Mark Clintberg uses text, printmaking, glass, textiles, neon, drawing, public art, and installation as tools in studying the affective dimensions of cultural institutions and public space. This exhibition includes several new pieces, as well as pivotal recent projects that investigate the spatial, temporal, and linguistic metaphors for inter-personal relationships, and the intertwining of the personal and the public.
Passion over reason / la passion avant la raison, which revisits the work of landmark Canadian artist Joyce Wieland. Working with a group of seventeen quilters on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, the artist revised the slogan Wieland adopted from Pierre Trudeau in her quilt Reason Over Passion. Passion over reason embeds this new, politically oriented message into “strip quilts” created by local craftspeople.
Similarly referring to and altering the practice of an artist from another generation, 3 x 3 with Opening tool adapts the aesthetic language of Carl Andre, and presents a series of milled copper tiles that may resemble Andre’s work but appear to have been crafted in Greek antiquity.
The neon Text mess age is a sign that describes its own condition as a linguistic signal circulating in a vast, unruly network of other text messages.
Not the one but there is no one else, another text-based work, involves: a hand knitted fishing net made from buoyant twine; as a poster multiple; and a photograph documenting the single time this net will ever be released into open water. A retroreflective and phosphorescent cable knotted into the net traces out the work’s title in a spidery, disjointed type. It was produced on Fogo Island and was produced for the 2013 Sobey Art Award exhibition in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, when Clintberg was shortlisted for the prize.
His new suite of works titled pudenda are monoprints that represent shattered sheets of coloured glass. In a similar vein, the sculptural series The gift (that I protect) recalls a set of museological vitrines on plinths; each facet of glass is a different colour, and a single face of each vitrine is fragmented into shards soldered back together. While these pieces may resemble formalist abstraction, their representation and use of shattered sheets of coloured glass implies the nuances and fragmentary exchanges and vague memories that haunt the conclusion of many romantic (and institutional) relationships.
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Mark Clintberg is an artist who works in the field of art history, and curates exhibitions. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta College of Art + Design. He earned his Ph.D. in Art History at Concordia University in 2013, where he was also an Assistant Professor, LTA. In 2010 he conducted Ph.D. research at Oxford University, St Peter's College, with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He completed his M.A. at Concordia University (2008), his B.F.A. at the Alberta College of Art & Design (2001), and was an exchange student at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (1999-2000). He was Shortlisted for the 2013 Sobey Art Award for the region Prairies and the North. His doctoral dissertation was nominated for the 2013 Governor-General's Gold Medal. Public and private collections across Canada and in the United States – including the National Gallery of Canada, the Edmonton Arts Council, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts – have acquired his work. His work has recently been shown at the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), the Illingworth Kerr Gallery (Calgary), AXENÉ07 (Gatineau), and Trapdoor Artist Run Centre (Lethbridge). Other exhibitions featuring his work have taken place at Locust Projects (Miami), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Banff Centre, Centre des arts actuels Skol (Montreal), The Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), and Eastern Edge (St. John's).
