June 16th – July 30th, 2006

Recent work by Daniel Barrow

Closing Reception 7:30pm, July 30th

Critical Distance by Steven Matijcio

Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry

A new performance by Daniel Barrow
Presented by ace art inc. in collaboration with the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival

July 19th-30th, 2006: Performance 7pm nightly
2pm matinée closing performance on Sunday, July 30th

For more information please contact aceartinc. or the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival Box Office.

Aceartinc. and Daniel Barrow would like to make a special thank you to Manitoba Arts Council, Winnipeg Arts Council The Canada Council for the Arts and Jessica Bradley Projects, The Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, VideoPool, PlugIn ICA, and Lloyd Branson.

Critical Distance Vol. 11:5
No One Helped Me: Daniel Barrow
June 16 – July 30, 2006

A response by Steven Matijcio

Daniel Barrow’s No One Helped Me is a cross-disciplinary collage that lays its pieces bare to emphasize their congregation; playfully animating elements of painting, drawing, cut paper, sculpture and written narrative via the vehicles of video, projection, and performance. The look and feel of the ensuing constellation recalls early 20th century magic lantern shows, comic strips, and serial novels with yellowed stock and pastel colours crossing the patina of time with the pathos of nostalgia. These individual parts assume collective life through what Barrow has variously titled “graphic performance,” “live illustration,” and (perhaps most fittingly) “manual animation” – marrying actions of the eye and hand as he manipulates drawings on mylar transparencies across the screen of an overhead projector. The ensuing process accentuates the elements of storyboarding and cinematic perspective habitually present in Barrow’s hybrid collages, bending fantasy and reality in a maze of floating body parts and enigmatic gestures evocative of the avant-garde Surrealist movement. This latter comparison is especially telling in the context of No One Helped Me (and its sister performance Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry), where Surrealist staples such as the dream world, the unconscious, and the search for layers beyond our immediate reality are conjured through the lens of Barrow’s quasi-biographical storytelling. Another Surrealist symbol functions as the iconic purveyor of this passage as the human eye takes on a recurring role; undergoing antibiotic treatment, cosmetic mishaps, prosthetic enhancement, tears (and tears), unrequited gazes and various other trauma that turns the vision of both artist and audience increasingly inward. Here, in the liminal territory of the mind’s eye, Surrealist architect André Breton’s hinted at the eye’s perceptual capacity when writing, “The eye exists in an untamed state. It presides over the conventional exchange of signals apparently required by the navigation of the mind.” In a similar space of semiotic ambiguity – between visions inside and outside a conscious state – Barrow launches his waking dream.
(Continued)

Julie Deamer: Director of Outpost for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Lecture: 7pm, Tuesday 23rd May 2006

Sarah Glennie: Commissioner of Ireland’s participation at the 51st Venice Biennale 2005
Lecture: 7pm, Friday 9th June 2006

Matt Keegan: Independent Curator, Artist and Publisher, New York
Lecture: 7pm, Thursday 29th June 2006

This series is designed to increase the visibility of local artists to artists and curators outside of Winnipeg, and, conversely, to provide the opportunity for local artists and cultural producers to become more familiar with artists and curators from away. This program is a valuable opportunity to look at issues, trends and changing standards in professional practice within the International contemporary arts scene as well as fulfilling our role to demonstrate commitment to professional and artistic development of Manitoban artists. (Continued)

May 5 - 20, 2006

Students from the University of Manitoba

Reception: May 5, 7.30pm

mark saunders, krisjanis kaktins-gorsline, takashi iwasaki, peter kralik, kelsey braun, elaine stocki, kazuteru miyauchi, dominika dratwa, denise c. miller, nora kobrinsky, josh dudych, jenny moore koslowsky, alexis dirks, ryan klatt, john small, melody white

Critical Distance Vol 11:4

mentis prehensio
Sarah Crawley
March 10 – April 22, 2006

Luminous Gestures of Intimacy: The Photographs of Sarah Crawley
A Response By Roewan Crowe

In her recent work entitled, mentis prehensio, artist Sarah Crawley returns to the physicality of the body as her source of image-making. She uses her own body in this work, as well as her lover’s to create abstract photographic images that engulf us in luminous colour. These images are predominantly variations of red, with some black, and their intensity radiates heat to the outer edges of the gallery. The 13 photographs are satisfyingly large (50” X 65”). They are not framed, rather they are applied directly to the walls of the gallery, grafting a photographic skin onto the space. These sensuous, saturated skins appear to be lit from behind, creating an illuminated vellum manuscript of sorts. It is a glowing story about artistic invention, the abstracted body and a persistent desire for intimacy. (Continued)

March 10 - April 22

Sarah Crawley
Artists’ Reception: March 10 - April 22
Artists’ talk: Artist Talk Saturday March 11, 2pm

“At 10 years of age, I developed a unique compulsive, repetitive behaviour. I blew on my hands. Having difficulty describing this past behaviour to a friend, I reenacted the gesture only to be flooded with sensory impressions and memories from that time in my life. I was struck by the physical nature of my response.”

During the research and production of her last body of work, ala lingua, Sarah Crawley developed an interest in line, the repetition of line and pattern, and how these conjure memory. Recreating more repetitive gestures from her past, Crawley began to consider the lines and patterns created on the skin as a result of these gestures, to be permanent micro versions of the transient lines left on the sky by the migratory geese in ala lingua. Both are a result of repetitive actions, both are linked to physical memory.
(Continued)

Critical Distance VOL 11:3
Brian Flynn
Cover Series: Belfast Portraits
January 20-February 25, 2006
I love Ireland and Ireland loves me
A response by Kendra Ballingall

It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. ¹

In the age of the information bomb, a call to arms is a call to represent. Every medium — video, photography, pen and ink — is heavily coded, burdened by its complicity in the competing dialogues of the military-information complex, in propaganda, advertising, newspaper illustration. What medium is at the disposal of the contemporary visual artist? Must it be vestigial, outside, excess? Industrial detritus? Ruins or remains? (Continued)

January 20 - February 25

Brian Flynn
Reception Friday March 10, 7.30 - 10 pm

Brian Flynn uses carpet underlay and his fingers to produce these huge portraits by removing the black bits. While the faces are of real persons, their identity is deliberately swept “under the carpet” of assumptions. The removal of verifiable identity both of persons and the character of the material -underlay- affords these works of art to be inventive and political, ethical and cognitive. The cover images are as mass produced as is the underlay, forging an unflattering link. On a deeper level, the material evokes a hidden existence.

Flynn remarked: “you see the underlay only before the carpet is laid or when it is spent”.

The cover images, a staple diet of culture obsessed by celebrities of all kinds, point not only to the fragile temporaneity but also to the beings “before and after” - where the actual time is not given. Unsettling as both the removal of identity and of presence may be, the scale increases the impact. The persons are not innocent bystanders, they seem to be harbouring guilt. For that is guilt, if anything be guilt, not to increase freedom. Flynn’s visits to Northern Ireland throughout his youth formed his individual voice that aims at revealing the ambivalence of historical truths.

Dr Slavka Sverakova
(Catalogue Essay from Brian Flynn, Cover Series: Belfast Portraits)

Image: Brian Flynn, Wake (detail), carpet underlay, 10 x 20 feet, 2005

Brian Flynn gratefully acknowledges the support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts

November 25-December 9 2005

Gala Night: Friday, November 25, 7PM-Late.
Live music, crêpe stand, creative refreshment, 50/50 draw, silent auction.
Come and celebrate the diversity and creativity of our members’ work in The Winter Warmer, and open show and sale.

Opening night features a live performance by Shary Boyle with music by Christine Fellows, to coincide with the launch of her new book, Witness My Shame.

October 15 - November 12

Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon
Béchard and Hudon have collaborated to create an interactive automated sound installation comprising of two works, Au Bout Du Fil and The Voice of Things. Au Bout Du Fil is an acoustic work inspired by a very simple amplification device of our childhood, the string telephone, where a series of strings are stretched between two pails along with a mechanized platform to which paper sheets are attached. The paper rubs back and forth on the strings. In The Voice of Things two huge mechanical brooms are suspended and see-saw, backwards and forwards. As they teeter-totter, they scratch, stroke and brush against a heap of newspapers. Their rhythms, sometimes very slow, convey a feeling of suspension in time and their excessive size suggest a sense of frailty and loss of balance. In both pieces the work is triggered by the viewers presence, and the sounds created are directly related to the position of the viewer to the works.

Critical Distance Vol 11:2

Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon
Between Sounds and Abstractions
October 14, to November 12, 2005

BETWEEN SOUNDS AND ABSTRACTIONS
A Response by Deanna Radford

Between our commonly shared understanding of every-day household objects as they are physically and culturally constructed, and, the manipulation of these objects, their meanings, and capabilities, lies Between Sounds and Abstractions. Comprised of two playful and sensitive kinetic sculptures or objets sonore¹, The Voice of Things and Au bout du fil were created by Montreal artists Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon and were on exhibit at aceartinc. from October 14, to November 12, 2005. (Continued)

Critical Distance Vol 11:1

Daniel Laskarin, Teresa Ascencao, Adad Hannah
to be continued…
August 16, to October 13, 2005

to be continued… The Real Made Ubiquitous
A Response By Steve Loft

The American public is now really a spectatorship. Grizzly, loud, lewd and stupid is the way of mass television…Now please, let’s have no more pieties about school safety, gun control, road rage and all the fab topics of superficial concern. When the great broadcasting medium of a super state clawing for a few more millions is willing to vulgarize the population for one more ratings point with less shame than Tom Green eyeing the hind quarters of a dead moose, cease the pieties. (1)