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SEVER

VERA GREENWOOD

November 4 – December 5, 2009

VERA GREENWOOD | SEVER | INSTALLATION VIEW | PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY | OTTAWA | 2009

VERA GREENWOOD | SEVER | INSTALLATION VIEW | PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY | OTTAWA | 2009

PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY presents SEVER, an exhibition of new works by Quebec artist VERA GREENWOOD

NOVEMBER 4 TO DECEMBER 5, 2009

Artist Reception:
Friday, November 6, 2009
5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Artist Talk:
Sunday, November 15, 2009 2 p.m.

PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY is pleased to present SEVER, a solo exhibition of new photo-based works by Quebec artist Vera Greenwood.

Vera Greenwood’s art practice is subjectively personal, placing emphasis on story telling, social studies, and a conceptual approach to representing the everyday; a way of working based on observation of the world. Through various projects involving domestic as well as public spaces she has employed social probes to investigate the complexities of human interaction.

In the new exhibition SEVER, most recently previewed at the 2009 Toronto International Art Fair, Greenwood is exploring a new direction in her practice. The photographs in this series, four duratransparencies housed in large-format light boxes, focus attention on a magnified piece of reality. Small computer-generated rectangles were randomly chosen from much larger, original images, leaving technology to assume an unguided level of control. It’s ability to choose without instruction effectively undermined Greenwood’s taste and disqualified her aesthetic, leaving the artist in a state of frustration. In time, however, a level of acceptance set in and these “accidental” crops re-informed Greenwood’s investigation of the unremarkable. While being grounded in the real world, these fragments convey something more abstract — concerned not so much with the particular, as the universal. By enlarging the selections, Greenwood has monumentalized these overlooked yet extraordinary elements of the whole, leading viewers to search for meaning in places where they normally would not.

Vera Greenwood has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Montreal’s Concordia University and a Diploma of Visual Arts from the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. She has exhibited widely in Canada as well as in the U.K., Italy and Mexico. The recipient of numerous grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, Greenwood is a past recipient of the Canada Council Paris Studio residency where she developed her critically acclaimed project L'hôtel SofiCalle. Her work can be found in the collections of the Ottawa Art Gallery, Canada Council Art Bank, the City of Ottawa, Carleton University Art Gallery, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Her forthcoming novel The Whole Enchilada — My Madcap Mexican Adventure, based on her experiences at a residency sponsored by DFAIT (Canada), FONCA (Mexico) and Centro de la Imagen (Mexico), will be launched in early 2010.

 

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