news | home | upcoming | past | artists | art fairs | about us | floor plan | contact

 

February 10, 2005 - February 14, 2005

ARCO 05 |New Terretories | booth 9NT19

Michelle Bellemare | Raffael A. Iglesias | Andrew Wright

International ContemporaryArt Fair | Spain, Madrid

 images from ARCO05

 



ARTICLES:
elmundo.es
El Cultural

 



Michelle Bellemare
Tease, 2004,
head-sized carbon fiber ball (7” in diameter), custom-made 360-degree wig, micro-meter, battery, and remote control motion censor

 

 

Raffael Antonio Iglesias
Guernica/Coronica
(mixed media, dimensions - 180 x 120cm , 2004)

 

 

Andrew Wright
Skies
Silver Gelatin, Unique contact print (paper negative)
dimensions 221 X 105 cm, 2004

Michelle Bellemare lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Her enigmatic sculptures have appeared in collective and group exhibitions, including: Untitled Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2004); Blindside, Koffler Gallery, Toronto (2004); Dust, Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina (2003); Lapse, Redhead Gallery, Toronto (2002); Commute, ARC Gallery, Chicago (2001); and Art of Darkness, AGO, Toronto (1996). Her work has received critical acclaim in publications such as Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Espace. Bellemare has been awarded numerous mid- career grants from the Toronto, Ontario and Canada Arts Councils, and most notably, the Chalmers Fellowship in 2003.

In her most recent work, Michelle Bellemare explores the manner in which associatively rich material (e.g. tensor bandages, hair and dust) lends form and voice to the inexpressible. She creates seemingly functional objects from familiar material so as to provoke the body’s inherent reflexes. She engenders an encounter – through movement or a need to touch, for example, which holds the potential for betrayal, thwarted desire, and/or hope.

At ARCO’05, Peak Gallery Co. will exhibit an installation featuring one of Michelle Bellemare’s enigmatic objects. Tease (2004) takes as its materials a head-sized ball, a custom-made 360-degree wig, as well as an internal mechanism. This ball, covered by a silky blond wig, rolls aimlessly on the floor, stopping momentarily when it bumps into an obstacle – only to turn around, and continue its blind blundering cycle again. As it sweeps, this moving mass of golden hair both attracts and repels. Is it engaged in a pathetic act of seduction or is it writhing in pain at our feet?

Raffael Antonio Iglesias lives and works in Toronto, Canada. His mixed media paintings have been exhibited in solo and group shows, including: Elxo, Peak Gallery, Toronto (2004); ALUNCINARTE, in conjunction with the Latin American art festival, gallery 1313, Toronto (2003); Books on the Fence, A Collaboration with Photographer Greg Staats, Epicentro Gallery, Mexico City (2003); Incuentro, Museo de Arte Contemporanio Art, Santiago Chile (2001); Che, Zsa Zsa Gallery, Toronto (2002); Glyphs, Gallery 401, Toronto (2001); and Last Century Modern, An Exhibition of Toronto Emerging Artists, Spin Gallery Toronto (2000). His art has received critical acclaim in publications such as LOLA and Fuse Magazines and in a short film aired on BRAVO! Video Fact. Iglesias has been awarded several grants from the Toronto, Ontario and Canada Arts Councils, most notably, the Emerging Artist Grant (1999, 2000, 2002, 2003).
Raffael Antonio Iglesias has, of late, begun to reinterpret canonical works of art so as to challenge the ideals of the artist, of history/landscape painting and the trappings of Romanticism and Exoticism associated with such traditions. Identified as “cultural landscapes” these paintings cull from and cast anew all aspects of the artist’s surrounds and heritage.

At ARCO’05, Peak Gallery Co. will exhibit one such “cultural landscape” by Raffael Antonio Iglesias, entitled Guernica/Coronica (mixed media, dimensions - 180 x 120cm , 2004). For this work, Iglesias “customizes” the extraordinary painting by Picasso; he takes the original composition as his blue-print but substitutes icons of popular culture for their mythological, religious and cultural precedents (e.g. Michelangelo’s Pieta and the Statue of Liberty). Much like a movie poster for conflict and, oddly, in keeping with the original, this Guernica/Coronica flaunts its status as both near-faithful record and sensational rendering of the horrors of war.

Andrew Wright lives and works in Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and has received critical acclaim for his work in publications such as Canadian Art, Border Crossings, Globe & Mail, and Mix Magazine. In 2001 he was the winner of the Ernst & Young Great Canadian Printmaking Competition and was recently awarded a position with the Canadian Forces Artist Program. He has served as Artistic Coordinator for Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area (CAFKA) for the past 3 years. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of South Western Manitoba, Roam Contemporary of New York, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Andrew Wright, in his art, often combines the archaic (photographic practices like the Camera Lucida, Camera Obscura and the pinhole camera) with the high-tech (digital photography and video); so, too, he blurs distinctions between art forms, between what he describes as “manual dexterity and mechanical procedure” – all to great effect.

At ARCO’05, Peak Gallery Co. will exhibit two photographs by Andrew Wright, entitled Skies XIII and Skies XIV (Silver Gelatin, Unique contact print (paper negative), dimensions 221 X 105 cm, 2004). For these monumental images, Wright - by means of a makeshift lens and shutter in the roof - converted his studio space into a veritable Camera Obscura. He unrolled photographic paper onto a 4 X 8 foot platform beneath the hole and opened the shutter, briefly, exposing the paper; and developed it in situ. These images are decidedly 'counter-photographic': the subject is emptiness, water vapour, and light itself; the procedure is simple and does not rely on current (or even recent) technology; tonally the image is reversed; orientation ceases to matter as there is no definitive up or down, left or right. Likewise, the decisive moment of picture-taking, the traditional purview of the photographer/artist, becomes arbitrary. Each moment is inherently different from the next, yet they are all versions of the same image. Ultimately, what becomes evidenced, here, is the procedure itself, the photo-ideological apparatus, our capacity to aestheticize the world around us, and our continuing amazement with(in) the magical space of the Camera Obscura.