Scott Conarroe, Cora Cluett: Apertura

July 11 - September 7, 2008
Organized by KW|AG

Artist Talk with Cora Cluett: Wednesday, July 23, 7 p.m.

Public Opening: Friday, July 11, 7-9 p.m.

Borrowing its name from the Latin word for opening, Apertura brings together new photographic and video work from Cora Cluett and Scott Conarroe. The works in the exhibition pivot on the notion of aperture - or opening - as both a literal and conceptual device.

Scott Conarroe, Parochial Views No. 4: Model Boat Club, Pool at Kitchener City Hall (detail), 2006, photograph, 29.5" x 38.5". Gallery purchase with the assistance of the City of Kitchener, the City of Waterloo and the Musagetes Fund at The Kitchener and Waterloo Community Foundation, and the Acquisition Assistance program of the Canada Council for the Arts, 2007.

Cluett's series of photographs titled In the Offing document the Nova Scotian and Scottish landscapes through the remnants of the W.W.II pillboxes and bunkers which line their coasts. Coastlines are sites of transition, traffic, and militarization. The title of this series refers to an old nautical term which describes the outermost visible edge of the sea, as well as the familiar phrase describing the not-too-distant future - away from you and coming towards you at once. Cluett uses the pillbox lookout to frame and isolate sections of the landscape, inviting the viewer to consider a multitude of dualities beyond the obvious "here and there" positioning.

Conarroe's photographic and video work reveals an interest in atmospheric occurrences of light and a precise birds-eye-view perspective. The Grand Plaza, a 2-channel video projection, casts the reflecting pool of the Kitchener City Hall as a contemporary suburban version of the Impressionist masterwork La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat. In Conarroe's video, the public site hosts myriad vignettes that compete for our attention in a gradient of real time. Also featured in the exhibition are several photographic works that continue Conarroe's interest in small-town sites of leisure, captured through long exposures, including Model Boat Club, a photograph commissioned for KW|AG's Parochial Views series. An online publication featuring an essay by Robert Bean and full colour images is available.

Cora Cluett, In The Offing No. 58, 2008, C-Print, 6" x 9". Image courtesy of the artist and Wynick / Tuck Gallery.

About Cora Cluett
Born in Nova Scotia, Cora Cluett has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Albright Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), The Painting Center (New York) and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Recent and upcoming publications featuring her work include Abstract Painting in Canada by Roald Nasgaard and Carte Blanche 2: Painting by the Magenta Foundation. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo. She is represented by Wynick / Tuck Gallery.

Read an Interview with Artist Cora Cluett >

About Scott Conarroe
Scott Conarroe was born in Edmonton and received a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute (Vancouver, 2001) and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (2005). His photographs are regularly exhibited and collected in Europe, the United States, and across Canada. They have been published in magazines such as Prefix Photo, Canadian Geographic, The Walrus, and the recent book on contemporary Canadian photography Carte Blanche.  He lives in Toronto and is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery.

 

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Allan MacKay, Collections & Curatorial Consultant, on Apertura

There are often a number of curatorial possibilities at work simultaneously when planning exhibitions. For the Apertura project, separate conversations with artists Scott Conarroe and Cora Cluett led to the desirability of linking and contrasting their unique photographic practices through individual presentations in adjacent galleries. The intention was to maintain the integrity of viewing and experiencing the work of each artist on its own merit; yet, create proximity where differences and associations imagined by the viewer could exist simultaneously.

With the degree of planning, research and decision making that goes on behind-the-scenes of each exhibition, whether in the office or studio, one important component that is shared by curator and gallery visitor alike is the experience of the exhibition itself. Something that I find particularly powerful is how after an exhibition is put together, additional relationships and ideas, which are not pre-determined, coalesce. This is one of the extraordinary and stimulating outcomes of the juxtaposition of different exhibitions in a public space: new ideas emerge and new connections are created between art, people and ideas.

A connection that has since taken shape, in the exhibitions of Bill Burns, Adriana Kuiper, Cora Cluett and Scott Conarroe, is the idea of "youth". All of the works seem to have a connection to youth, whether it is seeing the visual graffiti of youth on the bunkers in Cora's photographs, Scott's sites of childhood leisure and the video soundtrack, children demonstrating on video the bird calls of Bill Burn's Bird Radio, or memories of Adriana Kuiper's childhood place of safety under her parent's steps that helped to motivate her intention with the gallery installation. These emergent ideas further enrich the relationships among the exhibited artworks as well as enhance additional connections that Gallery visitors can make on their own. In addition, Robert Bean's commissioned essay Waiting for the Past contributes a further layer of connectivity and context contained within the practices of Conarroe and Cluett, linking their work to historical precedent and ideas.

A visit to the Gallery can be a wonderful occasion to experience the differing vantage points and ideas in all of these artists' works and permit your own personal ideas to join in, creating a shared artistic experience of your own making.

Allan MacKay
Curatorial and Collections Consultant