I have new paintings in an exhibition in Seoul, South Korea at Galerie PICI on view from Sep 1 to Sep 21, 2023.
To coincide with KIAF Seoul 2023 at COEX, Galerie Pici Seoul, located in Cheongdam-dong, presents the “Various Emotions” exhibition, running from September 1 through 21. This exhibition spotlights iconic works from the Dansaekhwa artists, including Kim Whanki, Kim Tschang-Yeul, and Park Seo-Bo, drawing from the gallery’s extensive paperwork collection. Furthermore, we are excited to showcase a captivating array of artworks by international artists from our gallery’s diverse roster, featuring Hajin Kang, Shinduk Kang, Toshiro Yamaguchi, Isabella Gherardi, SunSoo Kim, Cai Jin, TaeKyu Yim, and Mark Stebbins.
Galerie Pici 25 Dosan-daero 87gil Gangnam-gu SEOUL 06012
Anamorphosis Fir Gallery, Beijing, China Aug. 27 through Oct 9, 2022
Conor Murgatroyd, Huang Baoying, Li Jiliang, Liu Lu, Liu Shiqi, Mark Posey, Mark Stebbins, Soh Souen, Tan Qin, TUTU, Vinna Begin, Wang Yi, Wang Yifan.
Fir Gallery is pleased to announce that our group exhibition “Anamorphosis” will open on August 27th, 2022. The exhibition will feature a total of 32 works produced by 13 artists, whose personal perspectives have reshaped and transformed the objects they see in reality. When art has been liberated from the obligation of reflecting the reality, artists turn to embrace the incomplete and contorted images, reclaiming their agentic freedom through a purposeful deviation from the realness.
Anamorphosis implies the illegibility induced by image distortion, but it also entails the “sub-image” and “alt-image resulted from morphing. However, none of them is a product of accidental mistakes; rather, they are intentional re-interpretation of the reality. Anamorphic art has long existed alongside orthodox images as their by-products. During the Renaissance, a period of time when development of technology and anthropocentric thinking were at their prime, intentional “alt-image” became a tool with which painters could showcase their advanced perspectival depiction, which testified to their outstanding intellectual achievements as well — only with a transcendental mind could one modify the reality he saw. Now, in an era of the current wave of information explosion, anamorphic images still carry their original truth. Lacanian theories proposed the idea that the ego, as an ideal-I for the subject, is an “other” rather than a self. The formation process of self-awareness has already internalized expectation, reflection and alienation of the others, so much so that it becomes impossible for us to escape from the innate fetters of a feigned reality which came with us the moment since our identities were born. As such, anamorphosis and deformation offer a re-configuration for our self-awareness, allowing the subject to retreat into a promised land brimming with imagination only.
When art has forgone its function to reference the reality, it also unbinds the viewing action from a dichotomic relationship between the watching subject and viewed object. At the same time, anamorphosis urges the viewers to turn away from their most comfortable position of viewing and reconsider the validity of their unidirectional way of receiving information. As a result, one shall realize that the most ideal visual information is always acquired through several rounds of calibration and comparison under multiple contexts.
The participating artists include Conor Murgatroyd, Huang Baoying, Li Jiliang, Liu Lu, Liu Shiqi, Mark Posey, Mark Stebbins, Soh Souen, Tan Qin, TUTU, Vinna Begin, Wang Yi, Wang Yifan.
Little Squares: The Pixel as Material and Metaphor Dave Kemp, Thelma Rosner, Mark Stebbins, Shaheer Zazai
Glenhyrst Art Gallery, Brantford, Ontario Curated by Matthew Ryan Smith
January 18 – March 15, 2020
In this exhibition, artists Dave Kemp, Thelma Rosner, Mark Stebbins, and Shaheer Zazai examine how pixels are used as aesthetic material and metaphors for meaning. Pixels are small squares of colour that form the building blocks of digital images. When combined in a pattern with other pixels, they produce a complete picture. Despite its origins in digital screens, the word pixel now applies to non-digital imagery as well, and can be found in commercial advertising, interior design, fashion, architecture, and visual art. Working primarily in photography, painting, craft, and digital media, the artists in this exhibition approach pixels as visual devices to question our lived reality and experience of the world. While digital technology creeps toward higher forms of resolution, for instance 4k and 5k screen displays, these artists do otherwise—they break down pixilation to its essence, as a series of blocks, grids, or patterns, and employ these to create new works that appear like other media. In doing so, they bridge the divide between abstract painting and HD digital imagery, analog photography and digital photography, rug hooking and digital painting, and mass-produced objects and handicraft. Their work proposes different methods of how images structure memory, time, and place—they articulate the importance of what we look at and how we look at it in a society deeply consumed by pictures.
About the Artists Dave Kemp is an artist whose practice looks at the intersections and interactions between art, science, and technology. His artworks have been exhibited widely at venues such as at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Ontario Science Centre. They are also included in the permanent collections of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Canada Council Art Bank. He currently works as an Assistant Professor in the Image Arts program at Ryerson University.
Thelma Rosner has been a professional visual artist for over forty years. She was educated at Smith College and Western University, where she was mentored by Paterson Ewan. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, and England. She has received grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, McMaster University, McIntosh Gallery, and Museum London.
Mark Stebbins is an artist who works in painting, drawing and digital media to create images that connect craft, digital imaging and art history. Specific interests include abstraction, memory, quilting and pixilation. His work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally. He was awarded Honourable Mention in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2010 and has received grants by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. His work resides in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank and the Royal Bank of Canada, as well as numerous private collections worldwide.
Shaheer Zazai is an artist working in painting and digital media. His practice focuses on investigating the development of cultural identity in non-Western diasporas. He received a BFA from OCAD University in 2011 and was the OCAD University Digital Painting Atelier Artist-in-Residence in 2015. A recipient of a Canadian Ontario Arts Council grant, he has since had solo and group exhibitions at galleries including the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Trinity Square Video, John B. Aird Gallery, and Project Gallery.
Acknowledgements Glenhyrst Art Gallery acknowledges that we are on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnaabeg, and Haudenosaunee Peoples. Brantford is situated on the Haldimand Tract, land promised to Six Nations, which includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.
Accessibility Glenhyrst Art Gallery is fully accessible and includes an elevator and accessible washroom. The main entrance is accessed by a concrete pathway and may be opened with an automatic door opener. For assistance or questions about the gallery, please call us. Admission is free and everyone is welcome.
Please join me at the opening of Oblivion Souvenirs, my second solo exhibition at Galerie Simon Blais, Montreal.
Through 14 paintings and 4 digital works — equally encompassing both abstract and figurative imagery — this exhibition explores memory in the context of digital imaging, as well as the recording of experience through hand-labour and textile practices such as quilting.
Many of the paintings are based on photographs I have taken with my mobile phone, part of my immense and ever-growing archive of photographs capturing moments I barely remember. In converting these snapshots to paintings I have reduced their precision (by reducing the pixel dimensions, for instance) but greatly increased my engagement, spending up to 100 hours per painting to render the them in acrylic. Through different means of altering or degrading the original images, each work suggests some degree of loss, fragility and impermanence.
The digital works (offered as limited edition archival inkjet prints) fuse the immediacy of mobile photography with the slow deliberate nature of quilting, reconstructing quick gestural drawings and digital photographs piece-by-piece from hundreds of scans of textiles, predominantly of my family’s clothing. Figures are rendered simultaneously intimate yet indistinct, as if floating on the cusp of memory.
Working in a slow, craft-like manner I’ve attempted to slow down time in relation to moments of my life, creating works that embody the tension between speed and slowness, between memory and oblivion, between holding on and letting go.
The works in this exhibition will offer, each in their own way, a uniquely microscopic view of a wider world. Minute, predominantly blue, particles will lead the viewer’s gaze into the medium that, at this enlarged scale, will appear strange and disconcerting.
Brought together here will be works by artists Marie-Eve Beaulieu, Carol Bernier, Michel Campeau, Jean-Sébastien Denis, Catherine Farish, Mark Francis, JoeYan Hui, Denis Juneau and Mark Stebbins.
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Chacune des œuvres de cette exposition offre, à sa manière, une vision microscopique unique d’un environnement plus vaste. Ces particules minuscules, à la dominante de bleu, font pénétrer le regard du spectateur dans la matière qui, à cette échelle agrandie, nous apparaît étrangère et déroutante.
À l’occasion de cette exposition, le travail de différents artistes sera réuni : Marie-Eve Beaulieu, Carol Bernier, Michel Campeau, Jean-Sébastien Denis, Catherine Farish, Mark Francis, JoeYan Hui, Denis Juneau et Mark Stebbins.
Writer and curator Matthew Ryan Smith wrote about my work in his essay “Mark Stebbins:Pixel Paxel Puxel” to accompany my exhibition As Raindrops Become The Rain / Lorsque les gouttes deviennent pluie at Galerie Simon Blais, Montreal.
Wil Kucey Gallery is pleased to present Among the Jaggies, Along the Seams, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by London, Ontario-based artist Mark Stebbins. The exhibition is on view from Friday Nov. 4 through Nov. 26 Dec. 3, 2016, with an opening reception on Nov. 4 from 6 to 9 pm. [update: exhibition has been extended to Dec. 3]
Mark Stebbins’ small-scale acrylic paintings overflow with detail, often giving the appearance that they are composed of other media. Grids of coloured squares might imitate pixels, rows of tiny lines can become stitches in patterned textiles. Stebbins’ work generally explores the relationships between various visual media, drawing from the history and traditions of abstract painting, handicrafts, textiles, digital images, pixel art and glitch art. His compositions allow these forms to collide, merge and transform.
The works in this exhibition conflate the appearances of digital and analog painting. In many of the new works Stebbins opts for a layered, cut-and-paste aesthetic. The appearance is of having been assembled with digital image editing software such as Photoshop. Hard-edged shapes made of pixels, textiles, brushstrokes and other painted textures are layered against each other and a variety of backgrounds: unprimed canvas, painted skies, grey and white checkerboards (indicative of the transparent alpha channel in Photoshop), bare wood panel, the gallery wall. The playful, spatial ambiguity arising from these multiple backgrounds and shiftable layers suggest an environment in which everything is malleable and in flux.
The digital tools within image editing software are generally based on real world analogues: tools, techniques and processes from painting and photography; for example, the brush, eraser, dodge and burn tools. For Stebbins, the influence comes full circle as the logic of the virtual workspace is re-imported into the physical workspace of his paintings.
Other new paintings in the exhibition further the comparison with digital imaging by adopting an entirely gridded/pixelated field. Using acrylic ink to paint thousands of coloured squares, Stebbins works “pixel-by-pixel” to assemble what looks like gestural brushwork captured in a low-resolution digital image. These brushstrokes arise from nothing more than the repetition and shifting of patterns within a grid, and therefore do not trace the hand of the artist in the way one might expect. Instead, the artist’s hand is present in the precise, repetitive labour of the works’ construction, aligning more closely with a craft discipline such as cross-stitch than expressionist painting. Stebbins’ blockly pixelation at once implies digitization in appearance and handicraft in method. It brings together new frontiers of image-making both past and present: in structure alluding to the rich history of the grid in modernist abstract painting, in colour-shifting palettes mimicking the experimental aesthetics of contemporary glitch art.
The paintings in this exhibition celebrate these types of crossovers and connections. The “jaggies”–evident pixelation, especially stair-stepped diagonal and curved lines–might be a critical term in computer and video game graphics, but Stebbins deploys the word and aesthetic enthusiastically. His hand-painted pixels straddle visual domains and traditions, rewardingly placing the viewer among the jaggies and along the seams.
Repeat After Me A marriage of visual art and pattern
February 1 –March 12, 2016
Opening reception Wednesday, February 10, 5:00 –8:00 pm
FCP Gallery
First Canadian Place, 100 King St West, Toronto
Curator:
Kelly McCray
Artists:
Robert Davidovitz (Lonsdale Gallery), James Fowler (jamesfowlerart.com), Owen Johnson (owenjohnsonart.com), Caroline Larsen (General Hardware Contemporary), Sam Mogelonsky (Katzman Contemporary), Mark Stebbins (markstebbins.ca), Penelope Stewart (penelopestewart.ca)
Gallery hours: 11:30 –2:30, Monday –Friday
*Please call the FCP Events Office at 416-862-6290 to ensure that the
exhibition is available for viewing.
images:
upper left: James Fowler, Parade, 2015, Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36″
lower left: Mark Stebbins, Two Brush Painting, 2016, Acrylic ink on wood panel, 11 x 14″
right: Owen Johnson, Untitled (Paisley Pattern) No. 4, Glass murrine, fused and cold worked panel, 20 x 20″
Galerie BAC is showing my work again at Art Toronto (Toronto International Art Fair) this year. Look for the gallery at booth 1106 in the NEXT Section.
Art Toronto 2014 takes place from October 24 – 27 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. An Opening Night Preview will take place on October 23.
Other artists being shown at the fair by Galerie BAC include Scott Bertram, Jordan Broadworth, Marc-Antoine Côté, André Dubois, Marcel Dzama, Andrea Kastner, Virginie Mercure, Catherine Plaisance and Matthew Schofield.
For fair hours, tickets, directions and more see arttoronto.ca.
