1700 La Poste - Carol Wainio

CAROL WANIO

Réenchantement 

October 13, 2023 - January 21, 2024

As part of its 10th anniversary celebrations, the Montreal's gallery 1700 La Poste presents an exhibition dedicated to the Canadian artist Carol Wainio.

The exhibition Reenchantment highlights paintings and drawings primarily created in recent years. They explore the folktales and fables that populate our collective memory and testify to the persistence and resonance of stories through time. Linked to both grand and small narratives, they depict the threats facing future generations and evoke the hope for renewal.

For inspiration and for some of her works’ main themes, the artist used images from her own collection of old post cards many if which were based on fables. She reinterprets and reconstructs the images and the fables into her own artistic visual narrative. For instance, her painting The Fall (2015 / Acrylic on canvas) - see the photo just below this paragraph – is based on the fable from the oral French tradition Le Petit Poucet that was re-transcribed by Charles Perrault in 1697, see Wikipedia. Below the photo of her painting, there is the image of the postcard she used for that painting, at the bottom-middle of the photo.

The gallery's owner Ms. ISABELLE DE MEVIUS stated this in the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition:

 "The paintings of Carol Wainio, whose inspiration is nourished by the breath of centuries of art history, offers us a pictorial language of rare beauty and a style as original as it is inventive, which escapes the criteria of established recognitions. In the same painting, the artist introduces various elements in the form of collages of images of different styles. The effect of observing a painting within a painting then establishes a tension between the subjects. The motifs are treated like a puzzle of images which can be explained by a dialectic similar to that of a dream."

About the Artist

Carol Wainio was born in Sarnia, Ontario in 1955 to Finnish immigrants and grew up in Waterloo, Ontario. Since 1980, she has lived and worked in Montréal, Ottawa, and other places. She developed an early interest in visual art through her father and pursued studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (1976) and the University of Toronto (1978–1979) before earning an MFA from Concordia University, Montréal, in 1985. There, she worked with Guido Molinari and undertook additional studies in the history of ideas, developing a painting practice that draws on interests in history, narrative, and broader visual culture—brought together in a discursive, visceral approach, where figures from past and present, high art and vernacular forms of expression, engage in shifting, layered grounds. Her work has been described as visually dense, conceptually full, and marked by a desire to use painting as a means to consider representation itself as well as real world issues.

Wainio’s work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Art Gallery of Ontario, and many other museums and public galleries across Canada. Her paintings are part of major Canadian museum collections as well as corporate and private collections. Wainio is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2014). She is currently represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto, and Trépanier Baer Gallery, Calgary.

In the three photos below, Carol Wainio is presenting her paintings to journalists at a Press Conference on October 6, 2023, held at 1700 La Post gallery. 

1700 La Poste

1700 La Poste is an exhibition centre for contemporary art dedicated to supporting and disseminating the work of visual artists through the production of exhibitions, publications, documentary films and conferences.  It is located in a heritage building at 1700 Rue Notre-Dame West, Montreal. It was built in 1913 to house Postal Station F. A century later, it was entirely redesigned and restored to reflect the singular and audacious vision of its owner, Isabelle de Mévius, and Luc Laporte, one of Montreal’s most significant architects. For the past ten years, Isabelle de Mévius has contributed to the promotion of artists from here and elsewhere through her patronage and passion for the arts.

In a photo just below, Isabelle de Mévius is being interviewed by the journalist in front of Carol Wainio's painting.

Click on images to enlarge them.

All photos @ Nadia Slejskova

For this article's dedicated internet address, click on the title above the very first photo.

For more information, visit the 1700 La Poste website.

The admission to the exhibition if free of charge.

1700 La Poste - Vide et Vertige

 

Vide et Vertige
Ivan Binet, Jocelyne Alloucherie, Mathieu Cardin

Photography and Installation
March 24 - June 18, 2017

1700 La Post galley is presenting three Quebec artists: Ivan Binet, Jocelyne Alloucherie, and Mathieu Cardin. This time, there is not much colour in the gallery as was the case with the previous 1700 La Post exposition. There are only some accents of subdued or mono colour mostly in Ivan Binet's works. 

Ivan Binet

Ivan Binet contribution to the exhibition is largely photographic. Looking at his works one immediately assumes they are photo-shopped. Surprisingly, this is not the case. He uses his camera's setting and maybe also the Jet-ink photo printer settings to create very unique visual effects.

In addition, Binet also presents two photos of Cornelius Krieghoff's paintings in an installation-like setting inside the former post office's vault.

Jocelyne Alloucherie

Jocelyne Alloucherie, a sculptor who also became a photographer, went up north to photograph glaciers and their monumental shapes and forms. She also uses additional sculptural elements to complete her installation.

Mathieu Cardin

Mathieu Cardin's work is conceptual and sculptural. His reproduction of mountains and mountainous ridges and the additional use of photography to create his spatial structures is quite impressive. His mirror technique to conjure distance, perspective, and the illusion of an endless mountainous ridge is quite ingenious.

Click on images to enlarge them.

Hover your mouse over images for description and credits.

Participate in a virtual visit of the exhibition by watching this short video on VIMEO.
https://vimeo.com/210809606

1700 La Poste is a private space dedicated to visual arts. It presents events in the form of exhibitions and lectures. It is housed in a former Postal Station F, built in 1913, that was originally conceived by the architect David Jerome Spence. It is located in Montreal's Griffintown, 1700 Rue Notre-Dame West. The building was fully restored a century later, thanks to private financing from Isabelle de Mévius, and the vision of the architect Luc Laporte.

For more information, visit the 1700 La Poste website.
The admission to the exhibition if free of charge.

1700 La Poste

1700 La Poste - Claire Labonté

Claire Labonté
at 1700 La Poste

October 7 - December 18, 2016

Claire Labonté is a self-taught artist. Initially, her paintings which deployed minutely executed motifs across large surfaces were classified as naive art. However, over the years, her art evolved into an orchestrated complex imagery with a striking autopoiesis. As she explained herself, her paintings happen in the space after she dips her brush in a paint and before she makes the mark on the canvas. It is during this meditative instant where her works take shape and the imagery is conceived. Her imagery expresses her personal type of visual poetics, her unconscious sense of aesthetics, and not only her own but also the collective mythology that surrounds her. In addition, the colours she deploys are striking and vibrant, and project the sense of great energy and vitality. The colours play the major role in the propagation of her repetitive motives and painterly spots into a complex visual symphony of balance, harmony and meaning.

Her notion of a painting “making itself” reveal two involuntary constants in her art: the repetitive nature of her artistic process and the mythological dimension of the resulting works. In 2003, after twenty years of personal exploration and in-depth searching, she enrolled at a university to investigate the enigmatic mechanic-like and the unconscious nature of her work. She obtained the Bachelor of Philosophy and the Master of Fine Arts degrees, and came to view her repetitive creative process as being at the root of the mythological dimension of her artwork. In 2011, after completing a thesis on the mythical and ritualistic aspects of her paintings, she focused her pictorial research on the concepts of repetition and replication.

In 2013, in an effort to resist the mytho-narrative imagery that automatically introduced itself through the repetition or replication of her small touches of paint, Labonté created L’esthétique des contraintes à l’Orée des bois -The Aesthetic of Constraints at the Woods’ Edge (see the top-most image). With this work, she came to discover that the circumstances involved in the application of a touch of paint not only accounted for the mythical nature of her own paintings, but were fundamental to creative activity as such.

Claire Labonté's pairings could be easily discussed in conjunction with the Alfred Pellan's art who used extensively the repetitive elements and themes in his later works. This type of repetitive-imagery depiction, the complex visual rhythms that are conceived and portrayed, might even represent an artistic approach specific to some Quebec artists, and might stem from the Quebec's collective mythology.

Claire Labonté has participated in international exhibitions in Switzerland and France, including the fourth Biennale internationale d’art hors les normes in Lyon. She is the recipient of awards and grants from Switzerland, Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her murals have been integrated into the architecture of a number of public buildings.

Since 2008, Claire Labonté has exhibited primarily in Québec museums that have the necessary space to display her large and at times almost endlessly wide works that are perceived as being “murals.” 

Click on images to enlarge them.

Hover your mouse over images for description and credits.

Watch the video about the Claire Labonté's exhibition at 1700 La Poste here.

1700 La Poste is a private space dedicated to visual arts. It presents events in the form of exhibitions and lectures. It is housed in a former Postal Station F, built in 1913, that was originally conceived by the architect David Jerome Spence. It is located in Montreal's Griffintown, 1700 Rue Notre-Dame West. The building was fully restored a century later, thanks to private financing from Isabelle de Mévius, and the vision of the architect Luc Laporte.

For more information, visit the 1700 La Poste website.
The admission to the exhibition if free of charge.

Marc Garneau - 1700 La Poste

Marc Garneau: Une Trajectoire - Trajectory
Selected works 1985 - 2015

October 16 - December 20, 2015

The exhibition Marc Garneau: Trajectory presents a selection of works spanning thirty years of the painter’s career. In the 1980s, at a time of the renewed interest in figurative art, Marc Garneau set out to develop his own visual language which is part figurative and part abstract. It is rooted in the paintings of Québec’s Automatiste movement and American Abstract Expressionism.

For Garneau, his paintings are sites of creative experimentation where collage elements are strongly present His works are composed of various surfaces, fragments of previously discarded paintings, torn up paper, pieces of burnt wood that he incised, gouged, or layered, and other found objects. 

Garneau often sets aside the painter’s brush and uses the tools of the carpenter (a trade he has practised). He uses, for instance, chisels on the wood to carve, gouge, and incise it. He also burns wood to achieve the desired burned effect.

The artist not only explores the technical possibilities of the tools he uses but also sees this as an opening of a door to the unforeseeable. He states:

“I work by contradiction. Always. What I think is one thing, and what I do is a continuation of the thought, not its application. I try to provoke something unexpected. That’s what gives me the energy to surprise myself.”

His exposure to rural life inspired many works using fire, as in his painting Rituel (Ritual) that you can see on the right side in the photo below. In it, the wood was treated, burned, and gouged to reveal its layers. 

According to Garneau, each each of his paintings develops out of its own tensions and contrasts, within a body of work that comes together as a cohesive, coherent whole.

Garneau said that the way he often worked was to tear up an old canvas and to leave the pieces on his studio floor. When returning the next morning and seeing how they were arranged, he would right away start having ideas how and where to use them in his new creations.

Click on images to enlarge them.

Hover your mouse over images for description and credits.

1700 La Poste is a private space dedicated to visual arts. It presents events in the form of exhibitions and lectures. It is housed in a former Postal Station F, built in 1913, that was originally conceived by the architect David Jerome Spence. It is located in Montreal's Griffintown, 1700 Rue Notre-Dame West. The building was fully restored a century later, thanks to private financing from Isabelle de Mévius, and the vision of the architect Luc Laporte.

For more information, visit the 1700 La Poste website.
The admission to the exhibition if free.