening Twice. The Toronto-based, Ottawa-raised Trattles soon found himself immersed in the world of German rodeos.

Naturally, Trattles had to record that German fantasy-cowboy lifestyle. The result is a crowd-funded project to produce a book, German Rodeo, of photographs about the world of Germans living out their dreams of being cowboys.

Trattles was recently interviewed by The Artful Blogger.

How did you become interested in German rodeos and why the enduring interest?
I walked into a saloon in eastern Germany one day and there, leaning on the bar, was a perfectly kitted out native North American Indian. He said that on weekends he smoked the peace pipe, built teepees, and knew the tomahawk dance, which he performed for me. I asked him where he lived, and he replied in heavy Saxon: “About 100 metres away.”

“You mean you’re not a native Indian?”

“No,” he said. Then he pointed to his heart. “In here, I am so.”

That sealed my interest. I am not a rodeo cowboy and I don’t listen to western music, but essentially that’s my kind of story: those who live with their hearts. They live out a difficult and noble process.

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  |  August 24, 2012 at 10:00 am

THE ARTFUL BLOGGER: Mao Zedong is alive and well and hanging out in Gatineau

By Paul Gessell

Impersonating Mao

And all this time you thought Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman of China, died in 1976.

So, what is he doing in Gatineau these days?

The story begins in 2008 when Montreal artist Nathalie Daoust was in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and bumped into Mao, looking very alive. After some inquiring, it turned out Daoust had encountered a man who goes by the name of Zhang and has what the artist calls “an alternate life” pretending, over and over again, to be Mao.

Well, Daoust just had to meet him. And she did. And two years later spent considerable time with the reincarnated Mao and photographed him throughout the city, at times recreating famous portrait shots of the real Mao.

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  |  August 16, 2012 at 9:00 am

THE ARTFUL BLOGGER: The clever things one can do with roadkill — Marc Nerbonne showcases his work at Galerie St. Laurent + Hill

By Paul Gessell

This image by Marc Nerbonne highlights the artist's ability to seemingly bring animals back to life with his vivid works, while other images "are like some horrible mistakes in Frankenstein’s laboratory." Photo credit: 'Resurected overloaded' , 40 x 30, technique mixte sur panneau, 2012.

You may have seen Marc Nerbonne hunting animals, often just before dawn, on the highway linking Ottawa and Montreal. He carries no gun. He is just armed with a camera. And he’s looking for roadkill.

Nerbonne is a Hull artist transplanted to Montreal. He is a brilliant artist, although there is a creep factor in his work that’s not to everyone’s taste. Basically, he creates paintings seamlessly married to collages of cropped roadkill photographs.

You might say the roadkill images are Nerbonne’s building blocks. Take the mesmerizing six-foot-by-four-foot painting “Afraid of What May Be in the Trees” currently on view at his new solo show at Galerie St. Laurent + Hill on Dalhousie. The central feature of the painting is a woman created from a collage of roadkill photo segments all the way from her black hair (dead crows) to her floor-length skirt (dead raccoons). In between there are fashionable uses of dead ducks and dead wild turkeys.

Don’t even ask what animal died to become her corpse-like face. You would be surprised what dead animals are found on the road. The bellies of overturned turtles are particularly loathsome and human looking.

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  |  August 10, 2012 at 10:29 am

THE ARTFUL BLOGGER: Learn how to appreciate art with this group show (and accompanying catalogue) at St. Brigid’s

By Paul Gessell

“There Were Three” by Sharon Lafferty.

Painters, sculptors, and other visual artists are often dreadful at self-promotion. As a result, many great paintings and sculptures remain sitting in artists’ studios, unseen by the public.

The artists at the Rectory Art House Studios beside St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts are not content to remain unseen. They have opened an exhibition of their work at St. Brigid’s and, simultaneously, produced a small gem of a catalogue called Backstories, with each artist explaining his or her background, inspiration, and techniques. It’s exactly the kind of catalogue that the much larger and more established Enriched Bread Artists collective should produce for its annual open house in the fall.

Reading catalogues like Backstories at small do-it-yourself exhibitions such as this one helps visitors to appreciate and understand the works better. Take Andrew Morrow’s work, for example. He has only one piece in the exhibition. It is called “Study for a Tree.” The medium is “digital projection from animated oil paintings.”

Huh?

It’s a complicated process. Read Backstories to find out all about it and then marvel at Morrow’s ingenuity. Simply put, Morrow uses animation-like techniques to make snippets of oil paintings move.

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  |  July 19, 2012 at 8:45 am

THE ARTFUL BLOGGER: You might be surprised at the art you just bought

By Paul Gessell

Véronique Claude's "Shelter III," 2010, oil and acrylic on wood panel.

There are three main reasons for attending the annual exhibition of new art acquisitions by the City of Ottawa.

First of all, if you are an Ottawa taxpayer, you can see what $100,000 of your money bought on the recommendation of a peer jury. This year, that lump of dough purchased 101 artworks by 69 artists. The figure includes such costs as framing and honorariums for jurors. That means the city paid less than $1,000 for each piece of art in the show called Close to Home. A real bargain.

The second reason to attend the annual show at City Hall is to see what some of Ottawa’s A-list artists have been up to in the past year; people like Jinny Yu, Eric Walker, David Jones, Blair Sharpe, Lorraine Gilbert, and Tim desClouds.

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  |  July 13, 2012 at 10:20 am

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