Tag Archives: Pan Wendt

State of the Art

Being Brian Burke

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Predicaments: Brian Burke, a Retrospective Set to Open on October 5

An overview of the career of one of the Island’s most significant visual artists on exhibition at CCAG

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A new exhibition opens this week at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery (CCAG) celebrating the work of Brian Burke. The long-awaited two-gallery show will be open to the public on October 6 and officially celebrated—along with three other new exhibitions–at the Fall Art Gala on Friday, October 18 at the CCAG. The exhibition and its associated publication are sponsored by CN100.

The exhibition features over 100 paintings from a career that spanned 35 years. Brian Burke (1952-2017) was one of Prince Edward Island’s most significant visual artists of the past century. Mostly self-taught, although he did study briefly under Eric Fischl at NSCAD, Burke was a painter with a distinct personal style. His works addressed social roles, alienation, and the absurd in darkly humorous figurative images.

“Brian Burke is still a local hero, but he was also someone who dealt with universal themes, and achieved international success,” explains Curator Pan Wendt. “He was a rare artist who both sold his work and achieved critical acclaim, and he was a painter’s painter, instantly recognized by his peers for his original and powerful vision.”

This exhibition sums up Burke’s career, ranging from his rough and direct early work, through his time in New York and his major exhibition Mister Man, to his last decade, when he worked in Luzern, Switzerland, and includes loans from many private and public collections. It is accompanied by a publication that features essays by Wendt; Burke’s spouse, fellow artist Judith Scherer; NYU art history professor Robert Slifkin; and Swiss curator Heinz Stahlhut.

“We are so pleased with the generosity and collaboration of many private and several public collections for lending work to us for this exhibition in particular the Artist’s Estate,” says Gallery Director Kevin Rice.

He continues, “This retrospective of nearly 130 paintings, including many completed in Switzerland and not shown on P.E.I. previously, is really a celebration of an important Canadian artist. We hope we have a fantastic turnout at the opening reception at the Gallery on Friday, October 18 at 7 pm.”

Confederation Centre wishes to acknowledge the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Government of P.E.I., and the City of Charlottetown for their continued support.

PEI Professional Theatre Network

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PEI Theatre is the Guild, Harbourfront Theatre,
Confederation Centre for the Arts,
Watermark Theatre, and the Victoria Playhouse
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State of the Art

First You See It Then You Don’t

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Split Images: Truth and Fiction

 

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Real and invented worlds clash or coexist in this selection of works from the collection.
Curated by Pan Wendt.

 

PEI Professional Theatre Network

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PEI Theatre is the Guild, Harbourfront Theatre,
Confederation Centre for the Arts,
Watermark Theatre, and the Victoria Playhouse

 

Reviews

Who’s Your Mother at the Gallery

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At the CCAG: Women in Performance & Women in Discussion

Last chance to see popular Island exhibition ‘Who’s Your Mother?’; panel discussion on deck for Mother’s Day

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The Confederation Centre Art Gallery (CCAG) is celebrating the final month of the exhibition Who’s Your Mother? Women Artists of P.E.I., 1964 to the Present with a variety of events. These will highlight and compliment the exhibition, which features works from more than 40 Island women artists spanning multiple generations.

The ‘Women in Performance’ Series is the first program and takes place this Saturday, May 4 from 7 to 9 p.m. This event will include the following live performances:

·         Donnalee Downe, who is presenting Sit Down with Downe, an interactive durational performance in the Gallery’s Recharge Lounge;

·         Sandi Hartling in a durational ambient piece called How many variations does it take?;and,

·         Sarah Wendt and Pascal Dufaux in a live performance piece entitled The mountains move while my fingernails grow.

Wendt and Dufaux’s work will include the showing of recent short films made in Newfoundland. The short films are shot in an almost nature documentary style in landscapes of barren rocks and cliff-faces in the strange and fantastical scenery of the Tablelands, in Gros Morne, Newfoundland. Wendt will perform a live DJ set live in reaction to these works. This musical soundtrack will be made up of looping, field recordings, and electronic instruments.

The final event at the CCAG is the ‘Women Artists of P.E.I. Mother’s Day Panel’ on Sunday, May 12 from 2 to 3:30 p.m. in the Gallery:

·         Moderated by D’Arcy Wilson, an artist and assistant professor of Visual Arts at Memorial University, this panel will include Mari Basiletti, Sandy Kowalik, and Rilla Marshall—all women featrued in the exhibition. The panel will also feature Jane Ledwell, executive director of the P.E.I. Advisory Council on the Status of Women. 

Who’s Your Mother? wraps up at the Gallery on June 2. 2019. For more information, please visit the CCAG Facebook page or theCentre’s website.

PEI Professional Theatre Network

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PEI Theatre is the Guild, Harbourfront Theatre,
Confederation Centre for the Arts,
Watermark Theatre, and the Victoria Playhouse

State of the Art

Balancing Act

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In the Balance

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A selection of works from the collection that articulate the tension between idea and thing, form and matter, making and thinking. This exhibition highlights objects from the collection that generate a tension between formal control and the innate shaping properties of the materials of art—their density, structure, colour and texture. These works focus more on internal dynamics than they do on recognizable content—the relationship between an idea, figure or process and the consistency of its “support,” whether beeswax, whalebone, acrylic paint or Masonite. Focusing primarily on ostensibly formal issues these works actually reveal in their structure a resistance to persistent myths with social and ecological implications—the autonomy of the artistic statement, and the elevation of the artist to the status of a commanding, godlike shaper of inert material. In these works, artists confront a problem—the necessity of making a gesture that is at the same time receptive to the impact of other forces. The works ultimately oscillate between presenting a unifying solution and a disharmony that pulls them apart, opening them to the larger world.

PEI Professional Theatre Network

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PEI Theatre is the Guild, Harbourfront Theatre,
Confederation Centre for the Arts,
Watermark Theatre, and the Victoria Playhouse
State of the Art

Hanging in the Balance

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At the CCAG: Collections Show ‘In the Balance’ Explores Tension of Form and Content

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A new exhibition opens next week at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery (CCAG) focusing on the delicate balance in visual art between the material and immaterial. With selections gleaned from the Gallery’s permanent collection, In the Balance explores the tension between form and concept; ideas and matter; making and thinking.

Curated by Pan Wendt, this exhibition opens in the Upper West Gallery at CCAG on Saturday, April 27 and will be on display until the end of the summer, closing September 22, 2019. The works are primarily modern paintings that carry a very material quality.

“There is a long history in Western art of giving priority to design, to the mental picture, to drawing over colour, line over material, spirt over matter,” remarks Wendt. For example, in Renaissance Italy, where so many of our collective ideas about art were first articulated,  this manifested as two rival aesthetic approaches to painting—‘disegno’(design or drawing) versus colore (colour).

Continues Wendt, “We tend to think of perception in terms of the spiritual, or a disembodied experience of form, separated from its material basis, but in fact we are led by touch and other non-visual senses. And thought is itself intertwined with the whole body.”

Following the late 1960s, when this prominence of the formal, conceptual, and ‘optical’ were at their critical height, visual artists increasingly began to develop abstract pieces on the basis of a more materially-grounded conception of the work of art. That is, a process where there the idea stage and the material process were granted equal influence in the final product, and the physical process of making was emphasized.

Featured Canadian examples in the exhibition—from 1970s to the present—include works from: Ron Shuebrook, Harold Klunder, Aganetha Dyck, Ingrid Mary Percy, and Lionel Stevenson. For more information, please visit, confederationcentre.com/gallery

PEI Professional Theatre Network

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PEI Theatre is the Guild, Harbourfront Theatre,
Confederation Centre for the Arts,
Watermark Theatre, and the Victoria Playhouse
State of the Art

Back in Time

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The Documentary Impulse: 1970s Photography of Prince Edward Island Life

This exhibition will revisit an important 1978 exhibition, Document of our Times, and the work of photographers, Lawrence McLagan, Lionel Stevenson and Jake Werner, hired to document contemporary life on Prince Edward Island. A selection of these images, along with the work of other documentary photographers active in PEI in the 1970s, such as George Zimbel, Richard Furlong, and Edith Robinson, will revisit a moment when preserving evidence of the culture and landscape of the Island seemed particularly urgent in light of their rapid transformation. Curated by Pan Wendt.
State of the Art

Out of the Basement

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Sandra Meigs: The Basement Paintings

A series of paintings that transform personal experiences of grief into monumental panoramas of swirling line and intense colour.

In 2012, overwhelmed by grief, Hamilton-based painter Sandra Meigs produced a series of four large-scale paintings that translated her emotional state following the death of her husband into an imagery of subterranean architecture. One of the inspirations for the work was her sister’s basement in New Freedom, Pennsylvania. She found in the claustrophic, disused space, in the arrangements of half-forgotten things, a scene she linked to her emotional state and to the processes of stasis and change that preoccupied her. She described the experience:

“To get into the basement there’s a small door and rickety stairs, the ceiling there is quite low, and incandescent lights hang down just by their wires, from the ceiling. I found the basement so beautiful, especially when it was lit that way…there’s random stuff piled on other stuff, with narrow walkways through. It’s kind of like being in a museum…[but deposited] through normal accumulation over 40 years.”

The approximately 500 photographs Meigs took in New Freedom became source material for a series of modestly scaled paintings, The Basement Piles, and a catalyst for the more monumental The Basement Panoramas, which are each based on real basements whose locations are named in their titles.

Basements, often filled with unsorted things we store for future use and collections of the residue of lives, ornamented by tangled systems of wiring, heating and plumbing, hidden from everyday existence above ground, can be read in these works as an architectural scenario analogous with the structures and processes of the unconscious mind. In Meigs’ paintings, the physical shape of the basement breaks down into vigorous spirals and swirling lines, spreading and layering and changing direction as if of their own accord. Frequently interspersed with charged text, The Basement Panoramas reflect on mortality and rebirth, the hidden drives that both animate us and hold us in their confining embrace. Alternating between exuberant, expansive colour and gesture, and nightmarish claustrophia and repetition, these works are a document of the will, as intensity, as persistence, and as escaping endlessly beyond our control.

-Pan Wendt, Curator