intimacies

Denis Lessard         Kegan McFadden          Jim Verburg

September 6th, 2013 to October 18th, 2013 Opening: September 6th, 5-8pm In conversation Saturday, September 7th, 2pm with Larry Glawson (host) Denis Lessard and Kegan McFadden Workshop In Your Own Hands w/ Kegan McFadden October 5, 2:30-5:30 Cost $50 (no MPA membership required) This workshop will talk about different avenues and approches that artists use for self publishing. Participants will look at personal histories and stories working towards creating a limited edition bookwork.

Exhibition Brochure

  intimacies will present discrete but conceptually connected works in print form by three artists to be installed throughout the MSS gallery. Each of these works was produced as a multiple and represents a range of printmaking techniques and media, from digital to silkscreen to offset press and photocopy. These works are informed by the idea of intimacy, in particular male intimacy and how it is manifested in contemporary experience. The joint presentation of work by these three men is meant to offer both conceptual and experimental strategies from diverse perspectives. Lessard’s postcards speak to the emotional depth arising from personal relationships (sometimes fleeting, sometimes profoundly complex and laden) between men. McFadden’s screen prints speak to memory, identity and social bonds. Verburg’s ‘stack’ is concerned with the subtle links and connections between people, experience, emotion and personal reality. With the work in this exhibition, Verburg moves towards exploring these ideas in minimal and non-representational ways, representing people and ideas through shape, colour and form. An exhibition brochure with a text response by Robin Metcalfe will be available in the gallery during the exhibition. BIOS Denis Lessard lives and works in Montreal. Since 1982, he has presented his performances and visual works in Canada, the United States, France and the Netherlands. He has also worked as an art critic, translator, guest curator and art history lecturer. Through his interdisciplinary practice, he has addressed issues about collecting, male identity, spirituality and the relationship between literature, music and the visual arts. He has participated in a number of residencies since 1987 developing themes of memory, history and communities in relation to the cities and places he explores. Over the last year Winnipeg-based publisher As We Try & Sleep Press has been producing Lessard’s Douze historiettes postcards and disseminating them internationally. Kegan McFadden is a Winnipeg-based writer and artist whose practice is informed by questions of memory and its function and implication in socio-cultural contexts. During recently completed courses at Martha Street Studio, Kegan began to investigate where traditional printmaking techniques could meet conceptual applications. The series that was produced through MSS was premiered in a solo exhibition of McFadden’s at Malaspina Printmakers Association in Vancouver October 2012. Almost all of his projects incorporate text, and especially names, in order to question notions of memory and sentimentality in contemporary queer culture. Jim Verburg is a citizen of Canada and the Netherlands, who currently lives and works in Toronto. His artistic practice is mainly concerned with the complexities of relationships. Working with photography, video, text, installation and print Verburg explores his love of modernist aesthetics, emotional matters and the interpersonal. He has held residencies at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto and the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta. Recent exhibitions include Portrait Study at the New Stage of National Theatre in Prague, Domestic Queens at FOFA Gallery in Montreal, So Many Letdowns Before We Get Up at Platform in Winnipeg. Verburg’s solo show One and Two opened in the fall of 2011 at Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal. The show was awarded the 2011 Dazibao Prize. Robin Metcalfe is a writer, critic and curator who works with a wide range of media and cultural practices, including visual arts, architecture, craft and design. His erotic fiction, poetry and essays have been published in 15 anthologies and more than sixty magazines, in five languages and on four continents. As a visual arts curator, he has organised such Queer-themed exhibitions as Queer Looking, Queer Acting: Lesbian and Gay Vernacular (MSVU Art Gallery, 1997). He has lectured widely, served on many award juries and edited several periodicals, serving as Editor-at-Large and Halifax correspondent for C Magazine from 1994 to 2001. He was Curator of Contemporary Art at Museum London, in Ontario, from 2001 to 2004, and since then been Director/Curator of Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax.