Opening Friday, January 6, 6-9pm

2011-12-30T17:49:00.000-08:00

MULHERIN + POLLARD is pleased to present two new exhibitions, running concurrently from January 6 - 28, 2012.

Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, January 6, from 6 - 9pm.

Robert Hengeveld

ersatz

Alika Cooper

Makin' It Natural with works by

Bill Burns

Alika Cooper

Carl D'Alvia

Michael Harrington

Kris Knight

Christy Langer
Rob MacInnis

Annie MacDonell

Goody-B Wiseman

CHRYSTIE GALLERY:

Robert Hengeveld's new installation project, ersatz, consists of a collection of materials used to create an expansive composition comprised of synthetic rocks and trees, a series of orchestrated cuckoo birds, a clothes iron, fog juice, glass beads, cardboard, packing tape, lumber, hacked wildlife decoys, and many other materials – some created with the intent of mimicry, while others awkwardly beginning to take on marginal references to the 'natural' landscape given their associated company.

The installation is animated through the periodic inflating and deflating of an inflatable deer. A makeshift smoke machine creates a subtle mist at the base of the beaded waterfall. Cuckoo birds periodically pop in and out of holes which pepper the fabricated cliff façade. All this is overseen by a chrome coyote perched high above, looking over the entire installation – part romanticized emblem of nature, part dollar-store trophy. A small bunny tucked in behind some boxes quivers intermittently.

The work explores our capacity to suspend disbelief and our ability to meld our perceptions in order to fit within a predetermined notion of what it is we are seeing. We can choose to engage a mock rock as a rock or a plastic Christmas tree as a pine or spruce, despite our underlying awareness to the contrary.

The at times conflicting collection of these manufactured elements do not set out to pass judgment – synthetic good, synthetic bad – rather their collective association questions and examines our relationship to the increasingly manufactured environments around us, and our interest in mimicking all things natural – to the extent of embossing wood grain in plastic lumber. The amplification and manipulation of the artifical within this peculiar installation sets a platform in which our existing relationship to the synthetic can be explored; its fiction shedding light on the reality (or recreated reality) of the world we live in.

FREEMAN GALLERY: Makin' It Natural group exhibition

In conjunction with Hengeveld's installation, Katharine Mulherin curates Makin' It Natural in our Freeman gallery, with works by nine artists from Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, Ottawa, and Maine, all of whom present a version of "natural" in their practice, whether embracing or questioning the notion of the term itself or our complicated struggle with it. Our relationship to animals, landscape, our inner animal and our own corporeal existence are examined in this exhibition of sculpture, textile work, painting, photography and printmaking.

Christy Langer , Rack (detail), 2011, silicon, resin, porcelain, hair

13" x 18" x 8"

Christy Langer's sculptural work is inspired by her interest in the embellishment that can occur during the marriage of gradual ingestion and manipulation of reference. Each work, although deviated, are reconstructions of previously existing models; the artist utilizes these animal forms to illustrate the disparity between reality and remembered experience. As the works evolve into an aesthetic state closer to realism while simultaneously referential origins based in truth degenerate, the boundaries between reality and falsity become blurred and permeable.

Kris Knight is a Canadian painter whose work examines performance in relation to the construction, portrayal and boundaries of sexual and asexual identities. Drawing from personal histories of rural escapism through imagination, Knight paints disenchanted characters that are lost between youth and adulthood; they hide their secrets, but desperately long to let them go. His mythical and ambiguous portraits are a synthesis of fantasy and real-world memory; they tiptoe between the dichotomies of pretty and menace, hunter and hunted, innocence and the erotic.
Throughout Knight’s professional practice, he has created thematic bodies of work that reference historical notions of regality, mysticism, romanticism and symbolism. He often skews these concepts with contemporary interests in androgyny, psychotropic alterations and the post-modern gaze. Knight’s lustrous classical cum illustrative figurative paintings, stride between a contradicting palette of sensual primaries and ghostly pastels, reflecting his adoration for 18^th Century French portraiture.

Kris Knight

Map of Your Face

40 x 30"

oil on canvas

2011

Kris Knight
Waves (Augustus)
40 x 30"
oil on canvas
2011

Alika Cooper, Couple, 19 x 17", fabric and adhesive on stretcher bars, 2011

Alika Cooper couples drab, nondescript fabrics with sexually charged images drawn from European photography to create works that celebrate the natural body. Cooper is interested in the larger dichotomy of female identity in America today, an identity that is neither domesticated nor overtly sexualized.

Carl D'Alvia

Nosey
2012
14" x 18"x 9.5"
resin, paint

By exploring numerous polarities, Carl D'Alvia juggles the extreme and the absurd, tenderness and dark humor. D'Alvia creates fake fur or utilizes other veiling mechanisms that cover all types of figures, namely animals, but also anthropomorphic or even abstract bodies. Under this fictional coat, his sculptures express an introspection close to hermetism, both intense and ironical. A perturbing mixture of tenderness and irony permeates D'Alvia's work, in which a minimalist gesture and a narrative approach converge, producing unusual, yet seductive sculptures. The synthesis of appearing and hiding gives place to paradoxical works: abstract and animal bodies are veiled, so that their identities can only be guessed. Always covering the entire figure, the fur obstructs our perception. The impossibility to see these figures clearly feeds the desire to touch them. The hardness of resin makes evident that one cannot penetrate appearance. Carl D'Alvia's work could be interpreted from two perspectives: as a parodic approach to concrete language and as the insertion of minimalist vocabulary into a pop discourse, where falsification joins tenderness.

Michael Harrington
Green Parka
12 x 16"
oil on canvas
2011

Michael Harrington
Stop and Look
11 x 14
oil on canvas
2011

Until 1997 Michael Harrington painted at night while in the daytime he worked at his father's human resources company in Ottawa. The day job honed his observation skills and provided insights into the working world, and his night drives supplied the moody settings for his paintings. More recently, family vacations to sun-filled American towns have added some bright notes to his palette.

While all the world is a stage for Harrington, he leaves out much of the information needed to piece together a coherent story. The inscrutable activities of his figures thwart viewers' prejudices and interpretations.

Bill Burns

Bill Burns' work about animals and civil society has been shown and published widely

including solo projects at the Fondacion Cristina Enea, San Sebastian, Spain (2010); Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, England (2008); and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany (2007) and group shows at the Kunsthallen Nikolaj in Copenhagen, Denmark (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland (2006); Museum of Modern Art in New York (2005-06); the Seoul Museum of Art in Korea (2002); and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1995).

He has published more than ten books including Dogs and Boats and Airplanes told in the form of Ivan the Terrible, (Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 2011); Bird Radio, (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Cologne and Berlin, 2007) and The Guide to the Flora and Fauna Information Station: 0.800.0FAUNA0FLORA, (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England, 2008). His writing and artist’s projects have been published in Publicsfear, Art Monthly, Re/Search, and Semiotext(e).

Goody-B Wiseman

Goody-B Wiseman, Deerpile, bronze, unique, 2009

Bear

Edition of 9

Bronze

2008

Ever since creating a miniature museum about a fictitious colony of feral children for the 2006 California Biennial, Goody-B Wiseman has been fascinated with feral children and they've become the primary focus of her artistic production. This work began as an immersive sculptural expression both of institutional critique, bending the museums ability to represent Truth, and an anthropological allegory of the feral child as Otherness and in-between-ness, pushing the boundaries of our anxiety about the borders between savagery and civilization. Now her feral series delves into the fantastical, the beautiful and terrible, evoking fairy tales, mythology, folklore and aboriginal traditions, and above all the primal drive in humans to both fear and desire conversance with wildness.

Wiseman reworks established forms in her own crooked way, investing them with the pulse of the current socio-psychological moment. Her bronze work plays with the traditions of monumental figurative and wildlife bronze sculpture, her figures are neither monumental nor noble, they are small and inexact and hand-worked and raw. Her work is informed by the elegant simplicity of early conceptual art and a baroque mélange of influences play off of that foundation; science fiction, folk tales, experimental literature, anthropology, mythology and horror movies – for example, are evident in the work.

Annie MacDonell
No More Sea, 20 x 27", piezographic inkjet, 2011

Annie MacDonell
Mount Waddington/Drumheller, 20 x 27",
book pages and tape, 2011

Annie MacDonell
Hoarfrost at Black Diamond", 27 x 20"
book pages and tape, 2011

Annie MacDonell's “To Everything There is a Season” is a series of collages constructed from Roloff Beny’s 1967 book of photographs of the same title. Beny’s dated collection of images depict the far reaches of the Canadian landscape with an unusually esoteric tinge. Beny’s dark and inky duotones are here reworked into sharp, crystalline compositions through a series of manipulations that push and flatten the already stylized imagery further still. The resulting images sit at the intersection of a range of references, including minimalism, formal photography of the twenties and thirties, and the current resurgence of abstraction within contemporary photography.

Christy Langer
Prince 1,2 and 3
porcelain, unique, 2011

Rob MacInnis
Rhode Island
7.2 x 42"
archival digital photograph, 2010

Rob MacInnis blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, past and present, asking the viewer to reconsider both the role played by farm animals, and the historical significance of the panorama. By referencing a now extinct form of photography, and resurrecting it anew, Macinnis makes a memento of the soon to be forgotten.

ersatz and Makin' It Natural at MULHERIN + POLLARD

Opening Friday, January 6, 6-9pm