Operated by the Calgary Contemporary Arts Society

July 3 to August 22, 2008

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Colour Sense and Sensibilia:
New Edmonton Art

Allen Ball, Carolyn Campbell, Ken Macklin

But what is color? A kind of bliss…we must remember that color is also an idea (a sensual idea): for there to be color (in the blissful sense of the word) it is not necessary that color be subject to rhetorical modes of existence; it is not necessary that color be intense, violent, rich, or even delicate, refined, rare, or again thick-spread, crusty, fluid, etc.; in short, it is not necessary that there be affirmation, installation of color.”

- Roland Barthes

As far back as Aristotle and as recent as Wittgenstein, Barthes, and Derrida, philosophers, psychologists, and physicists have tried to understand and capture in charts and theories the essence of colour.  Time and again artists throughout history have rescued colour from its theoretical chains to give it a new face, capture another nuance of Barthesian “bliss,” make it new each time, desirous in the actual and “scandalous,” “pleasurable” ways of art, ways that need protecting as Wendy Steiner has convincingly claimed.

We are inviting you to attend an exquisitely crafted and exceptionally beautiful exhibit with recent works of three of Edmonton’s most innovative artists, Allen Ball, Carolyn Campbell, and Ken Macklin.  Each in her/his own way captures the liveliness of the sensual experience of colour in radically different approaches and practices.  The exhibit will present works atypical of what local audiences think of Edmonton art and challenge our preconceptions of steel sculpture, painting, and portraiture.

The exhibition includes works - painting and sculptures - which animate through the presence/ use of colour the gray, intermediary, “in-between” spaces of painting/sculpture, decoration/landscape, and self-document/picture.  Macklin “paints” his sculptures or hangs them on the walls as drawings; Ball on the other hand, literally “lifts” the vinyl flooring and seductively frames it on walls, while Campbell paints her over- or under-size portraits of local artists in ways that manage to question the genre’s ability to either “document” or “reflect” selfhood.

Caterina Pizanias, PhD.
Exhibition Curator

List of Images (left to right, top to bottom):

1. Installation View at the Triangle Gallery
2. Holy Thursday, 2007; enamel, varnish, wax and linoleum on plywood. Image courtesy of the artist
3. A Dream, 2007; enamel, varnish, wax and linoleum on plywood. Image courtesy of the artist.
4. It will always be too late, fortunately, 2004; acrylic, graphite on canvas
5. Proxy Isla, 2007; acrylic, ink on canvas
6. Garden of Lunar Grapefruits, 2006; concrete, glazed ceramic, painted steel
7. "curve of sigh and clay", 2008; painted steel, glazed ceramic

Photos from the Colour Sense & Sensibilia Opening