Screen and Décor

For Screen and Décor, the use of pattern and ornament (in the sense of extended motif) in contemporary art is understood as an organizing principle in a world of excessive data. Artworks in the exhibition are resonant of a contemporary visual reality characterized by complex patterning. Within the frame of an all-over exhibition design created by Rodney LaTourelle (CA) and Louise Witthöft (DK), Screen and Décor proposes to look at this phenomenon through the work of six artists.

Shannon Bool (Canada) positions historical referents of ornament and pattern within a distorted landscape of contemporary spatial ambiguity.

Simone Gilges (Germany) investigates historical forms of décor, towards the creation of a personal mythology free from the weight of German history.

Bernhard Kahrmann (Germany) pieces together re-photographed photos, shot in varying light and delicately overlaid, to build an unstable relation between the image and its apprehension.

Sanaz Mazinani (Canada) uses the veneer of décor, telling juxtapositions and the shifts in perspective that pattern can orchestrate to reveal the embedded meanings of images that circulate.

Kirstine Roepstorff (Denmark) updates genres of collage and photomontage to create woven analogues of the digital world.

Emmy Skensved (Canada) makes large-scale paintings that place a visage of décor over the vast field of our era’s digital slippage.

Presented from September 28 to November 24, 2013 at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.

Exhibition Design by Rodney LaTourelle and Louise Witthöft