Analogue, Mystic was conceived in response to an intriguing observation made by the curator while encountering the work of young painters. Everywhere he looked, a nostalgic gaze, filtered through the lens of analogue technology, permeated their intuitive brushstrokes. Among the shared studio spaces across Montreal, where many of the six selected artists work, there is an undeniable allure to the past decades.
This exhibition aims to piece together this shared fascination by uniting a collection of curiosities. We see tattered letters, postcards, and stamps inscribed with long-discarded messages-weddings, homes, landscapes, childhood portraits, and architecture. Photographic negatives belonging to strangers are etched into the surface of their correspondences by the beating sun. A shattered mirror refracts a private moment of introspection.
Landscapes are rendered in patchwork-a quilt of indigo blue, brassy orange, forest green, and burnt sienna. The motif of the lone figure traipses about in a journey through time and memory. Bits of remembrances, flashes of colour, and fragments of landscapes are sewn, sculpted, and pasted together. We visit a mythical island flanked by palm trees. A bull grazes. An apple core is discarded, and a cup overflows.
We find an analogue camera and a family photo album, hand-molded and fired in a kiln. The artist has recreated the apparatus used to cement moments in time and the precious treasures it created.
We encounter sinuous, restrained, meticulously applied layers of oil paint-deep, sumptuous reds and blues, recalling the glossy 2 x 5" prints received from the photography store after negatives have been developed. An imperceptible glitch. Memories of childhood bedrooms, ASL chat rooms, the buzzing allure of early internet exploration. A passing "hello!" as a smiling face zips by at an amusement park.
We drift towards a mountainous ravine dotted with visitors in transit on a bridge high in the sky. We find our way to a back alley in Taipei where urban sprawl meets lush overgrowth. At night, a neon aquarium on an unnamed street corner. A litany of fish dance in their watery enclosures amongst the urban throng and dull buzz of machinery. A masked figure watches while the painter observes, recalling it for us now, monumental in scale.
Motifs, imagery, material, and dialogue are exchanged in a constant painting flux, where the boundaries between the figurative, the abstract, and the surreal are alchemically melded together.
Curator: Matthew Sanderson
Bios
Bryan Beyung is a visual artist, born in Montreal to a Chinese-Cambodian family.
His artistic approach would fall under the autoethnographic journey. He mainly addresses diasporic heritage by creating works based on memories, ideas and images related to this experience.
His work can be seen in the United States, Canada, Haïti, France, Morocco and Cambodia. https://bryanbeyung.com/
James Lee Chiahan (b. 1990, Tainan, Taiwan) is an artist and graphic designer living and working in Montreal. He is interested in creating artworks that are representative of everyday life, but sometimes refocused through a lens of surrealism and tarnished by the mechanical accidents of the medium and the failures of the hand. His aim is to elicit a form of emotion and surprise specific to visual art and his own voice. His illustrations have appeared in Apple, Atlanta Magazine, The Atlantic, Emergence Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Marshall Project, National Film Board of Canada, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The On Being Project, Uncommon Bold, The Walrus, The Washington Post. https://jlee.ca
Nesreen Galal is an interdisciplinary artist and graphic designer, who was previously FASA's graphic designer (Fine Arts Student Alliance), and last years' Creative Director at a feminist art publication—Yiara Magazine. Her artworks work mostly centres on identity, the surreal, the uncanny and memories. https://www.nesreengalal.ca/
Gaia Pawar Shapiro is primarily a painter and drawer. She is from the south of India and has been living in Montreal for the past three years to do her undergraduate in Studio Arts at Concordia University. Her work revolves around themes of solitude in large, expansive, and contemplative landscapes.
Discover Gaia Pawar Shapiro: https://www.thenelliganreview.com/emileluminaries
On Théa M.N. Armstrong: https://www.instagram.com/theamariena/
Oscar Wilder is a multidisciplinary artist from Brooklyn, NYC. He explores mediums ranging from sculpture, to ceramics, photography, fashion, and in the last two years, has begun oil painting. In his practice, he often experiments with rediscovering the analogue, and creates interactions between art and viewer, in which many of his works require human activation.
On Oscar Wilder: https://iamoscarwilder.wixsite.com/oscar-wilder