Tales To Astonish

Opening Friday, September 9, 8 to 11pm
Artists' talk at 8pm

In the exhibition Tales To Astonish, artists Donovan Barrow, Brandon Vickerd, and Kevin Yates present paintings and sculptures that distill low-brow and decades-old science fiction tropes into works that pay homage to their original sources while evading the trap of kitsch within which some of those original sources were found. Instead, their collected works are resonant with ambiguous mystery and drama.

In a collaborative series of paintings and sculptures, Barrow and Yates draw from the climactic battle scene of a terrible 1980s film version of Flash Gordon and present a series of psychedelic backdrops based on sky and cloud formations in the scene, foregrounded by six wooden sculptures of the Rocket Ajax. Their gesture takes their cinematic source back to its comic book antecedents, as the works replicate a series of comic book frames while simultaneously luxuriating in a sense of painterly space, made more active by the still sculptures that punctuate each panel.

In a series of larger-than-life sculptures, Brandon Vickerd reconsiders various icons of popular culture—a comic book hero, a ghost, an astronaut, a robot—and draws from their emblematic presence a series of epic sentiments. The heroic, tragic, and fearful are intertwined and amplified through Vickerd's sculptures. The desolation of space travel as exemplified by a dead astronaut; the lonely heroism of the Silver Surfer's vacated surfboard; the elemental fright and singular beauty of a ghost; and the oversized, menacing but undeniably wonderful emblem of a robot.

All the works in Tales To Astonish play with their source materials and images, evoking and utilizing pop cultural flourishes. At the same time, in reworking these icons, Barrow, Vickerd, and Yates tap into the deeper significance of even the hokiest low brow entertainment, suggesting a shared set of cultural signifiers that vibrate and resound through time, space, and memory.

Brandon Vickerd is a Toronto based sculptor and Professor of Visual Arts at York University. He received a BFA from NSCAD University in 1999, followed by an MFA from the University of Victoria in 2001. In the past several years his exhibited projects have been diverse in form and content, including site specific interventions, public performances and object based sculpture. Projects such as Dance of the Cranes (Toronto, 2009) are community based projects outside the gallery that seek to transform the cityscape into a stage for performance. This performance consisted of a choreographed dance executed by high-rise construction cranes perched upon condos developments while viewers watch from the street bellow. Public works such as Satellite and Northern Satellite are similar attempts to engage the public in a discourse about our conflicting ways of understanding landscape. In gallery exhibitions he engages the audience through employing the language of monumental figurative sculpture, subverting dominant cultural narratives by creating monuments to popular culture characters (Dead Astronaut, Chrome Ghost). Purposely diverse, his work is an examination of sculpture as a catalyst for critical thought, enriching the audience's engagement with the physical world through the creation of spectacle. Vickerd has received numerous awards and grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Ontario Arts Council. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Memento Mori at Art Mur Gallery (Montreal, QC) Clutch at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery (Waterloo, ON) and Dance of the Cranes at Franklin Furnace Archives (Brooklyn, NY).

www.brandonvickerd.com

Kevin Yates (b. 1974, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada) graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in, and completed a Masters of Fine Arts degree from the University of Victoria. He has taught sculpture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, the University of Oregon, and currently works as professor of Visual Arts at York University in Toronto Canada. Yates has garnered attention for his sculptural work, whether finding inspiration in a crime scene, or tracing the sense of dislocation which results from too frequent relocation. He likens his work to film stills: objects that hold space like a "pause" allowing the viewer time to examine and inspect. Yates is particularly interested in the cold relationship that exists between tragedy and the scrutiny of the viewer. His installations confound the expectation of knowing-through-seeing, setting the stage for a perpetual mystery. Solo exhibitions of his work have been staged across Canada and the US at Artspeak (Vancouver), Anna Leowens Gallery (Halifax) , Optica (Montreal), YYZ (Toronto) and Ditch Projects (Oregon). His work has also been featured in prominent group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, Musèe d'art contemporain, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Alberta and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, among others. Yates is represented by the Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto.

Donovan Barrow was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1976 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA from the University of Victoria in 2001 and MFA from Hunter College in New York City in 2005. He has had a recent solo exhibitions at Rare Gallery, (2008) and (2006). He has had recent group shows at Cambridge Gallery, Ontario (2010); Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto (2008) and (2006); Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York (2008); Suzanne Tarazieve Gallery, Paris (2007).

www.donovanbarrow.com

Some publications related to this event:
TALES TO ASTONISH - 2011