You Are (I Am) Here: Pardiss Amerian, Martin Golland, Adad Hannah, Dil Hildebrand, Alice Reiter, Jackson Slattery

 

Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present You Are (I Am) Here, a group exhibition about painting featuring works by Dil Hildebrand, Pardiss Amerian, Martin Golland, Adad Hannah, Alice Reiter, and Jackson Slattery.You Are (I Am) Here centres on dualist strategies of twofoldness in painting. The artists examine the potential with which painting can introduce unique physical and optical encounters through effects of space and surface, skewing the line between abstraction and representation and reaching into the domain of its audience. Through strategies of fragmentation and collage, each artist calls into question what, where, and when these places are.

 

Dil Hildebrand introduces a new series of oil paintings that explore the interplay between a painting's surface and its image. Photographic images of greenhouse flora are rendered in blurry sfumato, framed in panels that echo greenhouse architecture. Combining smoothly painted imagery with sculptural applications of paint, Hildebrand's trompe l'oeil paintings present the surface world as a world his viewers may grasp while the fuzzy photographic backgrounds remain imaginary figments placed in the distance, unavailable to the touch. Sculptural passages function as barriers to entry, leaving viewers at the painting's doorstep. While perspectival space will put viewers at fixed vantage points, Hildebrand's impasto locates the viewer simply on the outside looking in.

 

Parallel in some ways to the distortions within Hildebrand's work, Martin Golland's kaleidoscopic spaces invite the eye whilst simultaneously representing a sort of visual finger trap that may not let it loose. By use of painterly technique, wonky perspective, and chaotic compositional schemes, Golland's built environments place viewers on unsteady footing. His masterful cut-and-paste method deftly collapses and foreshortens space while simultaneously squeezing and stretching it. Golland's collages, used as preparatory works as well as stand-alone compositions, reveal clues into how the paintings are made. Assembled from painted scraps, photos and paper, they present shattered spatial worlds inscribed on the folds of a turbulent origami.

 

Pardiss Amerian's paintings and collages hover in the hazy territory between the real and unreal, where abstract forms echo an ancient world, and architectural openings appear vaguely to frame areas of subtle colour shifts, shimmering in the background like silhouettes. Evoking in their subtle modulations of form and colour a bygone era, they appear to tell scarcely remembered stories, never fully told. Amerian says of her process: "I often start by thinking through drawing with tales and poems, pulling from tropes employed by Persian illustrated manuscripts in which they appear. The forms I arrive at are used as cut-out tools for monoprinting. The process of pressing paper together creates suction and pushes diluted paint around when lifted off the flat surface; outlines are approximated and gaps are left behind while the material is animated by chance."

 

The video Alternative Peeling by Alice Reiter uses slight of hand to expose the contradiction that characterizes the relationship between space and surface in images, proposing that a screen, like a painting surface, is merely a membrane between this world and that one. A parody of trompe l'oeil, the video humorously represents the act of painting as an activity of disclosing hidden truth. As with Parrhasius' curtain, painted so accurately as to fool his competitor's eye, we find that it is our own eye attempting to remove a peel that reveals itself to be an optical mirage.

 

In his painting In the Air of the Night, Jackson Slattery combines differing spatial experiences; a familiar photographic space is placed abutting a flat, graphic inscription of bold text. While distinctly different from the righthand image, we are left wondering if the word is meant to emulate graffiti, or perhaps an adjacent window on a desktop screen. Seemingly aware that his audience will consult their smartphones for the meaning of the German word written there, Slattery manipulates not only the eye of his viewers. Within the photographic image of Slattery's painting, two layers also compete with each other, at once placing the viewer in front of the painting, and at the same moment on top of it, as though floating over a dinner table. The two superimposed images interact with each other, each fighting to claim the direction in which gravity is operating. Will the objects that the hand releases fall to the table that the figure is sitting at, or will the objects fall into the painting, onto the table that ostensibly exists to hold up the dinner plate and other objects painted there. The conundrum does not resolve, and the eye is left oscillating between two possibilities.

 

In works that straddle both painting and photography, Adad Hannah picks up on Reiter's examination of surface via the camera lens. In his series, named "Rodin Reworked", the artist traces gestural paint strokes over forms that emerge from photographs taken at Musée Rodin in Paris. The artworks are twice removed from Rodin's originals; recorded in photographs which are then reimagined as paintings. In the manner of the Old Masters, Hannah applies transparent paint layers to colourless forms, but rather than emphasizing these forms in countless layers, the artist flattens and fragments the space with painterly abstraction. In both manner and material, Hannah's reworking of Rodin draws parallels across art history.

 

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Dil Hildebrand is an artist living and working in Montreal, Canada. Hildebrand's work has been shown internationally in such venues as the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2012); Herron Galleries at University of Indiana, Indianapolis (2013); Choi&Lager Gallery, Cologne (2013); Union Gallery, London UK (2012&13); University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery, Winnipeg (2013); YYZ, Toronto (2011); Galerie de l'UQAM, Montreal (2013); Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (2014); AUT University Gallery, Auckland NZ (2007); the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010); and Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto (2006). His work has been collected by major public institutions throughout Canada, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Bank of the Canada Council, as well as numerous private and corporate collections throughout Canada, the United States and Europe.

 

Born in Montpellier, France, Martin Golland spent his early years in Turkey, Puerto Rico, Miami, and Toronto before moving to Ottawa in 1991. He received his MFA from the University of Guelph, ON (2006) and his BFA from Concordia University (1998). He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including "Adisokamagan: We All Become Stories" at the Ottawa Art Gallery (2018) "Human Nature" at the Carleton University Art Gallery (2016), "Imaging Disaster" at Museum London, ON (2013), "The Archivist's Etagère" at Birch Contemporary in Toronto (2012), and "Dark Town" at Felix Ringel Galerie, Dusseldorf (2007). His work has been written about in numerous reviews, articles and publications. Golland received an Honourable Mention at the 11th Annual RBC painting competition, which was exhibited in various museums and galleries across Canada including the National Gallery of Canada. He is currently an associate professor in painting at the University of Ottawa. 

 

Pardiss Amerian is an Iranian-Canadian visual artist currently based in Montreal, where she is completing her Master's in Fine Arts at Concordia University. Her practice is a process-based exploration of painting and collage driven by narrative asides, as a way to address temporality, transhistoricity, and the lyric potential of an imagined elsewhere. Amerian holds a BFA from OCAD University and has exhibited her work in Toronto and Montreal. Recent exhibitions include Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, ON), Espacio Pinea (Cadiz, Spain), Gallery Yves Laroche (Montreal, QC), and 282 Symington Avenue (Toronto, ON). Her work has been supported by the Tom Hopkins Memorial Award and can be found in private collections in Canada.

 

Alice Reiter is a multidisciplinary artist from Montreal with a BFA from Concordia University. Her recent video work has centred on the use of ephemeral materials and hybrid artistic processes, combining digital editing, organic materials, and painting. Her work has been exhibited around Montreal, most recently at the FOFA Gallery, Art Matters Festival, and at the FNC as part of the Spotlight on Concordia Fine Arts.