FRANCAISACCUEIL

EXHIBITIONSARTISTSGALLERYCONTACTBLOGNEWSWORKS AVAILABLE

Mythologies May 16 - June 15
Opening Saturday, May 18 3:00-6:00pm

Shuvinai Ashoona
Ted Barker
Colleen Heslin
Jean-François Leboeuf
Itee Pootoogook


Galerie Laroche/Joncas is pleased to present Mythologies, a group exhibition featuring the drawings and paintings of five artists from Manitoba, Quebec and Nunavut. Together they furnish a visual landscape in which we can consider myth-making and art-making in contemporary practice. It is the productive and exciting pairing of myth’s malleability and popular culture’s provisional nature that connects these diverse and inventive artistic practices.
Many years ago Roland Barthes wrote about his concern that consumer culture emptied objects of their history, making them myths too early and thus depriving them of substance. Inversely, great stories of the past lost their power and were left empty myth-shells. At this point Barthes was invested in “breaking into” and exposing the multiple myths embodied in popular culture. Today, the game has changed somewhat—most notably these artists’ contemporary uses of everyday scenes, products and materials in order to tell new stories, to revitalize the practice of telling tales that incorporate the past and present, reality and fiction.
Both driven and fed by “cultural junk debris” and the gleeful mixing that it affords, the practice of Montreal-based artist Jean-François Leboeuf encompasses drawing, video, installation, performance and photography. In his large-scale drawing series Les Bâtards, a selection of which is on view in Mythologies, he exhumes both icons and common representatives of “bad taste” in popular culture, offering them up for resignification. As if to ward off or subvert the kitsch aesthetic that these “types” usually imply, the nearly life-size figures are singularly rendered in fine pencil against a white background. This formal simplicity clears the way for the startling realism and incredible visual detail of these personages.
Ted Barker, who lives and works in Winnipeg, shares with Leboeuf a virtuosic drawing ability, using pencil and paint to conjure enigmatic figures, lone objects and assemblages of the two. His subjects often wear buckskins and bear bundles of twigs; tarps and empty rain jackets add to the sense of wilderness survival. Barker’s works are both hyper-realist and surreal, the forms often resisting resolution. The enigmatic figures often look away, their faces obscured by their garments, or have no heads at all, seemingly swallowed by the materials that they carry. They evince a sense of solitude but are full of suggestion, prompting us to wonder about their particular story.
Montreal-based artist Colleen Heslin’s large formalist compositions of dyed and found fabrics, stretched taut over wood frames, evoke the history of formalist painting and its attendant persisting mythology. Moreover, her concern with the materiality and construction of these works—building frames from salvaged wood and often using old patterns and fabrics that suggest a particular decade, fad, or subculture— is also congruent with the making-do aesthetic of Leboeuf and Barker. The process behind these works further elaborates a story; consumer throwaways are re-enmeshed in our accounts of the contemporary moment.
Inuit artists Itee Pootoogook and Shuvinai Ashoona, who both live and work in the culturally rich community of Cape Dorset, Nunavut, are inheritors and innovators of its art traditions that have become internationally known. The northern landscape is Pootoogook’s primary subject. Bright, clear colours and a strong graphic quality summon the traditional aesthetic of Inuit art in his drawings and prints; at the same time he is relating a story of contemporary life in his community and the land that surrounds it.
Shuvinai Ashoona, granddaughter of renowned artist Pitseolak Ashoona, creates complex compositions of human figures, unexpected or hidden imagery, and a broad colour spectrum in her drawings and prints. Her work is personal, often meticulously detailed, and extremely inventive. The lines between reality and fiction blur as Ashoona puts both her inner life and her culture and community onto paper, challenging assumptions about contemporary Inuit art.
Mythologies are well-suited to contemporary life and art, as they are malleable and can adapt to the vicissitudes of time and changes in perception, attitudes and politics. The power of myth-making resides in their telling and retelling, in the exchange that takes place between artist and audience, and the interpretation that is always at work.

Nathalie Zayne

We would like to thank Elca London Gallery in Montréal making the inclusion of the works of Shuvinai Ashoona and Itee Pootoogok for this exhibition possible.



Ted Barker , 2013 Oil on board