Most artists have at least one unusual work that doesn't quite fit into their oeuvre. (((Parentheses))) Gallery & Art Projects new exhibition Mis-fits invites us to celebrate those divergent moments in which artists deviate from the identities they've created for themselves. It features thirty different artists, ranging from intuitive, self-taught artists such as Gillian Frise to academically trained artists such as the Brooklyn-based Nova Scotia College of Art and Design alumni Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg. "We wanted artists to bring out something that they had either tried to experiment with or a piece of art that was just sitting around on their top shelf that they'd made, that they knew didn't fit into a body of work, but that they just loved and couldn't get rid of," explains Dave Hayden, who co-curated the show with Kevin Lewis.
Matt Leines, Blue-Haired Man
Often collaborations help push artists out of their creative routines. Jason McLean and Billy Bert Young include a collaborative acrylic and ink collage titled The Pancake Speaks. They are both well-known doodlers and collage artists, part of a Canadian drawing movement with contemporaries including the likes of Marc Bell and Peter Thompson. Featuring a mad swirl of magazine cutouts and doodles of food and comic book characters precariously balancing fruit on their heads, the collage is both playful and chaotic. The work prompted me to imagine an exhausted chef slowly losing his grip on reality in the kitchen, ingredients mingling in his mind with memories, daydreams, and senseless cooking instructions.
The exhibition also features Brooklyn-based artist Matt Leines who creates flattened drawings of fantastic and morbid creatures immersed in supernatural, storybook-like worlds. He is inspired by everything from ancient bestiaries to campy American wrestlers. He initially lost the piece he's displaying in Mis-fits: an acrylic and Ink painting titled Blue-Haired Man that he'd made for a series he created about five years ago. He recently rediscovered the strange portrait. Now, the worm-shaped creature with saucer-like eyes and bushy black facial hair stands alone and apart from the pieces it was created with, a "misfit" by circumstance and chance.
Heather Snider's Shipyard Valentines features timesheets from the Halifax dockyard folded into floral arrangements. It juxtaposes the way in which shipyard workers pass time completing tasks society deems productive, whereas artists spend time engaged in non-utilitarian, aesthetic pursuits. Mitchell Wiebe's chimerical creatures adorn a lamp, as though poised to leap off into the dreams of those whose bedside the lamp might sit beside. And Andrew Hunt's Veneer, a study in beiges and browns of a wooden desk, demonstrates a departure from his usually brightly coloured paintings.
There were too many varied and quirky works to rattle each off by name or to tie the show together with any sweeping thematic linkages, but allowing the misfit pieces in the back of various closets to take center stage gave the artists the chance to break free from any limitations imposed by themselves, the public, curators and critics on their creativity, and provides gallery goers the opportunity to see the nuances in each artist's career.
(((Parentheses))) Gallery & Art Projects: http://parentheseshfx.tumblr.com/
Mis-fits continues until June 18.
Lizzy Hill is an internationally published writer and the editor of Visual Arts News, Atlantic Canada's only magazine focusing on the work of visual artists. Lizzy loves her community in Halifax's artistic north end, a wonderful summer camp for grown ups full of underground restaurants and pop-up galleries. She is Akimblog's Halifax correspondent and can be followed @LizzyFHill on Twitter.
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Mis-fits at Parentheses
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