Sky Glabush, Doug Kirton & Erin McSavaney
April 9 - 30, 2011
Common Ground explores our contemporary urban environment through the eyes of three important Canadian painters.
Doug Kirton approached us with an idea to curate an exhibition focused on contemporary representational painting. He suggested the work of London painter Sky Glabush and Vancouver painter Erin McSavaney as an interesting compliment to his own urban-inspired work. Common Ground combines recent painting by Glabush, Kirton & McSavaney and explores how each artist responds to their individual environments. All three artists paint what is commonly seen as familiar, while referencing complex ideas about our social landscape.
Sky Glabush was born in Alert Bay, BC in 1970 and grew up alternating between the West Coast and the prairies. After a six-month residency in Leiden, Netherlands in 2001, he established a studio in Amsterdam and remained in the Netherlands for 3 years. Upon returning to Canada he received his MFA from the University of Alberta in 2006. Glabush has had solo exhibitions at the Windsor Art Gallery, Arch 2 Gallery at University of Manitoba, Mackenzie Art Gallery and the Mendel Art Gallery. He is currently a professor of Studio Art at the University of Western Ontario.
Sky Glabush is interested in the way painting as a medium often exerts a strong influence on the way “place” is understood and seems to haunt the social imaginary. The sites he chooses to paint--places that are neither totally occupied nor empty wilderness--are attempts to acknowledge the precedents of the past while remaining open and receptive to the specific and somewhat uncanny quality of the familiar.
Doug Kirton was born in London, ON in 1955. After graduating with a BFA from NSCAD in 1978, he moved to Toronto. Between 1987 and 1992 Kirton was a sessional lecturer at the University of Guelph and the University of Ottawa, which reinforced his desire to teach. In 1994 he received his MFA from the University of Guelph and since 2001 has taught painting, drawing and digital imaging at the University of Waterloo. Kirton has exhibited extensively across Canada and was included in the important traveling exhibitions "The Romantic Landscape Now" (1986-7) and "Painters 15" (2002). Kirton's work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Doug Kirton is fascinated with how reflection, memory and observation can create seemingly endless painterly possibilities. Afternoon (2008), a painting of a downtown Chicago office building, captures a series of reflections and refracted views through a window on a rainy day. The painting offers multiple perspectives and vanishing points where the viewer’s position is jarred or dislocated. Kirton’s more recent painting Untitled (2011) is still rooted in a specific place, however, now, Kirton is allowing memory and perception to influence his experience.
Erin McSavaney was born in 1973 in Vancouver, BC. He graduated with a graphic design and illustration degree from Capilano College in 1998 after studying for a year at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Since beginning to exhibit in 2001, McSavaney has shown in Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa and Seattle, WA. In his artist statement McSavaney states "Architecture is a mirror to humanity. More specifically, over time, buildings move from reflecting their environment and an architectural "vision", to revealing their inhabitants and activities."
The paintings on exhibit in Common Ground are from McSavaney's recent body of work called Inland, an ongoing series with highway names in the titles that connect to the places depicted. Inspired by a family road trip from Vancouver to Trail, BC, McSavaney explores the relationship between humans, their architecture and the natural environment. What drew him in was how sometimes human design is very analogous to nature and sometimes completely divergent from it.