Oil on Canvas: Jenny Schade
Jenny Schade, "Stryving," oil on canvas, 2010. Courtesy the artist.
Jenny Schade thinks she was born in the wrong century. The 25-year-old Montreal-born artist has devoted herself fully to painting — pure oil-on-canvas painting. Her large works depict abstract landscapes always populated by a face or a figure. Her paintings are charged with a Beckmann-like intensity. A promising young artist, she has been featured in the 2009 juried exhibition, Fresh Paint and New Construction, at gallery Art Mûr and lauded as “one to watch” in the Montreal Mirror’s NoiseMakers of 2010. While Schade’s material and tactile canvases always reveal her process, much is still left to mystery.
Jenny Schade, "Stryving," oil on canvas, 2010. Courtesy the artist.
Schade readily proclaims her devotion to oil painting for its richness of texture, its materiality and its weight in time. “Even gesso is paint,” she shares, lighting up about her process, her body gesticulating brush strokes. The young artist even goes so far as to make her own paint, favoring the control of production as well as the personalization of the pigment. “If I had more time and space, I’d set up my own alchemy lab and create all my paints from scratch. I love seeing the pigments and crystals dissolve, the resin that forms…It’s exciting to me because it makes painting even more original and authentic.” Her canvases feature legible brushstrokes and dripping colors; her work is indexical in that she leaves her pentimenti (“yes, that old school term!”) for herself and for her viewers. Schade is undeniably enraptured by her art.
One Hour Photo: Yves Médam
Yves Médam, "L'indécis," digital photo collage, 2010. Courtesy the artist.
A former commercial photographer, Yves Médam has only recently made the shift to fine art in the last 3 years. The French-born artist constructs large format photographic re-inventions of reality, creating a collage of multiple images. It is almost a cubist reinvention in its form. Médam, represented by Galerie Dominique Bouffard, was recently featured in a showcase of Montreal artists at the World’s Fair in Shanghai. I have translated the interview below from French.
Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin: Tell me about your work, its evolution and inspiration.
Yves Médam: For the first 15 years of my career, I worked as a commercial photographer. I had an artistic approach but always within the commercial realm. Then, photography changed enormously; it went digital and image banks became popular. It became increasingly difficult to work. Photography became a banal practice. Today, everyone thinks he’s a photographer, everyone has an opinion about how to tweak an image. Thus, I wanted to leave photography. But simultaneously, I also loved my work. I told myself if I continue taking photos, I need to find a way to make it more personal and meaningful, find an approach all my own.
At that moment, I had a contract with the magazine Parcours. With each issue, the editor-in-chief commissioned an artist to create all the portraits in whatever style they wanted. It was a great opportunity; it was both a job as well as a chance to try something new. Would I play with lighting? A lot has been done with lighting. Would I play with form? Maybe it would be form. And I started to play.
Augmenting Reality: Paul Warne
Paul Warne doesn’t consider himself so much an artist as a designer. While trained in animation and film at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Warne found himself immersed in video game design, video installation and, most recently, creations of “Augmented Reality” (the interstitial space where virtual and the real worlds meet). An artistic mind with a penchant and know-how for the technological, the American (and now Montreal-based) designer has never been shy about creating art experiences that cross media boundaries and involve his audience.
Paul Warne, "Breaking The Ice," telepresence interface, 2010. Courtesy John Desjarlais (photographer).
How Sweet It Is: Shelley Miller
Shelley Miller, "Cargo," sugar mural, 2009. Courtesy the artist.
Shelley Miller creates exquisite, intricate artworks out of sugar. In 2009, her mural installation, Cargo, won the People’s Choice award at Montreal’s Mois de la Photo (Montreal’s biennale for contemporary photography). A collaboration between the artist and the Darling Foundry (a factory turned art center), the mural captured the public’s imagination. Referencing the azulejo ceramic tile tradition of Spanish and Portuguese cultures (and their colonies), Miller painted a scene of ships in a harbor using edible blue paint on white sugar tiles, then affixing the tiles to the wall with icing (the process for which she shared on her project blog). The beauty and power of the precise work, beyond its historical references to colonialism, was seeing it evolve over time. The audience witnessed the colors fade and run, the tiles crack and disintegrate. Throughout Miller’s installations, time, both past and present, takes center stage.
Shelley Miller, "Cargo (detail)," sugar mural, 2009. Courtesy the artist.
Trained at the Alberta College of Art and Design and Concordia University, the Saskatchewan native has worked in multiple media ranging from sand to marble, but she always returns to sugar. The self-taught confectioner quickly left behind her early feminist days of wedding cakes at art school, continued her playful, tongue-in-cheek jab at Kant’s Critique of Taste, and began exploring ideas of decoration, covering objects and furniture with delicately-patterned sugar before moving out of domestic spaces into more public realms.
