NOV 2, 2012 – NOV 24, 2012
Charles Grabinsky + Neil McClelland + Robert Dmytruk + Patrick Jacob + David Shkolny
Common Sense happily announces the opening of “Conversations,” a group exhibition of pictures and sculptures by western Canadian artists Charles Grabinsky, Neil McClelland, Robert Dmytruk, Patrick Jacob, and David Shkolny.
The five artists represented in “Conversations” are giving voice to a silent world which sustains each of them. Their respective mediums and approaches to subject matter are revelatory of the nature of their inquiry into art making.
Charles Grabinsky states, “Broadly, I view art as geography. In other words, art is another form of writing about the earth and our relations with nature. The overall goal of my artistic/geographic work is to explore the question: Can drawing, painting and printmaking be used to discover and discuss geographic knowledge and the meaning of a place?
For painter Neil McClelland it is a “meditative and recursive process…one of looking and reacting, responding to how the art materials are behaving on the surface, and finding a balance between taking control and letting go.”
Robert Dmytruk is “influenced by the manner in which we map the landscape. We divide, categorize and quantify the land. We impose patterns of urbanization upon it. The visual intersections of natural and manmade forms inevitability alter my perception of the environment that I call home. These intersections assemble and surface in my painting through a visual vocabulary of shapes, colour, texture, line, repetition, etc., enhancing and accumulating an urban vocabulary of visual, intellectual and physical recognition.”
In his sculpture, Patrick Jacob is seeking to transcend “the burden of the “object” and evoke “a higher state of consciousness”.
David Shkolny feels his landscapes, which “teeter on the fence of abstraction, are a dialogue between illusionistic space and a desire to subvert it, to get beneath the surface by acknowledging the two dimensionality of the picture plane.”
Common Sense 