Currently on view at Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Primer serves as a refresher course in the work of four Ottawa artists, each exploring the elementary concerns of painting in distinct but converging ways. The show presents new work, pointing in new directions, and announces new projects to come. The artists each have a distinctive visual language of their own, but the show is cohesive and the works have a lot to say to each other through their depth and complexity. Primer, the first coat of paint on any surface, reveals the multi-layered nature of all the work in the exhibition and throws into relief the notion that painting is flat.
Amy Schissel, Alto Terra 3, 2014, plaster, acrylic, ink, graphite, paper on wood
Andrew Smith's Passing Through makes for a striking entrance. A skein of pastel pink, aquamarine and black lines map a 5.5' x 7' canvas. Its relatively muted palette is riotous in comparison with adjacent works by Amy Schissel and Natasha Mazurka in shades of grey, but the complicated image is actually achieved with a very light application of paint: expanses appear to be primed canvas alone. The scale demands that the painting be navigated with the body as well as the eye.
Schissel's recent works continue the landscape tradition in the age of geocaching and WikiLeaks. The examples on display here can only suggest the ambitious immersive environments reportedly to come, but even at a small scale and mostly black and white they contain a wealth of information for data-mining. Her Alto Terra compositions of plaster, acrylic, ink, graphite, and paper on wood reward close attention with detail and incidental colour, numbers, charts, bits of graph and tracing paper, evoking a psychosocial topology as an overlay to the topography described.
Mazurka is the biggest surprise: known for her paintings with trompe l'oeil effects, she presents here a series of embossed drawings on layers of parchment paper in little shadow box frames. Entitled Phylogenic Index, this series of finely detailed cellular structures has tricks of its own and appears to glow from within. The scale of the show is taken to the molecular level and the working definition of "primer" is expanded to include a strand of nucleic acid essential for DNA synthesis.
In the back room, a row of new, small paintings by Colin Muir Dorward also contains the stuff of life. A number show a compost heap in advantageous light, not only depicting a landscape in microcosm, but also celebrating the organic, elemental origins of painting itself. In contrast to Smith, Dorward piles on the paint in gobs of earthy ochre, brown and green. Another work is a study from a new series of paintings focussing on found objects and trash that will be shown by Patrick Mikhail Gallery at a new space in Montreal in October. It looks like a cross between a cityscape and a painter's palette. With the new space opening in April, I hope that the Ottawa location will continue to show exhibitions as excellent as this one beyond a transitional period.
Patrick Mikhail Gallery: http://www.patrickmikhailgallery.com/
Primer continues until March 1.
Michael Davidge is an artist, writer, and independent curator who lives in Ottawa, Ontario. His writing on art and culture has appeared in Border Crossings, BlackFlash, and C Magazine, among other publications. He is Akimblog's Ottawa correspondent and can be followed on Twitter @MichaelDavidge.
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Primer at Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Ottawa
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