The McMaster Museum of Art

By Design and By Chance

Provisional Sites in Contemporary Sculpture and Photography

LABEL COPY

 

 

Edward BURTYNSKY (Canadian, born 1955)
Rock of Ages #25, Abandoned Section, Adam-Pirie Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991
chromogenic colour print
Gift of Mrs. Brenda and Mr. Roger Glassco, 1999

 

Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis. These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear.

For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.

- Edward Burtynsky

 

What we see in Burtynsky's [quarry] photographs are the consequences of stone having been removed, often in great, regularised blocks. The aftermath is ruination of a kind – but it also looks like something built too, almost self-preeningly monumental in its own right, because of the sheer regularity of what has been left behind afterwards. The walls of the quarries themselves are often architectural and cathedral-like – they look like the giant remnants of walls from some ancient archaeological site that has been happened upon by chance.

- Michael Glover, The Independent (UK), 2008

 

 

Andreas GEHR (Swiss, born 1942)
“T”, 1986
glass, fibreglass
Gift of Leo Meyer, 2009

 

In 1986, Andreas Gehr created an installation of sculptures made almost entirely of glass.  The challenge for Gehr was using a material that is both immaterial and unrelenting. In doing so, as Sandra Smith wrote, Gehr directed his work to the very concept of the sculptural process and the fragility and temporality of existence; the sculptor as philosopher.

Here, sculpture as the epitome of three-dimensional material solidity, as a construction that clutches and creates space, is transformed into a fragile form that eludes unambiguous perception.

 

These sculptures are based on clearly defined, logically derived elements that clarify the structure of each work, even if the eye can barely discern them, as they are—paradoxically—"hidden" by the transparency of the glass.

Max Wechsler, Artforum, 1988

 

 

Anish KAPOOR (English, born India, 1954)
Oblivion, 1995
fibreglass and pigment
Levy Bequest Purchase, 1995

 

If [Marcel] Duchamp declared that all the objects in the world are art, then I am interested in the next stage of that argument, which may have been prompted by [Joseph] Beuys in some way—that all the objects in the world are symbolic…it’s the artist’s duty to find poetic meaning in things.

- Anish Kapoor, 2008

 

We all know darkness –we all know it internally. I've made works where that kind of darkness is externalised in the work, and you can see something.

- Anish Kapoor, 2002

 

 

Paul KIPPS (Canadian, born 1948)
Cathexis #4, 1996-1998
black and white lexan covered photograph, maple, birch and MDF frame
Gift of the artist, 2010

 

Paul Kipps’ work has embraced a range of materials over 35 years—from the manmade to natural, and sound elements—but working primarily in sculpture and installation situations and responses to what curator Terrence Heath described as “disjunctures…the small fissures in the apparently seamless, abstract language of our daily intercourse [and the frame] itself is nostalgic of an earlier time when the family home and it memorabilia were central is his/our lives.”

Cathexis #4 is one of 4 similar photo-frame object works produced in a site response for his 1998 solo exhibition at the Oakville Galleries, using photographs that Kipps shot in sites around Gairloch Gardens. Oakvile Galleries curator Marnie Fleming wrote:

Cathexis, refers to a process of investing or concentrating emotional energy on an object, which in this case may be the process by which one attempts to fulfill one’s desire for the other. Our complex relationship with the nature we try to tame, cultivate, own, hold at bay, or even transform into beautiful parks for retreat according to our rules, is not so different from the relationships we construct amongst ourselves. 

 

 

Richard LONG (English, born 1945)
Spring Showers Line, 1992
Delabole slate
Levy Bequest Purchase, 1993

 

My art is about working in the wide world, wherever.  It has the theme of materials, ideas, movement (walking), and time.  The beauty of objects, thoughts, places and actions.  I hope to make images and ideas which resonate in the imagination, that mark the earth and the mind.   My work is about my senses, my scale, my instinct.  I use the world as I find it, by design and by chance.

- Richard Long

 

 

Richard PATTERSON (English, born 1963)
Heat, 1995
R-Type photograph
General Acquisition Fund Purchase, 1997

 

It was February and someone came to my studio late one night and saw that I was making this painting sitting on a chair on a box.  I had arranged things like that for convenience, but it seemed like a natural composition of objects.

When the painting was nearly finished, remembering the amusement that this other person had at seeing me on the box, I decided that I would record the scene, and took a camera and tripod and took a few photos on a timer. I was going to do it very formally from different angles so that sometimes the painting was square on and sometimes it was at an angle to the camera, like a dance.  And as I was doing that I suddenly thought it would be much funnier to take my clothes off like that dash that people do, the suicide thing when they leave their clothes on the beach.  It was like I was disappearing off into the painting.

 

- Richard Patterson, 1997

 

 

Margaret PRIEST (born England 1944, lives in Canada)
A View From Here of the View of the City, 1995-2011
digital print mounted on Dybond
Courtesy of the artist
photo: Michael Awad

 

For more than 40 years, Margaret Priest has worked at the intersections of architecture, design and urban histories, examining and interrogating its social dimensions in the public and private realms, through drawing, objects and sculptures, and public art commissions (proposed and realized). Priest’s work has utilized extant architectural photography as a source, where the “social body” is implied without depiction—and made “abstracted” and “primary form” constructions where the “social body” is inflected and implicated. Priest does not moralize nor demonize, yet delivers us a message. To cite the American social historian Lewis Mumford, she recognizes that “mind takes form in the city; and...urban forms condition mind.”

 

A View of the City is a 1995 three-part sculpture that was included in a 20-year survey exhibition of Priest’s work at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 1996.  Curator David Moos wrote of the work, “the experience of these three X components produces a consciousness that begins with the body and stretches outward in four directions to infinity.”  Priest revisits this work as a digital print, bringing the “model viewer” into the pictorial space and in the embellished title, a view of the view of the city, without a literal interpretation of the built environment, but stripped-down to essential and structural elements.

 

 

Susan SCHELLE (Canadian b. 1949)
Seascape, 1993
two framed black and white photographs
Promised gift of the artist

 

Susan Schelle’s sculptural photo-based works confront issues of museum culture, collecting, cataloguing and researching as well as domestic life and the natural world.   Seascape was first shown in her solo exhibition at the Power Plant Toronto in 1994.   Essayist Carol Laing wrote:

It is comprised of two grainy, black-and-white photographs whose source is old National Geographic [magazine] images: an answering pair, not quite symmetrical, of a waterspout.  The dot-matrix of the photographic images is visible, and rain crowds their aligned but separate inner edges.   In both pictures, blurred and changed through enlargement, the “water” is a broad, continuous horizontal joined to upper bands of heavy cloud by the arcs of the waterspouts.  

 

The images are fitted into simple gilt frames with beaded inner borders; on their glass surfaces a viewer can see both a reflected self-image, and the reflected images of all of the other works in the room. [Laing was referring to other works by Schelle in the Power Plant exhibition, but in this instance it is the works in the McMaster installation].