Janet Werner: Sticky Pictures
Gabriele Beveridge: Soft Shrinking Tremor
September 8–October 7, 2017
Opening: Thursday, September 7, 6–9pm
Parisian Laundry
3550 St-Antoine West
Montreal, Quebec
Canada, H4C 1A9
www.parisianlaundry.com
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Janet Werner: Sticky Pictures
Janet Werner’s recent paintings reveal a shift within the artist’s practice. For nearly two decades Werner has focused primarily on the female figure, painting a range of altered and exaggerated portraits, through the amalgamation of found images drawn from magazines and illustrated books. In Sticky Pictures, Werner makes visible the source material of her paintings—not only the subject in the photograph, but also the photograph itself; the material quality of the printed image, its traces of weathering, handling and use, its physical presence as an object lying on the corner of a table or hanging loosely on a wall, in a space that might be a studio. What is at stake in this work is not so much representing a figure and giving it flesh, but the staging of an image’s life—as if the image was taking revenge upon the portrait and pushing its way to the surface of the canvas, with the help of curtains and shadows, pictorial marks and brushwork. The female figure has become a mere apparition or spectre: a silhouette that is barely outlined, or a smile without a face; it’s even withdrawn entirely from a few paintings, where only an empty frame or a black monochrome rectangle remain. Through the mise en abyme of painting, photography, and three-dimensional space, it’s the images themselves that now seem to gaze at their own reflection in a mirror, or throw at the viewer the glare of a hunted beast. The paintings in Sticky Pictures present elusive spaces in which images are eaten, torn, smeared, or pinned, becoming metaphors for our own sticky relationship to images, as sites of fascination and contempt, of ambivalence and fantastic projection.
–Translated from a text by Ji-Yoon Han
Werner received her MFA from Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut) and BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore). She has shown widely in Canada including solo exhibitions at The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), the Art Gallery of Windsor, The Ottawa Art Gallery and Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art (Winnipeg). Recent group exhibitions include Her Story Today at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Painting Project at Galerie de l’UQAM (Montreal), Generation at the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), Intrus/Intruders at Musée du Québec (Québec) and Painting Perspectives at AXE Neo7 (Gatineau). Internationally, Werner’s work has been exhibited in the Prague Biennale and in the survey exhibition Oh, Canada at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts) in solo exhibitions at Whatiftheworld Gallery (Cape Town), Galerie Julia Garnatz (Cologne), the Portrait Society Gallery (Milwaukee) and the Esther Massry Gallery (Albany, NY). In 2013, a solo survey exhibition organized by the Kenderdine Gallery (Saskatoon), travelled to the Esker Foundation (Calgary), the McIntosh Gallery (London, Ontario), Galerie de l’UQAM (Montreal) and the Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto). Werner’s work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, The Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon), Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina) and The Winnipeg Art Gallery, as well as numerous corporate and private collections.
Gabriele Beveridge: Soft Shrinking Tremor
For Gabriele Beveridge’s first solo exhibition with Parisian Laundry, the London-based artist presents Soft Shrinking Tremor. Here, Beveridge assembles found objects and images with newly fashioned parts that subtly evoke the tactual and evanescent contact between the body and the accessories and processes that serve to embellish it. An abandoned beauty product advertisement, hair salon imagery, presentation walls and counters are salvaged and reassembled, their fatigue and disuse is magnified by the contrasts established through the artist’s juxtaposition of old and new. In works from the “Clouds” series, a palette of nail varnish shades is applied to the softly powder-coated pegboards that are fitted alongside shop panels covered in the discoloured drips of a thousand products that have lost their sheen. In Prophetic Souls, pristine chrome bars reveal themselves as more than simple presentation mechanisms, as their bends and curves suggest a skeletal form, perhaps a rib cage, deformed and appended. The impression of a corporeal presence is emphasized by a leitmotif that emerges throughout the exhibition, the presence of hand-blown glass bubbles, at times vibrantly coloured, that find themselves carefully propped up, and upon closer look, moulded around shop fittings, or the rectilinear lines of a framed image. The curves and droops of these radiant bubbles function as halos that attract the eye in all their reflective powers, while also as appendages—a silicon implant that has fallen off one of its subjects. Throughout these assemblages that one can imagine as potentially infinitely dissembled and reassembled, Beveridge develops an art of prosthesis that traces the contours of a body liberated from the laws of the organic. A body that is defined by appendages and adornments rather than its organs, an eerie body that tremors with the expectation and promise of transformation.
–Translated from a text by Ji-Yoon Han
Gabriele Beveridge holds an MA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art (London) and a BA in photography from Falmouth College of Arts (Falmouth). She has had solo exhibitions at Frieze Focus London with CHEWDAY’S, Deweer Gallery (Otegem), MOT International (Brussels), Zabludowicz Collection (London) and La Salle de bains (Lyon). Beveridge has also participated in several group exhibitions at Off Vendome (New York), Spinello Projects (Miami), Galerist (Istanbul), Glasgow International (Glasgow), Hayward Gallery (London) and at the Arnhem Museum of Modern Art (Arnhem). Her works are found in prestigious collections such as the Zabludowicz Collection, the Silvie Fleming Collection and the Saatchi Collection, as well as various international collections.