current exhibitions
Bev Pike: Grottesque
Curated by Blair Fornwald
Organized and circulated by Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library.
April 23 - June 11, 2021
Winnipeg-based artist Bev Pike is known for her monumentally-scaled, performative landform paintings. Painted with gouache on paper, her works stretch from floor to ceiling, and are no less than eighteen feet in length, enveloping the viewer. Grottesque features her most recent series, which depict strange underground grottos and caves, lush with baroque detailing. Evocative titles like Cavernous Sun Parlour, Buried Dancing Pavilion, and Subterranean Day Spa suggest that these spaces comprise the leisure sites of a new underground civilization.
Since graduating from the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, Bev Pike has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, and has also become an accomplished writer. She has received senior arts grants from the Winnipeg Arts Council, Manitoba Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts. Her work is in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the Manitoba Arts Council Art Bank; as well as in artist’s book collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern, and special collections in England and North America.
Bev Pike: Grottesque is curated by Blair Fornwald, and organized and circulated by the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, SaskCulture and Saskatchewan Lotteries.
This Loop is Wearing Thin
Chantel Schultz
April 23 - June 11, 2021
Chantel Schultz is an artist from the Canadian prairies currently based in Saskatchewan on Treaty 4 territory. Schultz graduated from the University of Alberta in 2020 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art and Design with a studio focus in Sculpture and Drawing/Intermedia. She also holds a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Visual Communications from the Medicine Hat College (2017).
Schultz has completed internships at Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, Minnesota, USA (2018) and at Salem Art Works in Salem, New York, USA (2019). She has been the recipient of two Edmonton Arts Council CIP Travel Grants (2018, 2019) and received an honourable mention from the International Sculpture Centre (ISC) for the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (2019).
This project is supported and funded by SKArts.
"In my practice, I aim to develop an intimacy with the materials and forms I engage with, to become sensitive to their temperaments, and to share this material vibrancy. Through an interest in an ostensible nature-culture divide mainly described through sculpture and drawing, I attempt to reconsider the interconnectivity and relativity of these concepts. I call to question what is permeable and porous through materials and forms that undergo transformations to challenge the barriers that keep the respective binaries in their place.
In This Loop Is Wearing Thin, I observe the inevitable entropy of everyday things. These forms possess various qualities and express different rates of transformation throughout the installation and video component. As the forms defy their bodily containers by leaking, decomposing, spilling, evaporating, and accumulating, I attempt to closely consider the temporalities of the objects and our relation to these processes and properties. Where does one body end and another begin? In an age of growing concerns for individual health and ecological responsibility I attempt to blur this bodily barrier to express the complex relationality of these non-human actants and ourselves.
The raised table heightens this awareness. Looking into rather than over the objects brings them into direct relation to ourselves. The senses engage with a faint acrid scent of fermentation and decomposition. The small weightless bits of dust and debris quiver beneath the breath. By virtue of being in the space, we become a participant, completing the installation with our organic presence modifying the space. In what ways might you be affecting the materials and how might the materials be affecting you.
The time lapse format of the video plays on a loop animating the seemingly inexpressive objects found in the space. At times, the changes appear to be impalpable. We are then reminded that certainly change is taking place when the video speed increases, and the change is perceived as considerable and rapid; much like staring at that wrinkly potato you pulled out from the back of your crisper. As our gaze returns to the table, we might consider what quiet moments of transformation the objects are currently undergoing and in turn, direct that attention toward ourselves.
Rather than the sublime notion to step away from the everyday and into nature I ask you to look closer and risk an encounter with the grandeur in the banal. Capturing the micro moments in our built environments, I aim to shift our perspective of the seemingly insignificant traces of nature to consider the indifference we feel towards a natural world that isn't 'grand.'"
- Taken from the statement of the artist.
