Friday, December 18, 2009

Dominique que Fortin

Dominique's work is centered towards human characters. Her painting, sometimes naive, sometimes more abstract, is a sort of study of the human soul in a contemporary style, but full of the emotions of romanticism. It once depicted reality, but today, it has something of the exoticism of fairy-like dreams, where the characters are actors but also the catalysts of emotion.

Modern Art with its sensuality, its use of lines, movement and ornamentation was of great influence in her first years' pictural vision. But since the beginning, continuously exploring new horizons, Dominique has tried to free herself of her influences, using everything that she can grab to embellish her paintings with bursts of color, textures and media, making her way to find her own symbolic language.


Techniques mixtes sur bois,120cm x 150cm(disponible à la Galerie Saint-Dizier)



Today, her vision is centered towards childhood, this paradise lost for adulthood that she idealizes because she's constantly brought back to it by her own children, as she paints their unfailing joy of life, candor and imagination.


Pamela Dodds

Pamela Dodds known as printmaker also a large-scale painter, typically using vibrant colors and a bold palette. Her subject matter has been concerned with the figure, but also with the idea of narrative. Each painting features figures frozen in a moment of interaction – an interaction that has no precedent, and no discernible conclusion, as the viewer has no access to the story the painting told.



Dodds exploits the grain of her woodblocks as an important collaborator; the surface of the wood itself plays an active compositional role in this suite of prints. Having carefully selected and marked out each plank of wood so that it featured a particularly symmetrical pattern, from the inception, these works emphasize the idea of the mirror both aesthetically and conceptually.

Martin Beaupre

Adventurous, his many travels in Asia have had an undeniable influence on his artistic career, reflected in the duality of the yin and the yang often expressed in his work. Back from a trip to Japan, Martin Beaupre is always evolving and is guided by a particular interaction of art and energy that nourishes his world. His philosophy, emitting beauty and harmony, in spite of emanate from his works. The artist’s perception of the world that surrounds him results in work that inspires tranquility and gentleness, while evoking an insatiable interest in oriental culture.



His painting, whether figurative or abstract, reflects the serenity and the calm of his meditative states. His works, with their clean lines in which white predominates, initiates the spectator to looking at a work by confronting one’s own interior world.

Candice Breitz

Inner + Outer Space

Candice Breitz investigates contemporary media culture using the language of the entertainment industry, including pop music, television and Hollywood films. Stradding the sometimes ambiguous terrain between art, entertainment and consumerism, she edits, re-contextualizes or otherwise re-interprets familiar elements of our mediated mass culture landscape to produce aesthetically dazzling and critically engaging multi-channel video installations. In addition to being technically accomplished and conceptually rich, Breitz’s works engage wide range of participants and audiences from diverse backgrounds thanks to their committed engagement with the codes of popular culture.

ueen (A Portrait of Madonna), 2005/2006


Same Game, 2009

Matthew Sweig

Matthew Sweig is not only a prodigiously gifted painter but also a landscape architect – one will be amazed by his astonishing representational ability. He can make black and white paintings that look remarkably like black and white photographs, with much stronger texture.

His show Arable land at XEXE gallery in Toronto:

Arable land is an agricultural term used to describe land that can be used for growing crops. Agriculture is the key development in human history that enabled humans to develop and maintain complex societies. Agricultural production has provided a reliable, predictable food source and out of this abundance, human civilization has grown.



Today agriculture has been pushed further and further from our everyday experience. The means of producing food is disconnected from urban populations, both geographically and psychologically. The very cities that agriculture has made possible now sprawl over the earth that once fed them. Still, the romanticized notion of the farmer mindfully tending crops from seeds in the spring into a plentiful harvest in the fall still lingers in the corners of our memories.







The exhibited works show seemingly mundane views of agricultural landscapes. These symbolic images of the agricultural landscape of the past are ingrained in our collective unconscious. The memory of ‘the farm’ that we all drove by on the highway while growing up serves as a benchmark from which we might evaluate the present.

Pierre Durette

Pierre Durette’s paintings are the result of ongoing research, both historical and art historical. With an interest in Bruegel the Elder, Byzantine art and stories of conquest and war, his works, have a catastrophic element to them: the canvas or blank paper take on the role of an unknown place under siege. White backgrounds create an empty pictorial space allowing the artist to focus on the narrative of his characters.



“Between the grotesque detail and the poetry of the ages, and where these two meet, I present a revision of linear time in a rigorous mix of centuries, cultures, and traditions.” Durette’s canvases incorporate faraway, aerial view and a conscious staging of characters, with meticulous attention to detail. Pierre Durette lives and works in Montreal, where he completed a BFA at the University of Quebec at Montreal.





Friday, November 6, 2009

Minot - Gormezano

For over 25 years, Minot and Gormezano have been exploring gorges, mountain streams, cliff paths, lakeshores and plateaux, forging links between the roads of reality and the thoroughfares of the imagination. It has been a long, lonely walk where the vagaries of life have led them, stopping here and there to dream in places where photography and physical experience can reveal an enigmatic presence as transient as a shadow, a vibrant reflection at the heart of the world, setting in motion a silent, shimmering dance of substance and light. Premeditated or no, the images of this shared exploration remain unpredictable; they make up a unique body of work.







The photographers' acquaintance with philosopher Robert Misrahi has underlined the freedom of their approach: using images to reflect upon the dawn of existence, when the presence of the self is revealed in the world's eye.



Monday, November 2, 2009

Shoji Ueda

Shoji Ueda's name is often associated with meticulously staged pictures taken against a backdrop of sand dunes. He involved family members in these images, also appearing in them himself. The charm and originality of his compositions are more or less unique in the history of photography.






Ueda's work exists on the margins of documentary photography, informed by visual components garnered from within a small area in his native region of Tottori, a place which to all intents and purposes he never left. He perfected his staging technique, integrating all sorts of motifs into his work. Ueda's photography also reflects his curiosity and playfulness: his pictures are suffused with both poetry and humor.






Monday, October 26, 2009

Artist Statement

Many things inspire me to create: Personal experience, friends and family, travel, music, books, good food, old buildings, huge open fields and the ocean when it is enormous and in turmoil. I have always had a heightened awareness of the natural environment; the energy and rhythms which are ever present if you look hard enough. I make my prints, sculpture and video art from inspiration of this energy, and just as in the flow of nature, manage to breathe this life force into all my creations.

"You born with artistic eyes and hardworking hands." This is what my uncle always says to me when he sees my art. He is the only person doing art in my family before my generation. I think this sentence well described my way of doing art. Attempting to understand the complexity drives my artistic vision, I see the process of developing the concept and making art (both physically making the piece and mentally processing the idea),the most important parts for me. I like to have a craft approach to my prints by using a mix of media; I like to approach printing techniques to my video art by using layers of colors and images. I also like to work with found objects. Through constructed structures, I let the symbolic and the imaginary perform a decisive role conveying new meanings to familiar objects and notion.

I often use the element of contrast in my work, finding and understanding the relationship between things, people and places, what happened years ago and what's happening now. My changeable personality is reflected in my art with a style that transforms and mutates with every pieces. The only constant is reinforcing this idea of emotion, the imagination within and beyond the nature, capturing sense of beauty that often accompanies each piece of art.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Miya Ando

Miya Ando is a minimalist metalworker; employing steel and pigment to create quiet, meditative environments. Working solely in two-dimensional metal panels, she combines tranquility with strength that results in landscape-like works of art made from traditional metalworking techniques.

steel, pigment, patina, lacquer12" x 12 "

steel, pigment, patina, lacquer12 " x 12 "


"My reasons for working with steel are multifold. It is dynamic, having the ability to simultaneously convey strength and permanence while remaining delicate, soft, fragile, luminous and ethereal. Metaphorically, steel's physicality can evoke steadfast truths, steel's reflective surface gives it an elusive quality that I utilize to invoke ideas about universality and evanescence - the transitory and ephemeral qualities of nature, quietude, and the underlying impermanence of all things."

- Miya Ando

Brooke Reidt



"Asphyxiation has taught me the art of effusion. I am a metropolitan mermaid with a moxie to live through constant migration. My paintings are memories, marks and maps to document my salvation from arteriosclerosis caused by oxidization. My destination is to create a contagion of demiurge through apostrophe and swell above the catastrophe caused by modern day miasma. "
- Brooke Reidt









Brooke is an emerging artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. I'm really interested in the concept of her work, these figures and layers of colors she uses in her work.



Friday, October 9, 2009

Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson's photographs feature a series of ongoing and possibly connected dramas, located in small town America yet conceived on a grand scale.


Untitled (Shane), Summer 2006, Archival inkjet print

Crewdson's photographs are often described as cinematic, his exteriors are repeatedly caught at moments of changing light and his interiors are often patterned with complex pools of illumination. Each image operates as a compacted drama, with the significance spread between various visual points within the image. It is between these points that a density of meaning and narrative is constructed; in this sense, Crewdson references classical ideas of symbolic representation that are located in painting rather than cinema, or even photography. Within these settings, his subject matter often suggests climactic moments in human relationships—though quite what these are remains ineffable.

Untitled (birth), Winter 2007, Archival inkjet print

Untitled, Summer 2003, Digital C-print


Woman in flowers, 1998-2002

Crewdson's photographs are located firmly in the present tense. The strength behind his photographs lies in their ability to stage – and then extend indefinitely.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Matthew Ritchie

Matthew Ritchie's installations of painting, wall drawings, light boxes, sculpture, and projections are investigations of the idea of information; explored through science, architecture, history and the dynamics of culture, defined equally by their range and their lyrical visual language.


"The Universal Cell" Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2005


"The Universal Cell" Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2005

Matthew Ritchie's work takes a basic line and takes it farther in meaning, in space, and in motion. He is a lover of layers, both literal and conceptual. His art goes back and forth between computer generation and hand execution: Imagery is drawn, scanned, projected, traced, scanned again, and printed and animated in myriad ways. The large framed canvases build up layers of different mark making: stains, drips, loops, and squiggles that constantly play off the macro and microcosmic.
"Parents and Children" Andrea Rosen Gallery

"The Morning Line" Andrea Rosen Gallery, 2008-2009

More omnivorous than omnipotent, encompassing everything from cutting-edge physics, ancient myth, neo-noir short stories and medieval alchemy to climate change, contemporary politics and economic theory, his installations fuse unique narrative forms with our constantly changing factual understanding of our universe.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Artist Statement

Eva Xie is originally from China. Lives and works in Rochester, NY, Xie has been experimenting with elements of visual art and theatre. Xie sees herself as an "Idea-based" artist who always starts her work with inspiration of a concept, which is usually from personal experience, stories she heard, and the environment surround her, then chooses the media and material based on this concept. The process of developing the concept and making art (both physically making the piece and mentally processing the idea) is incredible important to her. Xie's work consists of a variety of media including of printmaking, photography, video art and recently focusing on installation and narrative environment design. She also likes to work with found objects. Through constructed structures, she lets the symbolic and the imaginary perform a decisive role conveying new meanings to familiar objects and notion. Most of Eva Xie's art address issues of culture, identity and gender. She believes that art task is to encourage the mind, to create sensuousness, to conjure up positive energies, to research possibilities and to destroy clichés and prejudices.



As Nature Formed? Linocut Prints. 2009

Friday, September 25, 2009

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist is one of the most recognizable names in contemporary video art. For me, she is a very important inspiration for my experiment with video art and multimedia installation.




Installation view, Hauser & Wirth Zürich, 2009

Pipilotti Rist is renowned for bridging the gulf between popular culture and art and for merging various mediums. From her earliest tapes through her recent multi-media installations, Pipilotti has crafted a body of work in which she appropriates this spirit for her own ends, exploring the intersection of sexuality, technology, and pop culture.


Homo sapiens sapiens, 2005Audio-video installationInstallation view, San Stae Church, Venice

Tyngdkraft, var min vän (Gravity be my friend), 2007Installation view, FACT, Liverpool, 2008


A Liberty Statue for Löndön (monolith version), 2005/2008Audio-video installationInstallation view, Art Unlimited, Basel, 2008

Fantasy is at the heart of Pipilotti's work: her dream-like scenes often seem so loaded with suggestive images and scenarios that they threaten to collapse under their own meaning, saved, in the end, by her light touch and ironic humor. I'm always frustrating yet amazed by the saturated colors, sensual images, and an unconventional use of space and scale in her piece. Pipilotti Rist's video installations are at once tangible and boundless — witnessed in the here-and-now, but full of interpretive possibility.
One of my favourite piece from her:

Ever Is Over All, 1997Audio-video installation Installation view, National Museum for Foreign Art, Sofia

Pipilotti Rist Official Website: http://www.pipilottirist.net/

Pipilotti Rist "Pour Your Body Out" at MOMA