An eclectic collection of works that seek to bring about a sense of tranquility in our frantic daily lives. The works search for that combination of colour, texture and subject that will cause one’s mind to convey a few moments of reprieve from a modern world that is constantly challenging a person’s quest for a few moments of inner peace.
Featured new and upcycled works from 2019 to 2022 while maintaining the initial integrity of the works. A collection of paintings and alcohol inks and mixed media.
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 5pm. Evenings by appointment.
An exploration of empathy, mortality and documentation as they pertain to the secret lives of animals.
Exhibition dates: Feb 29th to March 12, 2024
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11-5pm; evenings by appointment.
First Friday, March 1, 11am to 9pm.
Exhibition Statement:
Lives and times: conceptual wildlife art.
An exploration of empathy, mortality and documentation as they pertain to the secret lives of animals.
This exhibit collects work from my series of animal portraits and my trail camera paintings. I began my exploration of wildlife art by looking for subjects that were really real. Often wildlife art involves generalization of a species to a single type, or working from a constructed schema. I was looking for a near scientific degree of objectivity, at least conceptually, while still making painted images. This led me at first to making animal portraits, exploring the subjecthood of individual animals in a genre of painting derived from images of the historically powerful or important, and then to making paintings of photographs taken with a trail camera or camera trap. Both bodies of work maintain a relationship with scientific observation through painting. The Trail Camera paintings make use of a genre of photography used for the collection of data and which includes elements of that data, such as the temperature, date and time directly in the image and the animal portraits are accompanied by fictionalized zoological text panels.
Animal portraits:
As an exploration of empathy, my animal portraiture encourages seeing animals as beings with thoughts and feelings, but it is interesting to note that the personalities and emotions we ascribe to animals are not likely to be their actual feelings. What we tend to see are projections of our human perceptions of human emotions. As a sort of parody of this process, I include fictional depictions of emotional life on the expanded gallery label that depict their subjects as human beings in human situations. While animals do indeed have emotions and feelings that can be observed and recorded by behavioral scientists, and certainly people who live with pets develop a sense of their pets’ emotional life, the emotional lives of the subjects of these paintings are ultimately unknowable.
Trailcam paintings
Different genres of images, like mug shots and instagram selfies confer meaning to their subjects differently and in a way that derives from the images use or function, rather than its contents. In this way images taken with a motion sensitive trail camera confer a unique context on their subjects. Trail cameras, sometimes known as “camera traps” are used to study animal populations in wildlife ecology and also to track game for hunting. These images, easily recognisable by the strip of data along the bottom and by their use of infra-red night vision that appears to give animals spooky glowing eyes, confer a fascinating layer of ambiguity on what could otherwise be conventional canadian landscape paintings. Do they show research subjects or prey? Typically Canadian landscape painting is also a romanticized pursuit, to have examples of it derived from a genre of photography used for scientific data seems like an ironic way to question that reading.
Painting and documentary
Before the advent of photography, painting served a vital function in the study of history. Both through artists painting significant figures and historical subjects, and through historians using the studying the content and materials of artworks as a form of anthropology, painting has been a significant connection to the past. This function hasn’t entirely disappeared from contemporary representational painting. It adds importance to the choice of subject and the means through which it is observed. To this end, I generate all my own photo references. The animal portraits are from photographs I have taken myself, and the trailcam paintings are from images taken on my trail camera. I have been maintaining a trail camera at various locations in Manitoba including the Assiniboine Forest, Bird’s Hill Provincial park and at Whitemouth. Approximately once a week, I ride to the location of the camera and move it to a new spot. The paintings of these images maintain their function as data. In both series the paintings are still evidence that a particular animal was in a particular location at that time. In the Animal Portraits the documentary function of the work is more oblique and operates much like a portrait of a historic figure. With the Trailcam Paintings, that status is both more obvious and more complicated because the date and time are recorded instantaneously with the photo, but the painting obviously takes longer to make than the photograph to record.
Bio
Over the years, Brian Longfield has exhibited video work, installations, and paintings, and explored performance, theatre and avante-garde music. His acrylic paintings are made with original photos and a data projector. His current work incorporates an interest in biodiversity, ecology, science and empathy. Brian has recently returned to painting after exhibiting video based work with the now defunct collective Viewing Method Group and performance based work as a part of the duo 6. Through his various projects, Brian has had work exhibited at The New Music Festival, Nuit Blanche, Video Pool, Graffiti Art Programming, Frame Arts Warehouse, and as part of the Winnipeg Fringe Festival.
Brian holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba and an MFA from the University of Western Ontario. He has curated exhibitions, both at Frame Arts Warehouse and at his own former Gallery, Tumble Contemporary Art. He lives in Winnipeg with his partner Charla and their children, Aria and Zephyr.
Ashely uniquely creates stunning works of pour-art and brushed acrylics that reflect her fascination with gravity inspired water movement and topographical nature themes.
Exhibition Hours:
February 15 to February 27th:
Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 5pm; evenings by appointment.
A view from a window; a love of trees; a poem; a song; a word. I translate these into colour on canvas.
Exhibition dates: February 1 to February 13, 2024
Exhibition Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 5pm, Evenings by appointment
First Friday, February 2nd, 11-9pm.
Shelley Remple was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Throughout her life she has always been creating. In earlier years she sewed, quilted, and did needlework-mostly self-taught with trial and error being the main teacher! In the last 20 years she discovered a love of painting after taking some drawing and painting classes at her local art gallery. Her art reflects her love of colour, texture, trees, words and places she has visited but with a special interest in Manitoba.
I create art to express my feelings. I think for hours before I put brush to canvas and continuously ask myself how I feel about a tree, a view, a word, a poem or a song. What colours or textures would best express what I am thinking or feeling? What mood do I want to evoke? I look to other painters to see how they accomplished a beautiful sky or moving water for example. Each of my works of art is an experiment from start to finish and until I’m satisfied that my painting tells a story, I then put my paint brush down.
Our Members were to submit a piece of art with “a little soul”. All works were to be a minimum of 12″ to a maximum of 24″. A variety of mediums: paintings, photography, ink, fibre, sculpture and mixed media are available from abstract to landscape and portraiture! 73 artists are in this exhibition. (a longer description is in the works, please check back again later.)
Artworks can be purchased online or in person. Pick up or shipping available after the exhibition. Pre-sales available with full payment by contacting jordan@cre8ery.com or 204-944-0809.
Dodie Mitchell
Extended Hours, no reception, First Friday, January 5, 11am to 9pm
Exhibition Hours: January 6-27, 11am to 5pm, Tuesday to Saturday, evenings by appointment. 125 Adelaide Street, 2nd floor.
Although my work is primarily representational and features hints of the surreal, at the centre of all that I try to accomplish artistically, is to produce a measure of personal identification in the viewer.
My pieces are presented with buried narratives; unclear stories that will often be translated differently by each individual.
I try to accomplish this by introducing dichotomies and visual metaphors, such as minstrels strumming while basilicas burn, curling rocks made from jam cans, and tumbling umbrellas and vermillion bedsheets that twist through wind-whipped skies above darkened neighborhoods. Through this exhibit, it is my goal to evoke the emotional memories of those who see my work, and to challenge them to look more carefully at their own worlds.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
David Colvin is an incurable people-watcher. Of note, is his fascination with aspects of the human condition. This has been a constant throughout his adult life… as an artist, playwright, parent, husband, and clinician.
Although geared toward a future in visual communications and illustration art, his life took a decidedly different trajectory that ultimately led to a long and satisfying career in the behavioral health field. As such, he chooses to reflect human emotion through his artwork. Specifically, he focuses on nostalgia, and childhood longing in his pieces.
Fleshing out these emotional memories are key to the examination of Colvin’s art. Given that yearning is said to be a blend of the primary emotions of love and sadness, this is no small task.
Dave draws inspiration from theEarly Netherlandish painting schools and the Pre-Raphaelites, and creative sources as diverse as the outsider work of Henry Darger, the narrative compositions of Pieter Bruegel, and the single-panel, darkly comedic cartoons of Gahan Wilson.
His quasi-realistic pieces are also driven by dreams, psychedelia, and too many hours poring over Graphis magazines in Commercial Art class.
Colvin’s commission works hang in private collections across North America and the UK. He has also been short-listed multiple times in the Manitoba Society of Artists open juried competitions.
Currently, atypical watercolour is his “go-to” but any combination of water-soluble media including acrylic, acrylic pen, India ink, and gouache is fair game in his world.