Current Exhibitions

LAURA LETINSKY
Still Life Photographs, 1997–2012

May 25 to September 8, 2013
Artist Talk: Friday, May 24, 7 pm
Opening Reception: Friday, May 24, 8 pm

Organized by the Denver Art Museum. Circulated by the School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba, in collaboration with the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.

For more than fifteen years, Canadian-born artist, Laura Letinsky, has explored the possibilities of still life photography. The generally subdued colors of her work lend it an air of lightness and tranquility that is often at odds with the moldering produce and mass-produced remnants of daily life she orchestrates in her photographs. On close inspection, playful manipulations of balance, space, and scale reveal both her curiosity about human perception and her rigorous search for meaningful form.

While Letinsky’s earlier photographs evoke feelings of melancholy—often awakening a sense of absence or an awareness of time that has just passed—her recent work has focused on elaborate paper constructions that produce complex spatial and perceptual puzzles when photographed. Intrigued by the shifting relationship between ideas and their corresponding representations in visual art, she uses the time-honored genre of still life both to explore the way we see and to challenge our understanding of what we observe.

This major touring retrospective of Letinsky’s work has its first Canadian venue at Rodman Hall Art Centre. It will also tour to Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa and School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

KEVIN YATES with ROBERT YATES
Usher the Fall of the House

January 19 – June 16, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 24, 7 pm
Artist Talk: Friday, February 8, 12 pm

Known for his highly realistic miniatures that are at once familiar and strangely unsettling, Kevin Yates’s works possess a quiet, meditative quality, often likened to the pause of a film still. Responding to the historic character of Rodman Hall’s Hansen Gallery, Yates presents a major new sculptural work and a video produced in collaboration with his brother Robert Yates, an experimental filmmaker. Dream-like in their subversion of the expected, these works further Yates’s consideration of the uncanny, exploring domestic spaces as sites of memory, mystery, wonder, and fantasy.

OLIA MISHCHENKO
Ravine World

January 25 to September 8, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 24, 7 pm
Artist Talk: Friday, March 22, 12 pm

Olia Mishchenko’s intricate drawings depict urban spaces existing on the topographic and historical ledge. Ravine World is based on an aggregate study of the current and historic conditions of ravines in the cities around the Golden Horseshoe. The drawings include high-rise buildings, ravine properties, parklands and civic points of interest, both real and utopian. This cumulative drawing project will imagine new uses for the ravine spaces of the city and will propose a post-utopian vision for a site where the man made and the natural intersect in a strange, delinquent balance.

MARY ANNE BARKHOUSE
Settlement

Curated by Stuart Reid
Presented by Rodman Hall Art Centre with financial support of the Government of Canada through Cultural Capitals of Canada, a program of the Department of Canadian Heritage

October 14, 2012 to September 29, 2013

Opening Reception: Sunday, October 14, 2 – 4 pm

In creating this new outdoor installation for Rodman Hall, Barkhouse examines issues of sovereignty and confederacy from an indigenous ecological vantage point. As an aboriginal woman, Barkhouse is mindful of the history of conflict imprinted on this region of Ontario, particularly during this bicentennial commemoration of the War of 1812. Many of the conflicts and alliances between First Nations and settling cultures that played out two hundred years ago are still unresolved today.

Settlement incorporates sculptural elements into an artist’s garden built in the shape of a frontier house (16 x 20 feet). Last spring, the artist planted a series of border gardens of indigenous plants including corn, squash, beans and quinoa. Situated in the interior spaces of the garden are life-size bronze sculptures of a coyote and a badger, alluding to the cooperative nature of the allies involved in the 1812 conflict. Badgers and coyotes are known to be cooperative hunters in their search for small burrowing animals in the wild. Barkhouse is interested in the contentious nature of territory as is relates to struggles over land, whether between humans, amongst animals or plants.

An illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Stuart Reid and an interview with the artist by Michelle LaVallee, Associate Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, will be forthcoming in 2013. This publication is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Barkhouse was born in Vancouver and belongs to the Nimpkish band, Kwakiutl First Nation. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and has exhibited her work widely. A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, her recent solo exhibition entitled Boreal Baroque toured Canada.

Associated Programs

HOT TALK: Mary Anne Barkhouse
June 21, 2013, 7- 9 pm
On National Aboriginal Day, join the artist Mary Anne Barkhouse for an illustrated lecture about her work and the outdoor exhibition Settlement.

In the meantime, check out this audiocast with the artist discussing some of her intentions behind the work: