Text by Anaïs Castro
 
"I am drawn to the form and idea of memorials, those markers that formalize links between memory and present experience. My main fascination is for the ways in which people bring facets of these ritual systems and objects into domestic spaces in order to amplify their personal identification with them, or perhaps with the cultures that support them.’’- David R. Harper
 
We are in an era in which all information has to be recorded, preserved and catalogued; every image shared; every event commemorated. In parallel, we are in a sanitized era, where everything is polished, where nature is controlled, contained, and cleaned.
 
It is precisely within this perspective that the work of David R. Harper situates itself. He investigates taxidermy, a technique increasingly used by contemporary artists since the 1990s, which for him, satisfies the pleasure of controlling wildness, claims the supremacy of culture over nature, and even “celebrates an animal’s mortality while deferring our own.” Taxidermy promises the preservation of an animal’s body after it dies, but as a constant reminder of death, it is always morbid.
 
Better The Devil You Know, however, is not. It operates in a way as to highlight a contradiction by presenting a contained and polished, almost monumental, image of death. The many arrows that surround the animal are not without reminiscing tauromachy and confer to work a sense of theatrical drama that allows the sublimation of death. This effort to embellish mortality is an endeavour to cover up our discomfort regarding everything that infringes on our control and that brings us back to our ineluctable expiry date.
 
The particularity of Better The Devil You Know is that the body of the pig has been noticeably altered. Its feet, ears, eyes and mouth have been covered in Chinese porcelain, which brings quite another dimension to the work— of how taxidermy objectifies animals as decorative artefacts exhibited in people’s homes, often sold as another ‘Made in China’ commodity. The work’s reference to hunting, an impressive kill board one might say, is not to be disregarded either. In this way, Harper’s works have multiple layers of signification, and it is always up to the viewer to confer them with meaning. For this reason, one must say that David Ross Harper produces powerful sites of memorials. Because ultimately, memorials are inextricably linked to empathy: to erect a monument is to join one’s feelings to an object.

Text by Vincent Marquis
 
At last! The veil has been lifted on Barbie’s emotional distress and Ken’s genuine sexual interests. In her photographic series In the Dollhouse, Vancouver-based artist Dina Goldstein chronicles the unhappy marriage of the two most iconic, played-with, and, some would say, socially problematic dolls ever designed. Through her ten-part story, she peeks into the private life of the couple, dismantling the sacred aura surrounding these symbols of popular visual culture.
 
In the late 1980s, picking up on the claim of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that the body is a historically contingent site of meaning, feminist theorist Judith Butler offered a reconceptualisation of gender as a “corporeal style,” the cultural and performative interpretation of the facticity of the body. Furthermore, Butler argued, if gender performance eventually leads to the sedimentation of the roles ascribed to biological sexes, then “performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect.”
 
It is with the possibility and implications of subverting “sedimented” gender behaviour that Goldstein is primarily concerned in the Dollhouse. Surprisingly (and, hilariously) enough, what we see is a transgender Ken reading The Oprah Magazine, wearing Barbie’s stilettos, and leg shaving in the bath. Devastated by the news of her husband’s gay affair, we later find Barbie shifting to a boyish appearance by cutting her iconic hair and putting on a suit and tie.
 
What is especially noteworthy about the proposed articulation of gender roles is precisely the use of Barbie and Ken, as they have continuously embodied the epitome of popular gender expectations throughout their fifty years of imposed partnership. Thus, just as we slowly realize that the subjects of the photographs are not really plastic toys, the Dollhouse becomes a site where behavioural expectations flicker and traditional gender roles are reshaped in creative ways.
 
And yet, as we encounter Barbie’s despair, we are just as much encouraged to reflect upon the implications of “performing one’s gender wrong,” upon what we need to sacrifice in order to give way to something new. The Dollhouse is also, more broadly, a questioning of the (anachronistic?) place of marriage as an institution in our contemporary period, as well as of the value we place on beauty and the weight that it carries “within the interior walls of our lives.”
 
So, as we sneak into Goldstein’s Dollhouse and ponder what it communicates, it is ultimately at ourselves, our practices and behaviour, that we are being prompted to look—as is revealed, in the haircut scene, by the (our?) scrutinizing eye reflected in Barbie’s mirror...

Text by Amber Berson
 
Karine Giboulo is known for her intricate sculptures depicting the inner workings of the bureaucratic systems that Western Culture is built upon. They reveal the inner workings of cities, factories, and production lines, and reproduces exchanges that make visible the direct effects of free-market capitalism on a global scale.
 
Aesthetically, Giboulo’s sculptures are colourful and bright. The characters and settings seem like they were borrowed from the Claymation department of an animation studio. They can be as visually simple as one character doing one action, or as complicated as a multi-floor factory whose inner workings are illuminated through multiple access points depicting a complete story-arc.
 
For her exhibition City of Dreams at Art Mûr, Giboulo is presenting work that speaks to the complex issues around life in cities – near and far. Partially inspired by events she saw or experienced while participating in the Space 118 artist residency in Mumbai, India, two of the works in the series depict the life of Mumbai families that (literally) live on the street. In one, Giboulo recreates their dwelling – a McDonalds advertisement that they live under as protection from the elements and other city factors. In another, a man pulls a cart carrying goods and services. The man is bare-foot, and in old, dirty, ill-fitting clothing. His hair falls into his eyes, also dirty, and he pulls a homemade wooden cart. What trails behind him are goods that he cannot afford – he is literally performing the idea of the First World developing on the backs of the Third World. Perhaps the message is a little didactic – but the miniaturization of such enormous issues does put them back into our field of vision.
 
At the centre of the exhibition at Art Mûr is an imaginary floating city – an island – that represents no real place but is still somehow familiar. In this project, the artist is reflecting on immigration patterns, on urban migration and on the contrasts inherent to the reality of these issues. Giboulo’s floating city shows the inner mechanisms that propel society further and further towards industrialism. At its centre though are not bosses and masters, but people with hearts that develop community wherever they may be. Her work is a critique of brain-less capitalist structures, but underlines the human elements that can prevent this.
 
In the same way in which the smaller works act as a way to think about and around power imbalance, the lingering effects of colonisation and the economic and environmental manifestations of industry, Giboulo’s island city at once presents the problem and the possible solution.

Battat Contemporary is pleased to announce our next exhibition featuring the work of Tom Fairs, Alex Frost, Sophie Jodoin and Thérèse Mastroiacovo. Focusing on the practice of drawing, this exhibition offers the viewer a unique opportunity to focus on the methodolgy of drawing. These four artists have been chosen as each brings to the surface a formidable vision, stretching the definition of observation as well as what is possible with the practice of drawing.
 
Tom Fairs (1925 – 2007), a lifelong resident of London, left school at age 15. After winning several prizes for drawing, he went on to graduate from Hornsey College of Art and The Royal College of Art. Married to the writer Elisabeth Russell Taylor, he taught fine art and stage design at the Central School of Art and Design form 1954 to 1987. Upon retiring, Tom Fairs devoted himself entirely to his art, painting and drawing every day. Much of his imagery was found in and around Hampstead Heath, where he drew daily in his sketchbooks. His artistic hero and mentor was Pierre Bonnard, whose delight in the ordinariness of daily life and its elevation to art was a shared passion. Like Bonnard, Fairs was a humble, unpretentious man, indifferent to the notion of career, for whom art, as he wrote in a statement in 2003, was a chance to have a ‘brief glimpse of the implicit order that lies beneath what we perceive as reality.’ -Bobbie Oliver, painter
 
Alex Frost’s ‘Blind drawings’ are an ongoing series of drawings. These drawings are made from portraits and still-life photographs, made in reverse, working back-to-front. They are develoedp through a process combining perforation and painting. Bronze, silver or gold paint is pressed into the back of the drawing so that the holes admit rich, metallic colour and Frost‘s image appears to float to the surface of the paper. Eyes closed and head slightly turned or tilted away he seems intent on absence, a blank subject present as a gilded apparition, a relief, a death mask. Frost studied Fine art at Staffordshire University (1993-1995) and Masters in Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art (1996 – 1998). Selected solo exhibitions include: The Old & New Easterhouse Mosaic (& everything in between), Platform, Glasgow, 2012; The Connoisseurs, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, UK, 2010; Compassion Fatigue, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, UK, 2008;. Recent group exhibitions include: Soul Seekers: Interpreting the Icon, Trinity Museum, New York, 2012; You, Me, Something Else, GoMA, Glasgow, 2011; Industrial Aesthetics, Hunter College, New York, 2011He lives and works in Glasgow
 
Sophie Jodoin favours the media of drawing, painting, and video. Since 2004, she has worked exclusively in black and white. Her often difficult subjects evolve into austere, minimalist, frequently indivisible large-scale mural installations. The selection of drawings in this exhibition are taken from her series of ‘architectual’ works refernecing monloithic structures such as high-rises, plinths and citadels. Jodoin studied Visual Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. Her work has been presented in individual and group shows in the United States, Europe, and Canada, most recently at Battat Contemporary, Centre Clark, and OBORO, Montreal; Richmond Public Art Gallery, British-Columbia.; Galerie Bertrand Grimont, Paris; and at the Musée d’art de Joliette, Québec. She has been the recipient of grants from the Canada Council and le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Her works are in a number of public and private collections. She lives and works in Montreal.
 
Thérèse Mastroiacovo’s work is about art itself as an idea, artistic process itself as methodology. It is about the precarious relationship art has to its own definition, open, half open, or slightly open for reclassification at any given time. The varying degrees of openness create space in-between, a space that gives meanderings, processes, and procedures. Her work is situated right here, in a space of potential created in the middle of existing structures. It is this - this large, large thing stated so, so plainley- that makes her work both familiar and unknowable. Mastroiacovo’s series ‘Drawing From A Single Vantage Point’ calls into question our relationship to not only the work in front of us but the existing work that is referenced. Our vantage point being that of an image of an image of an object, an event or even a performance. Thérèse Mastroiacovo holds a BA in Visual Arts from York Univeristy and an MA in Fine Arts from Concordia Universty. She has particpated in many solo and group shows in Quebec, Canada, Australia and Mexico including the 2011 Quebec Triennial and Conceptual Filiations at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery (2008). She lives and works in Montreal.

Galerie Graff is happy to invite you on Wednesday May 22, 2013, at 5:30pm to the opening of Click Here to Enter, an exhibition of the recent paintings by Véronique Savard, recipient of the 2010-2011 Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Grant for completion of graduate studies in contemporary art. The opening will be accompanied by the launch of the catalogue Véronique Savard, comprising texts by Jean-Émile Verdier and Monique Régimbald-Zeiber. The exhibition will continue until June 22, 2013
 
Through this exhibition comprising her recent paintings, Véronique Savard, by giving form to messages found in unsolicited emails (spam), proposes a reflection on the social concerns behind various online propositions. Waiting for you, Certified by Doctors, The scientific Breakthrough is here, Miracle or science, You need to Know This, etc. are good examples of the both fantastical and delusory nature of these emails, collected by the artist since 2009 so that she might then translate them into paintings. Véronique Savard, through this revisiting of the pictorial codes used for the online marketing of pharmaceutical drugs, questions the paradoxical structures of adequacy and offensiveness underlying the issue of individual ideality. Through this confrontation of a vision-based artistic model and a knowledge-based scientific one, the artist extends the lifespan of these “junk” messages beyond their original purpose. Similarly, these sharply contrasted paintings juxtapose a rhythm of brightly colored, hard-edged lines with a signage generally associated with online communications. Considering that marketing strategies often mirror their contemporary social imperatives, these paintings act as conduits for a singular form of information.
 
It is thanks to the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Grant for completion of graduate studies in contemporary art Véronique Savard received in 2010-2011 that this exhibition, as well as its accompanying publication, were made possible. For this reason, this evening will also see the award ceremony for the 2013 grant, which goes to two graduating students from UQAM and Concordia University.