Eugène Atget - Photographs from the MoMA

Atget, Eugene, Pont Neuf, 1900, Albumen Silver Print, 7 x 8.5 in

Eugène Atget
Photographs from the MoMA
December 1 - December 22


The work of Eugène Atget is one of the richest pictorial embodiments of French culture—poised between tradition and experiment. In the rapid unfolding of modernist photography in the early 20th century, Atget’s work soon became the exemplar of the medium’s new creative power—the single most vital force that propelled photography from its documentary past into its artistic future.

Atget has rightly been considered first and foremost a photographer of Paris and its environs. This exhibition features outstanding examples from several of Atget’s bodies of work. Many of his earliest images were made in the Somme, a storied agrarian region in northern France. Atget recorded rural scenes and flora for his “Landscape Documents” series and Parisian architecture and architectural decoration in documenting how Paris was transformed through modernization. He turned his attention beyond the city's threatened architecture to its marginalized populations in 1913 with the series “Picturesque Paris”, working systematically in what was known as the zone, an area immediately outside the 19th-century fortifications that ringed Paris until after World War I. Atget’s more meditative photographs were made in the last decade of his life with his “Parks and Gardens” series. These late photographs have a qualitatively different sensibility: formally bold, they are also atmospheric and mysterious.

 

Memorial for Jared Sable

We hosted the Jared Sable Memorial today.  People from all aspects of Jared's art world and family life came out to share in the memories of Jared, the man, the dad, the grandpa and the art dealer.

After welcoming the assembled crowd of artists, dealers, art collectors and the like,  Jane Corkin spoke of her first memories of Jared Sable when she was at David Mirvish Gallery in the 70's, both selling photographs in a city where clients were not easily challenged to own photographs. Jane Corkin also spoke of her experience of Jared Sable when she was president of the Art Dealers Association of Canada, and he was on the board,  as always being fair,  cutting through the personalities and the drama to the essential.

Jared Sable's oldest daughter, Joanna Sable spoke about what it was like to grow up with an art dealer father, and what he taught her about looking.

Barbara Astman and Tony Scherman, both artists who showed with the Sable-Castelli Gallery, gave anecdotes of their experiences with the loving curmudgeon.

Art Dealer Fabrice Marcolini added what it was like to be Jared Sable's neighbor as a dealer for 7 years.

And finally, before Corkin gave the final toast, Art Writer Sarah Milroy spoke about how Jared Sable taught her to see.

The assembled crowd enjoyed lively conversation around coffee and chat to remember a beloved colleague.

MY NOSE IS GROWING NOW

My Nose is Growing Now, No.9, 2012, pastel on paper,25x33 in

RAMÓN SERRANO MY NOSE IS GROWING NOW
Opening Reception at Corkin Gallery
Tuesday, November 20, 5 - 7 pm 


When does a lie become true? Where can a lie lead to? How far can you stretch the truth?

Ramón Serrano presents various acts full of conflicting concepts. Immediate and timeless, his storybook drawings are based on a fairy tale describing the adventures of a marionette in his quest to become a real boy. The puppet is prone to telling lies because in his mind, lying is nothing more than a way to stay out of trouble. But when he lies, his nose grows.

More than a series of random adventures, it is a social allegory. The wooden boy’s nose brings an embarrassing discovery to our notice: the tendency to lie, first to ourselves, and then to others.

"My nose is growing now" is a version of the liar paradox which consists of the statement "This sentence is false." Any attempts to give the statement a classical truth value leads to a contradiction because if it is true, then it is false; this would mean that it is technically true, but also that it is false, and so on ad infinitum.

We welcome you to see where this paradox will lead us.

The Automatiste Revolution

Françoise Sullivan performing Danse dans la neige, February 1948. Photo: Maurice Perron. Collection of Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec.

The Art Gallery of Alberta

2 Sir Winston Churchill Square
Edmonton, AB $40 General Public / $25 AGA Members, Students, and Seniors
Tickets include access to the exhibition The Automatiste Revolution

Saturday, October 13, 2012 at 2 pm
Talk | 2 pm
Performance | 3:30 pm

Join exhibition curator, Roald Nasgaard, for an engaging conversation with award-winning author Ray Ellenwood and Françoise Sullivan, an original member of the Automatistes. A dance program choreographed by Sullivan and performed by Ginette Boutin follows the talk.

The Automatistes were the first artists to bring modernist painting to Canada and the first Canadian artists to embrace avant-garde gestural abstraction. Gathered under the leadership of Paul-Émile Borduas in the early 1940s, they were inspired by stream-of-consciousness writings of the time and approached their works through an exploration of the subconscious. They published Refus global (Total Refusal) in 1948 and it became one of the pillars of the Quiet Revolution, a period of intense change in Quebec. Refus global was an anti-religious and anti-establishment manifesto—one of the most controversial artistic and social documents in modern Quebec.

The Automatistes were not solely painters, but also included dancers, playwrights, poets, critics, and choreographers. After twenty years of challenging the politically and religiously repressive Quebec society, the Automatiste group disbanded in 1960 after the death of Borduas.

Françoise Sullivan is represented by Corkin Gallery. For inquiries about works available by Sullivan, please contact the gallery.

Germaine Krull

Modernist photographer Germaine Krull led an extraordinary life that spanned nine decades and four continents. She witnessed many of the major events of the twentieth century and with her camera examined and recorded the industrial, technological and cultural transformations that took place following World War I. Born in Wilda, East Prussia (now Poland), Krull studied photography as a young woman in Munich.

untitled, open books and portrait, date unknown, gelatin silver print, 7.75 x 6.5 in

  

Politically minded for her entire career, Krull was briefly imprisoned in Russia as a counterrevolutionary and then deported before moving to Berlin in 1922. Working as a photographer, her subjects and were varied and diverse: fashion spreads, architecture, nudes, avant-garde montages, street photography and highly successful commercial advertising work all contributed to her body of work. Moving to Paris in 1928 and to Amsterdam later on, Krull was concerned with depicting all aspects of the modern city, with dramatically high angles, muscular patterns and near-abstracted close-ups. 

The Palm-Beach Pool in Cannes, c.1935, gelatin silver, 5.75 x 4.75 in

  

Alfa Romeo, c.1935, gelatin silver, 8 x 6 in

Quarry, c.1928, gelatin silver, 6 x 8 in

untitled, woman sitting on wall, c.1935, gelatin silver, 4.75 x 6.75 in

  

Genetics for Cowboys

Genetics for Cowboys

Multimedia Installation by Deborah Carruthers

September 15 – October 13, 2012

Opening Reception

Saturday, September 15th, 2 – 5 PM

   

         Genetics for Cowboys, a multimedia installation, was created in response to an artist residency exploring the intersection of science and art at University of Calgary. The exhibition investigates the socio-political impact of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease, and is the result of a research project the artist engaged in at the invitation of renowned scientists such as Dr. Morley Hollenberg and Dr. Christen Sensen at the University of Calgary. 

The presentation includes paintings, photographs, a sound installation and a didactic slide show. The sound component of Genetics for Cowboys is comprised of an audio loop of the cattle auctions at Oldes Auction Mart, Alberta. Carruthers creates her intervention through this sound loop, now disrupted to include auctioneers “calling out” in auction patter, juxtaposed with Agriculture Canada regulations pertaining to the prevention and containment of mad cow disease, as well as excerpts of science and news articles.

The artist’s suite of bold acrylic paintings capture evocative abstract representations of cattle coats along with DNA-like renderings of the disease causing agent of mad cow disease. The accompanying photography deftly displays the complex realities of animal husbandry and the burgeoning field of related genetics to complete a compelling view of information gleaned from her research – research that raises provocative questions about what can happen when economic and political concerns trump science.

Genetics for Cowboys powerfully intersects art and science to investigate little known information about a very well known event that some in fact may find hard to swallow.

Text by Linda Abrahams

Artist bio: Deborah Carruthers is a Montreal based artist and curator. Her projects have been presented in art venues across Canada, as well as internationally.

Dancing with Che: Enter through the Gift Shop

Barbara Astman
Dancing with Che: Enter through the Gift Shop
Sept 28 – October 21
a museum gift shop intervention / installation

Barbara Astman explores the commodification of iconic revolutionary Che Guevara

containR
Olympic Plaza
228 8 Avenue Southeast Calgary, AB T2P 2M5
Presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Calgary

containR: a street installation at the nexus of video, public art and urban design, sitting at the cross roads of mountain and urban culture, art and sports cinema, embracing public art and sustainable design

Paris after Atget

Colonne de Juillet, Place de la Bastille, 11e, 2007, gelatin silver, 13 x 18.5 in

Thaddeus Holownia went to Paris more than once before undertaking this series. These missions set up in him a different appetite – that is why we travel after all. He would not go after surfaces, but layers. An archaeologist would call this a ‘dig’: the careful exploration of a site to reveal and, sometimes, extract evidence of its former states and uses. All photographers, consciously or unconsciously, traffic in history and memory. Any photographic image can be excavated for signs of the past and most can help us to visualize changes to the earth or the living arrangements of its earthly creatures. History, as Jacques Le Goff tells us, “can only be a science of change and the explanation of change.” Any object or scene is infused with this dynamic potential; a photograph does not capture all of it, to be sure, but preserves and circulates an observant photographer’s insights about the history-in-the-making of a place.

Street calligraphy, 2007, gelatin silver, 13 x 18.5 in

Holownia has called this series “Paris after Atget.” In his statement of plans, he mentions not only Eugène Atget (1856 – 1927), who spent most of his working life intimately and exhaustively documenting the city, but Walker Evans (1903 – 1975) who spent about a year in the city (much of that reading books!) before returning home to America where his photographic subjects became places abandoned and people in transition and neglect. Scouting Paris with these ghosts, Holownia developed a comprehensive list of sites, scattered over twenty arrondissements, that responded to Atget’s rigour, sense of belonging, and visual poetry, as well as Evans’s eye-opening, fleeting experience.

Terrasse Lautreamont, 2007, gelatin silver, 13 x 18.5 in

A selection of photographs from Paris after Atget now on view at Corkin Gallery.

Photography by Thaddeus Holownia

Text by Martha Langford

The Eye as Dove

untitled, 2012, oil on canvas, 96 x 120 in

David Urban
The Eye as Dove
September 13 – October 28, 2012
Opening Reception: 5pm to 8pm, September 13

David Urban is widely regarded as the leading Canadian painter of his generation. His critically acclaimed paintings have become well known for their signature wandering lines, textured surfaces, and distinctive colour.

The Eyes as Dove is a visual chronicle of a walk in the woods. Natural elements found in the wild are condensed into form and figure. Deeply poetic and meditative, the paintings reconstruct moments in time as objects in space, each with a discrete personality. 

David Urban is exclusively represented by Corkin Gallery, located in the historic Distillery District, one of Toronto's hottest cultural attractions.

Made of Iron

Rigging Eye, Ironworks, 2001, 24 x 20 in, gelatin silver print

Taking as his subject a selection of hoary and venerable blacksmith-made objects (a rigging link, a rigging eye, and a measuring device called a “traveller”) each of them pitted with use and pocked with the decay, Thaddeus Holownia positions each of these objects against a velvety background. The intimacy of detail is made possible by the photographer’s use of the large negative format (8” x 10”) presenting each tool as an intriguing artifact.

Rigging Link, Ironworks, 2001, 24 x 20 in, gelatin silver print

Traveller, Ironworks, 2001, 24 x 20 in, gelatin silver print

Photography by Thaddeus Holownia

The Exacting Eye of Walker Evans

Woman and Man at Amusement Park, 1929. Gelatin silver print, 6 x 8.5 in

Walker Evans (1903-1975) created defining images of America. His work has influenced not only modern photography but also literature, film and visual arts in other mediums. Evans took up photography upon his return to New York in 1927, following a year in Paris when his aspiration to become a writer faded in the shadow of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Joyce. Best known for social documentary photography, Evans worked for the Farm Security Administration recording the effects of the Great Depression. Much of his work from this period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. Commenting on his work at the time, Evans noted that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that were literate, authoritative and transcendent.

Church of Nazarene, Tennessee, 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, 7.5 x 9.5 in

In 1936 he traveled with the writer James Agee to illustrate an article on tenant farm families for Fortune magazine and the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men came out of this collaboration. Evans continued to work for the FSA until 1938. That year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held the exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs. This was the first exhibition that MoMA devoted to the work of a single photographer.

Throughout his career Evans contributed photographs to numerous publications, including three devoted solely to his work. In 1965 he left Fortune, where he had been a staff photographer for twenty years, to become a professor of photography and graphic design at Yale University. He remained in the position until 1974, a year before his death.

Alluring Beauties

Floatin' Foxee from the series: Lure, 2001. Colour print, 20 x 16 in

Lady Lipstick from the series: Lure, 2001. Colour print, 20 x 16 in

Tiny Miss Crazy Crawler from the series: Lure, 2001. Colour print, 72 x 48 in

Hot'n'Tot Pygmy from the series: Lure, 2001. Colour print, 20 x 16 in

Mann Dancer from the series: Lure, 2001. Colour print, 20 x 16 in

Photography by Lori Newdick

New York: Portrait of a City

Herald Square, 34th and Broadway, 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, 8 x 10 in

 Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself. -- Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) was one of many Americans drawn to live as expatriates in Paris in the 1920s. It was there that she became interested in photography, initially working as an assistant to Man Ray, a role she held from 1924-1926. She later photographed many of the great writers, artists, and eventual cultural icons living there, including James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Max Ernst. Her portraits from this period are direct, seeking less to flatter the sitter than to present unveiled, fascinating faces.

In Paris, she discovered the photographer Eugène Atget, whose work had considerable influence on her own. Abbott fought not only to secure recognition for Atget’s major contribution, but also for the preservation of his work, much of which resides today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

When Abbott returned to the United States and New York at the end of the decade, she did commercial work for Fortune magazine. At this time she embarked on the most important of all her life’s work, a portrait of the city of New York. The Federal Art Project’s “Changing New York” became an important document historically and artistically, and secured Abbott a major place in 20th century American photography.

Tempo of the City, 1938, Gelatin Silver Print, 8 x 7.5 in

Many of the buildings and landmarks she caught on film have since been demolished. Her varied images of New York in the 1930s display impressive high-rises and quaint street fronts, wide avenues and unpolished back alleys, docks and ferries, businessmen and street people. She took views from below, capturing the wonder and pride of looking up at a confident, strong city built out of the hard work and imaginations of peers and ancestors. She soared above it and shot glimpses of the life below, capturing the soul of the city both in tight compositions and in expansive views. Her use of light and shadow is as complicated and exciting as her range of subjects and perspectives. 

Last week to view the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Photographs at the AGO ending August 19, 2012.

The Lovers

Silber by Frank Mädler may be understood as a reflection on romances and affairs that lay under a sheet of time and dust – once ‘golden moments’ now silvered with age. The series derives from postcards which the artist collected over several years in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Weathered by sun and rain and neglected on the rack, Mädler enlarges the photographs on Kodak Metallic paper, transforming kitsch ephemera into enduring works of art.

Silber, L2, 2007, colour print on metallic paper, 13 x 23 in

Silber, L3, 2007, colour print on metallic paper, 23 x 13 in

Silber, L13, 2007, colour print on metallic paper, 13 x 23 in

Silber, L10, 2007, colour print on metallic paper, 23 x 13 in

Silber, L6, 2007, colour print on metallic paper, 13 x 23 in

Wrappers Delight

 

These photographs of candy wrappers by Chad Gerth make explicit the difference between our physical reality and the fiction of the plane. Though meant to wrap around candy, these plastic and foil wrappers are actually 2-dimensional surfaces. As they lose their intended shape, they gain new significance as objects of consumption and seduction.

“Winnie the Pooh” (Candy Wrappers) 2002, colour print, 24 x 20 in

“Dubble Bubble” (Candy Wrappers) 2002, colour print, 24 x 20 in

“Pingu” (Candy Wrappers) 2002, colour print, 24 x 20 in

“Big Deal” (Candy Wrappers) 2002, colour print, 24 x 20 in

“Magic Stars” (Candy Wrappers) 2002, colour print, 24 x 20 in

“Devil” (Candy Wrappers) 2002, colour print, 24 x 20 in

an Egg a Day Five

Northern Harrier, 2001, colour print, 24 x 20 in

White, nearly round as a cue ball, your egg might

roll true on that green tableland banked behind dykes –

Tantramar, maritime prairie the sea laid down,

grain by grain, when the tide was ‘asking high.’

You tilt above this reclaimed place

like a bubble in a spirit level,

tipping by degrees, as if pondering

a question of loyalty, reparation for past injustice.

You yourself suspend the laws of nature,

hanging in the sky, stalled

on upswept wings,

calling all the shots.

Photograph by Thaddeus Holownia. Poem by Harry Thurston. 

From the catalogue Ova Aves published by Anchorage Press, 2011

Dog Day Afternoon

Tojie, 2006, gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in

Owen, 1999, gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 in

 

Molly; Lesvos, Greece, 1994, gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in

Dog Shot, 1988, gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 in

True, 2005, gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in

Photography: Burt Covit

Aedh extended until August 31 2012

Aedh, No.1, 2012, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in

Françoise Sullivan: Aedh

Extended until August 31 2012
Corkin Gallery
Distillery District 7 Tank House Lane
Toronto, ON M5A 3C4
http://www.corkingallery.com


In the series of paintings titled Aedh, an Irish/Gaelic term which connotes fire that does not consume itself, red is the springboard for what has been created. Often associate with harshness and aggression, the colour red in Aedh becomes voluptuous and tender.

Since the earliest days of her career, Françoise Sullivan has explored the relationship of the unconscious with painting and dance. Born in Montréal, she was a founding member of the Automatiste movement, ushering in dramatic cultural change to Québec.