Buenos Aires & Santiago Exhibits 2012
FLESH GARDEN INTERNATIONAL GROUP EXHIBIT
July 6 – 29, 2012
JULY 6 / 8PM TO MIDNITE
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Collaboration with YESSR … Santiago (Chile) & Buenos Aires (Argentina) & Canadian curator Guy Berube (Ottawa, Canada)
$5 COVER / Proceeds to Villa Marguerite Nursing Home, Ottawa.
FREE BUBBLY. FREE PIZZA. FREE HUGS.
Co-curator Felipe Bracelis (Santiago, Chile) will be present on opening night
Proudly sponsored by CKCU 93.1 FM, Cheesy Luigi’s & OverKill Lounge
PLAYING LIVE: Toronto’s Kids on TV http://www.kidsontv.biz/
ALSO PERFORMING: The One & Only THEO PELMUS http://www.theopelmus.com/
LIVE ART: Toronto’s ALEKS BARTOSIK http://
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FLESH GARDEN This exhibition is an opportunity to cross meet South/North America, where geographical limits are exceeded by the visceral urge to create and meet. We expect our artists to chop limbs, scatter around organs, to take maximum advantage of multiple chromatic attributes of skin; here we can all be surgeons and butchers. FLESH GARDEN will bring together artists from across the Americas to share the experience of representing the body in the New World. Canadian artists will be presented in the context of colleagues from the United States and South America in a travelling exhibition that will be presented in galleries in the Sala +18 (Santiago, Chile), in Casa Brandon (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and La Petite Morte Gallery (Ottawa, Canada).
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FLESH GARDEN provides an opportunity for artists to collaborate with each other and to share with gallery visitors their paintings, photographs and mixed media collages depicting social and physical trauma. The images are linked through their shared exploration of corporeal extremes, invoking the anomalous and the exotic, the dismembered and the disturbing. Collectively, the figurative works visualize the external evidence of internal states of disintegration, disfigurement, and dysmorphia. Between the tangible reality of lived experience and the surreality of psychic hallucination, this selection of artists in the Americas reflects their diverse responses to the terrain of the human body as the impact point of the social body. .
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BUENOS AIRES @ Casa Brandon March 15 – April 8th
SANTIAGO @ Sala +18 May 10th – June 3rd
OTTAWA @ La Petite Mort Gallery July 6th – July 29th
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ARTISTS:
Aleks Bartosik (Toronto, Canada)
Matthew Stradling (London, England)
Peter Shmelzer (Ottawa, Canada)
Nani Lamarque (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Celio Braga (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Lucas Simoes (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Andrew Salgado (London, England / Born in Canada)
Martin La Roche (Santiago, Chile)
Rodrigo Cienfuegos (Santiago, Chile)
Felipe Bracelis (Santiago, Chile)
James Huctwith (Toronto, Canada)
Juan Carlos Noria (Barcelona, Spain / Born in Canada)
Martin Douville (Montreal, Canada)
Ashkan Honarvar (Amsterdam, / Born in Iran)
Scooter LaForge (New York, USA)
Francisco Navarrete Sitja (Santiago, Chile)
Hayden Menzies (Toronto, Canada)
Guillermo Trejo (Ottawa, Canada / Born Mexico)
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Co-curator Felipe Bracelis, Santiago, Chile: Felipe Bracelis is an emerging artists and curator from Chile. He is also the founder and director of YESSR, an art platform that includes fanzines, exhibitions and online publications. Bracelis became a regular name in student exhibitions in Chile during his last high school years, to later on become part of the Plan Basico en Artes Plasticas (University of Chile), where he first developed digital collage as a way to take a step aside from what he’s fellow students were doing. In 2010 he founded the Yessr project curating he’s first exhibit at the University of Chile, including indumentary pieces, copies if YESSR1 fanzine and video work by him and Chilean performance artists Felipe Rivas San Martin and Gustavo Solar. Felipe’s imagery reflects heavily on the relationship between landscape–technology and the human body, and his curatorial work has included artists from many latitudes of America, making him a very promising figure in the future of the Latin-American art world. During 2011 he had his first solo Exhibit Valle Central on Sala +18, Santiago; where he showed to the public his skills as a photographer, in several pieces that reflected country-side nostalgia to a metropolitan audience.
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KIDS ON TV: Kids On TV emerged from the drainage pipe of a Toronto bathhouse in the spring of 2003. The group consists of John Caffery, Minus Smile, Roxy and Wolf. Their music explores the worlds of house, experimental rock, no-rave, punk, and soul. Their multi-media performance is apocalyptically gay and transforms environments with projections of their film and video work. In 2007, they released their debut album “Mixing Business With Pleasure” on Chicks on Speed Records (internationally) and Blocks Recording Club (Canada). The band has toured Europe and have played with Gang of Four, CrystalCastles, Ladytron, Dat Politics, Angie Reed, Les Georges Leningrad, and Lesbians on Ecstasy. They have worked and recorded with Boy George, traded remixes with Man Parrish, and recently collaborated with Yo Majesty, Katie Stelmanis, and Diamond Rings.
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THEO PELMUS: Theo Pelmus is a performance artist who has received several awards, including an emerging artist grant and integrated arts grant from the Ontario Arts Council (2006; 2009), the Dennis Tourbin Fund for emerging artist in performance art (2007) and an emerging artist grant from the City of Ottawa (2009). He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including shows in Copenhagen and the Bucharest Biennial. Theo has a BFA and MFA from the University of Fine Arts in Bucharest and University of Ottawa. He is an active participant in the Ottawa arts community, most notably as a programming member of Available Light Screening Collective. He is represented by La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa.
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ALEKS BARTOSIK: I am a visual artist currently working from my studio in Toronto, Ontario. I work figuratively and most often large-scale, where I combine drawing elements with painting, performance and installation, and film/video. I explore the boundaries between the real and the imaginary and investigate one’s ability and willingness to imagine, pretend, dream and suspend disbelief. I am interested in our repressed fears and the sense of wonder engendered through curiosity and dream. I am motivated by people; the particularities, delicacies, sensitivities, beauties and obsessions held within relationships between lovers, siblings/twins, friends, strangers, or themselves. I like to observe the visible (and accessible) interactions between people and the situations they are placed in and re-create my own scenarios and my own environments and narrations. It is my challenge to invite the viewer to dream through my deliberate narration and my obsession with drawing in painting. *
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Merci,
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Guy Berube, Curator