Are You My Mother? A Curatorial View

Colin Lyons, 'Boom Town' (detail), 2008-2009. Zinc plates, 24"x48"x48"

This Thursday, November 14 at 7:00 pm, join JNAAG Curator Lisa Daniels for a conversation and curatorial walk through of our current exhibition, Are You My Mother?

With so many intersecting themes at play within the exhibition, Daniels will explore the materials, images, concepts and processes used by the three artists featured in the exhibitions, to create a display that challenges social, political and cultural norms.

More about the exhibition:

The art of Cal Lane, Colin Lyons and Clint Neufeld,  shatters any preconceived notions one might have about the masculine and the feminine; practicality and frivolity; ornamentation and function; absence and presence; flourishing and failing; craft and fine art. 

Clint Neufeld, 'Valve Grinder and Other Sunday Afternoon Activities,' 2012.
Ceramic, found Tea Cart 40" x 16" x 29". The Donovan Collection, St Michael's College, Toronto ON.

Neufeld works with concepts of masculine identity, beauty and contradiction in the form of ceramic engines and machinery. In Are You My Mother?, he has taken a popular symbol of the alpha male and re-contextualized them into objects of delicate beauty, perched on top of elegant pieces of antique furniture. The furniture evokes notions of home, and assist in misdirecting our processing of these objects.

Cal Lane, 'Untitled,' 2009. Plasma cut shovels, 59" x 7.8" x 4" each.

Reminiscent of medieval tapestries and delicate lace, Cal Lane transforms discarded industrial aluminized steel corrugated sewer pipes, rusty I-beams and used oil drums into objects of beauty. Filled with contradiction, her sculptures pull together industrial and domestic life as well as relationships of strong and delicate, masculine and feminine, practical and frivolity, ornament and function.

Exhibition shot of Are You My Mother? Featuring Colin Lyons' works,
'Automatic Ruin' and 'Boomtown,'

Colin Lyons' work focusses on the process of ruination at all stages of transformation. In Automatic Ruin a three dimensional replica of a discarded industrial object, constructed from a zinc etching plate, is fully submerged in a weak solution of copper sulphate and is actively in the process of becoming a ruin throughout the course of the exhibition.  

Join us this Thursday at 7:00 pm to learn how these contradictory materials and ideas work together to create an exhibition that is both visually stunning and transformative by nature.