Contemporary Art Gallery

Our assignment was to visit a local art gallery of our choice and to analyze the exhibitions as contemporary art, based on how it is described in our course text: "Believing Is Seeing" by Mary Anne Staniszewski.

During the time I visited the CAG, three exhibitions were held: Corita Kent's "To Create is to Relate", Thomas Bewick's "Tale-pieces", and Federico Herrero's "Vibrantes".

This was a solo presentation.

Transcript

1. CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY Gracey Mesina • 301115667 • FPA 160 • Fall 2011 Corita Kent Thomas Bewick Federico Herrero
2. CAG 555 Nelson Street, Vancouver The Contemporary Art Gallery is devoted to cultivate a setting that explores and records the transforming artistic practices as they are shaped by social forces, while maintaining a deep connection to the original place and time of the work, and by fostering dialogue and new understandings of collective meanings and values.
3. Federico Herrero Herrero (b. 1978) is an abstract painter from Costa Rica. His work is characterized by his use of interlocking geometric and organic forms painted in bright colours. He uses unconventional locations and surfaces as his canvas for his large-scale murals (similar to a graffiti artist), which directly addresses the division between art and social life, that challenges the notion that art is a specialized commodity.
4. commissioned by the CAG, is a window mural with its name derived from the “kinetic” energy created by the overlapping and mixing colours of the vinyl. The energy is also Vibrantes, a reference to the dynamics of the work, in that its intensity, opacity, and saturation is constantly shifting in conjunction with the unpredictable Vancouver weather. Essentially, the vibrancy of his work pulses with the energy of its urban context.
5. Thomas Bewick Tale-pieces Bewick (1753-1828) is an English wood engraver, artist, and naturalist. The works in Tale-pieces are from natural history books that he illustrated for. These ornamental images were usually placed in the empty spaces on the bottom of the page or after a paragraph. The exhibit requires the viewers to look at his vignettes through a magnifying glass, which shows his fine attention to detail, and his (sometimes dark) sense of humour in use with his wood engraving skills.
6. T o create is to relate Corita Kent Kent (1918-1986) is a pop artist known for her brightly coloured serigraph prints. She taught art since the 1950s at the Immaculate Heart College in California and was known as Sister Corita Kent until she left the order in 1968 when she moved to Boston to fully pursue her art. Her teaching techniques were just as innovative as her creations in that she taught her students different ways of seeing, and was admired by other designers and artists such as Charles and Ray Eames, and Saul Bass.
7. Kent mixes advertising slogans, song lyrics, and poetry. This de-contextualizing of text is juxtaposed by her layering and “cut and paste” collaging. Through her art, she expresses her spiritual, social, and political beliefs (including topics on racism, poverty, feminism, and desire for social justice and peace during the Vietnam war). Similar to Herrero, her works also assert the continuum between daily life and art in that it should not be separated from our everyday experience
8. Images http://www.akimbo.ca/UserFiles/Image/Client%20Logos/CAG_logow.jpg http://www.allianceforarts.com/files/volunteer/CAG_ext.corner.jpg?1260387985 http://www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk/resources/images/1496188/?type=display http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2009/4/16/1239871257000/Man-on-stilts-crossing-ri-001.jpg http://s3.amazonaws.com/files.posterous.com/headers/3359790/scaled500.BMP?1312498894 http://www.flickr.com/photos/28673481@N08/3465364364/ http://whitney.org/image_columns/0006/9841/2007.44_kent_imageprimacy.v1_640.jpg http://thedoejane.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/sister-corita-kent-2.jpg http://www.breslinfinearts.com/Corita-BFAwebpics/MoonFlowers-web.jpg http://wow.sportmax.com/en/wp-content/uploads/7_Sister_Mary_Corita_Enriched_Bread2.jpg http://www.themagentalinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/sister-corita-kent4.jpg http://www.stlawu.edu/news/corita.jpg Content http://contemporaryartgallery.ca/ References