PATRICK MIKHAIL MONTREAL PRESENTS “BREATHER” AN EXHIBITION OF NEW WORKS BY TORONTO ARTIST SCOTT EVERINGHAM
SCOTT EVERINGHAM
BREATHER
MONTRÉAL
MAY 6 TO JUNE 24, 2015
ARTIST RECEPTION:
FRIDAY, MAY 8, 2015
5:30 P.M. TO 9 P.M.
PATRICK MIKHAIL is pleased to present BREATHER, an exhibition of new paintings by Toronto artist SCOTT EVERINGHAM. In Everingham’s second exhibition at Patrick Mikhail, and his first at the gallery’s new Montréal exhibition space, the artist presents an innovative body of work that explores new directions in his artistic practice.
Scott Everingham’s new exhibition BREATHER allows him to act as architect and painter while exposing the choices and process of creating visual language. The works in the exhibition are, from a painter’s perspective, logical and trustworthy, yet at the same time naïve and faulty. Items and objects could be viewed as purposeful or useless; static, or in the middle of falling apart. The simple mark of paint simultaneously acts as the tool to build: added and removed impressions of architectural objects that mimic familiar forms around us while existing as a performative moment in time. Time then becomes important, not only in the creation of the works, but also for one’s ability to examine visual communication as a meditative tool.
For Everingham, painting is a solitary and individual experience. His interests lie in producing fictional environments that an individual may view as solid, constructed, and hopeful, or in a dystopian and collapsed state—all of which exist as both illusory depth and a two-dimensional surface.
Scott Everingham creates environments and worlds that have yet to exist. Spaces are built and dismantled as if in a single moment of time where life and its bi-products are created by paint, rather than with reality that is familiar. What is central to the work is interpreting growth through the collaboration between assembled space, and paint as the visceral tool used to create it.
The artist’s strong interest in fiction, and the nature of fiction itself, allows the work to develop with a controlled impulse, often relying on chance and error to move each painting to completion. Each stroke is crafted based on the stroke before it, and a work progresses quickly and without delay until considered finished. This immediacy is indicative of how each painting is put together: various selections of colour and brushstroke mimic the natural and fabricated world, often with utopian and dystopian results.
By creating moments in time that have a constructed and fragmented footing, Everingham is free to explore the materiality of paint and the relationships between marks and negative space, as well as how this liberty correlates directly with fiction, in that anything is possible. As such, a viewer may approach each painting as experiential, perhaps without roots in familiarity, but inviting an exploration into other realities and clarity.
Scott Everingham has a BFA from NSCAD and an MFA from the University of Waterloo. He has exhibited his work at The Powerplant, Toronto; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Art Gallery of Calgary; as well as in England, the U.S., and the Netherlands. He is a three-time finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and is the recipient of recent Toronto and Ontario Emerging Artist Grants. His work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, RBC, TD Bank, NBC Universal television, and in numerous national and international corporate collections. Everingham lives and work in Toronto.