Tag Archives: Pan Wendt

The Wonders of Wiebe

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Curated by Pan Wendt

Mitchell Wiebe: VampSites

An exhibition that launches a national tour of space activations by the Halifax painter, performer, and installation artist.

 

Based in Halifax, Mitchell Wiebe has been something of a cult artist in Canada for decades. Known for his instantly recognizable paintings of fantastical creatures and warped worlds, Wiebe is also a performer who has fronted numerous experimental bands. Over the past decade Wiebe has branched out into installation art, and this new show involves his occupation and response to the Brutalist architecture of the Confederation Centre.

“We’re doing something special with Mitchell, actually putting him and his process on display,” says curator Pan Wendt. “Not only are we showing a selection of his work, in various states and contexts, including a black light gallery, but the artist will create a giant painting and installation in the public eye. You can actually watch him work, almost as a performance, for the week of October 15-19.”

During the run of the exhibition, the gallery will feature a number of performance pieces involving collaboration with artists and musicians. The show kicks off a national tour, involving a series of responses to gallery spaces across the country, and will feature a publication that includes critical essays by prominent curators in Canada and the United States.

Mitchell Wiebe received his M.F.A. at NSCAD University, and his work was included in the national survey Oh, Canada, organized by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. P.E.I. viewers may be familiar with his many contributions to Art in the Open and afterimage, including collaborations with Graeme Patterson, Ray Fenwick, and Russell Louder.

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See the New Lineup

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The Confederation Centre Art Gallery will celebrate its winter and spring exhibitions with one of its ever-popular opening reception events on February 24 at 7:00 p.m. All are welcome to come see the Gallery’s new lineup featuring a contemporary Island artist, an early 20th Century amateur Island photographer, videos by 11 well-known Quebec artists, a collection exhibition, and a mid-career survey of a New Brunswick artist’s print and installation works.

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“The opening is a great opportunity to catch up with friends and check out several new exhibitions and an impressive range of art-making. It promises to be a lot of fun,” says Kevin Rice, Director of the Gallery.

New exhibitions include Norma Jean MacLean’s Accumulated, Positioned, Reflected, curated by Pan Wendt and a part of the Gallery’s Studio Watch Series that is supported by the RBC Foundation. Wish You Were Here: W.S. Louson’s Picture Postcards featuring images of PEI landscapes was curated by Harry Holman. Motion includes short videos by Jean-Pierre Aubé, Patrick Bernatchez, BGL, Caroline Boileau, Michel de Broin, Pascal Grandmaison, Nelson Henricks, Myriam Laplante, Eduardo Menz, Nadia Myre, and Chih-Chien Wang. Motion was organized and circulated by Galerie l’UQAM and curated by La Fabrique d’expositions, a collective of Montreal curators, Julie Bélisle, Louise Déry and Audrey Genois. Luminous looks at effects of light and colour in eleven works from the Gallery’s Collection and was curated by Kevin Rice. Eric Edson’s Other Stories, includes the large-scale installation ruins (2017) alongside a selection of Edson’s work that spans two decades, and was curated by Pan Wendt and organized collaboratively by the Confederation Centre Gallery and Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University.

Several featured artists will be in attendance at the opening and attendees can enjoy light snacks, a cash bar, and live music provided by SOPA music performance students.

There is no cost to attend the event. For more information, please visit

http://www.confederationcentre.com/en/exhibitions.php.

New Works at the Gallery

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Winter 2018 Will Bring New Exhibitions to the Gallery

New works, historical postcards, and visual movements

A young Island artist, a gifted amateur Island photographer, and videos by 11 well-known Quebec artists make up the Gallery’s new winter lineup of exhibitions.

Norma Jean MacLean’s exhibition Accumulated, Positioned, Reflected is a selection of her recent work where she explores the aesthetics of improvised layering, piling, and accumulation. MacLean is a part of the Art Gallery’s Emerging Artist Program that is supported by the RBC Foundation. Curated by the Gallery’s Pan Wendt, the exhibition will be on display from January 13 to April 28.

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William Steele Louson was a gifted amateur photographer from Charlottetown. Wish You Were Here: W.S. Louson’s Picture Postcards of Prince Edward Island showcases his photographs of picturesque Island landscapes that were reproduced on postcards. This historical exhibition captures a period in the 20th century when the public interest in buying and selling postcards was a new mania. Curated by Gallery guest, Harry Holman, the exhibition will be on display from January 20 to April 21.

Motion is a visual anthology that shows the work of 11 Quebec artists. The theme of “motion” is understood in two ways: as movement and as a proposal. This exhibition was organized and circulated by Galerie de I’UQAM and curated by La Fabrique d’exposition, and a collection of Montreal curators: Julie Belisle, Louise Dery and Audrey Genois.

“The new exhibitions will see the art gallery transformed yet again,” says Gallery director Kevin Rice.  “I am looking forward to Norma Jean MacLean’s new paintings and installations; Harry Holman’s research on W. S. Louson’s early 20th century landscape photography (which circulated primarily on postcards); and the videos by 11 well-known contemporary artists based in Quebec. These exhibitions will provide audiences with a wonderful diversity of artworks.”

And this is your last chance to see John Greer: Material and Metaphor exhibition which closes January 14, 2018.

The Gallery winter/spring hours run from January 1 until May 20, welcoming the public from Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m.- 5 p.m. and Sunday 1-5 p.m.

A description of each exhibition can be found on the website at http://www.confederationcentre.com/en/exhibitions.php.

Gretzky is Everywhere

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Andy Warhol and Wayne Gretzky — while not naturally congruous icons to utter in the same breath, both are considered pop culture giants of the 20th century who are forever linked by a famous print, Wayne Gretzky #99. 

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In 1983, the Canadian hockey prodigy visited Warhol’s New York studio to sit for a portrait arranged by Frans Wynans, an associate of Edmonton Oilers owner Peter Pocklington. “He’s more than a hockey player, he’s an entertainer. An entertaining hockey player,” Warhol famously remarked. The artist created screen prints based on Polaroids taken at the sitting. Many of these prints ended up in gallery collections across Canada, including at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery (CCAG).

Gretzky is Everywhere presents Warhol’s famous print at multiple sites simultaneously via livestream: in Charlottetown, at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, and at The Rooms in St. John’s. Gallery patrons can enjoy the artwork in the Young People’s Gallery at the CCAG, while peering in on fellow visitors experiencing Wayne Gretzky 99 and an opposite camera feed in Alberta and Newfoundland — a natural hat trick.

 Three Canadian audiences, artworks and art institutions are linked by a public web feed, brought into a conversation structured by repetitive imagery, the immediacy of the virtual experience, and the “everywhere” of sites connected by the Internet.

 “Collaboration has been an important strategy in engaging the public with visual art, so Gretzky is Everywhere is focused on both the gallery’s collection and the audience experience,” states Gallery Director Kevin Rice.  “We are really looking forward to presenting concurrently with two other public galleries and seeing how audiences respond at each venue.”

 ”We are still living in the age of Warhol, whose dissemination of celebrity images lay at the heart of his prescient practice,” offer the exhibition’s curators, Mireille Eagan with The Rooms and Pan Wendt with the CCAG.. “We now take the pervasiveness of celebrity for granted, as individuals are given heightened status through sheer repetition of their likeness.”

 They continue, “Art institutions seek to respond to these changes in digital technology, with its rapid circulation of images and identities, and an increasing demand for participatory experiences. Warhol’s embrace of repetition and the virtual seems more pertinent than ever.”

 Special thanks are extended to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the other partner institutions.

Drawing in Space

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Leah Garnett is an artist based in Sackville, New Brunswick who teaches Fine Arts at Mount Allison University. Her installations explore the shaping of space, how we construct, mold, and contain it. Drawing on her experience growing up on construction sites, her recent work, in which she creates installations that combine mark-making and building, has been described as “drawing in space.”

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For the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Garnett is creating an installation this week titled When One Space Meets Another, in which she transposes various sites – woods in Maine, an exhibition space in Sackville, a construction site – into the space of the gallery.

“Leah Garnett’s installations are enigmatic, playful blends of optical effects, mapping, drawing, and sculpture,” says gallery curator Pan Wendt. “We are excited about how she will transform the space of the gallery,”

For the artist, the work provides her with an opportunity to range over questions about construction sites such as “what is the relationship between landscape and architecture where the temporary and transitional construction site becomes a hybrid of the two,” as well as “how does a construction site compare to a studio, especially the temporary studio occupations of artist residencies,” and finally, “what are the results and implications of transposing multiple landscapes into a single location?”

Leah Garnett: When One Space Meets Another opens this Saturday, March 4 and will be on exhibition until June 4.

Illusion and Material in Mid-Sentence

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New York-based Canadian artist Rachel Beach is opening her first major exhibition in this country in a decade. A collaboration with Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, Rachel Beach: Mid-Sentence will be presented at Confederation Centre Art Gallery from December 10 through April 30, bringing the artist back to the Maritimes, where she was originally trained.

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The show consists almost entirely of new creations, selected from Beach’s studio in Brooklyn, NY, where she has been based since 2001. Educated at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and later Yale University, Beach’s work has been written about in The New York Times, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, among others.

Originally from London, Ontario, the artist works with abstract shapes and a variety of materials to produce colourful sculptures and two-dimensional pieces that play between illusion and material, geometry and surface. Her works typically deploy a vocabulary of shapes in creative interplay; although non-representational, they often evoke the human figure.

The Centre’s Pan Wendt curated the exhibition with Saint Mary’s Robin Metcalfe. “It is impressive to see what Rachel Beach has created over the past few years,” says Wendt. “Her studio, and everything in it, was destroyed during Hurricane Sandy, but she hasn’t slowed down at all, and her work has grown even richer.”

Gallery Director Kevin Rice looks forward to seeing the exhibition come to life in the Centre’s lower west gallery. “This exhibition will be like eye-candy, colourful and fascinating objects in dynamic arrangements,” he says. “Rachel’s work is known for its visual appeal and playful use of material and shape. Her sculptures are constructions built out of a variety of shapes that evoke folded paper, masks, the built environment, and the history of the medium. We are excited to bring her work back to the Maritimes.”

Rachel Beach: Mid-Sentence opens at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery on December 10. The artist will be present for an enriching exhibition tour on Saturday, December 10 at 7 p.m. All are welcome and the tour is presented free of charge.

Last Call, Last Call…

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Last Call for Three Summer Exhibitions at CCAG

With ‘Secret Citadel’ closing, Graeme Patterson to lead ArtTalk and Tour Sunday, September 25 at 2 p.m.

It’s closing time for three visual art exhibitions that have been turning heads all summer at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. This month is the last chance to view works from Graeme Patterson, Landon Mackenzie, and Gwen Michaud.

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Showing until September 25 in the Upper and Lower East Galleries, Graeme Patterson: Secret Citadel explores the trials and tribulations of male friendship through a four part sculptural/video installation and an experimental animated narrative. Based in Sackville, New Brunswick, Patterson works in miniatures, using tiny figures in stop-motion to explore much bigger themes and stories. Although based on specific memories of the artist’s past, Secret Citadel draws you into its captivating worlds by highlighting universal themes of love and loss, play and competition, companionship and loneliness.

Patterson will lead an ArtTalk and public tour through his exhibition this Sunday September 25 at 2 p.m. in the Art Gallery. There is no cost to attend and all are welcome to hear this first-hand account of how the touring exhibition came to life from one of Canada’s most exciting young artists.

B.C.’s Landon Mackenzie is a nationally-known Canadian artist, admired for her large-scale works using paint on canvas. Less widely known are her works on paper, which she produces in high numbers as a tandem practice to her larger paintings, often while travelling. Showing in the Upper West Gallery until September 25, Landon Mackenzie: Parallel Journey: Works on Paper (1975-2015) takes the viewer on a journey through the past four decades of Mackenzie’s art production on paper, beginning with a watercolour the artist painted when she was 14 years old, and concluding in the year 2015.

Showing in the Centre’s concourse cases until October 2 is Gwen Fichaud: Arranging the Local. This exhibition provides an overview of the work of Fichaud (1915-1988). Born in Montreal, Fichaud took up painting full time in 1964, a few years after moving to P.E.I, where she became an early supporter of the Centre and chair of the Women’s Committee. She was immediately taken with Island history and the pastoral landscape, and her work ranged from country scenes to studies of flora and fauna, to images of local community. Her work was always focused on carefully arranged details, presenting facts and anecdotes about the Island way of life and its natural setting. The high horizons and ordered compositions of the artist’s images allow a maximum of visual information to be brought together within a single frame.

“The great variety of characters, colours, activities, and incidents in Fichaud’s crowd scenes are tightly organized and brought together into an ordered whole that mirrors her vision of community,” remarks Pan Wendt, gallery curator. “Made by an urban settler impressed by the apparent naturalness and harmony of Island life, these works articulate an ideal rural Prince Edward Island.”