Press

Galleries, Museums

Area art bought by rental bank

By FREE PRESS STAFF
Works by London-region artists are included in a major series of acquisitions by the Art Bank with a total value of about $280,000.

Londoners David Merritt, with Untitled (Heart Breaker), and Laura Millard, with Lac Des Arc: Skate II, and Bothwell-area photographer Larry Towell, with No Man's Land, figure among 79 works from 1,840 submissions.

The Art Bank has 18,700 Canadian artworks which it rents to government offices, corporations and private businesses.

Canadian Art Review of Flicker

Laura Millard

Jeffrey Coploff Fine Art, New York
Featured within a group show entitled "Flicker" at Jeffrey Coploff Fine Art in New York, Canadian artist Laura Millard circumnavigates the fraught territory that connects photography and painting. Millard's work exists somewhere on a hypothetical spectrum on which paintings of photographs (by, say, Gerhard Richter) exist at one end, and photographs of paintings (think Thomas Struth) exist at the other, while refusing to come to rest somewhere between these Germanic extremes. Millard has relentlessly traversed a difficult terrain throughout her career, tackling the experience of the landscape using traditional painterly tools while studiously avoiding painterly landscape conventions. Her destination is phenomenal experience and its visual translation, and the recognition that all images of nature are mediated constructions remains an obstacle on her path she must continually surmount.

In her current series, Millard has turned to photographing ice. The images are blown up and mounted on aluminum. Cropped from all otherworldly referents, clusters of frozen bubbles form impromptu galaxies that drift in a narrow depth of field, confusing the micro and the macro. Ice is rich in elemental evocations: as ephemeral as the passing seasons, or as eternal and immutable as a glacier. At first glance, Millard's project threatens a meltdown in Nordic Romantic fervour. The sheer surface of the photograph, which appears to offer nothing more than a document of a glistening cascade, in fact teems with tiny brushstrokes. Millard assiduously works the surface with warm and cool tints, and it is her painterly intervention that imparts the metallic-like glimmer to these otherwise monochromatic images.

Alterations to prints at the tip of a brush are permissible to a point-to eliminate hairs and dust caught at any stage of the process between the lens and the chemically sensitive paper (an increasingly arcane practice now generally replaced equivalent). Millard takes the doctoring of photographs to a pathoa photograph 30 x 30 cm logical extreme, advancing outside the borders of photographic convention without crossing into the realm of peinture proper, in which the presence of the artist is commonly announced through bold and commanding strokes. Instead, her approach is ecological, her miniature brushwork like a kind of ground cover, proliferating throughout the image like hardy life forms colonizing an inhospitable environment.

Millard discreetly imparts substance, a tactility that renders sensual the mechanically reproduced highlights and shadows of the photograph. Like pearls adorning sitters in the portraits by old masters, the frozen bubbles possess texture, mass and sheen.

While her images allow us to dwell in all-over compositions of matter, Millard skates deftly around the rhetoric of painterly abstraction by focusing on a salient feature of the photographic image that, remarkably, bears repeating: the photograph is always a manipulation of reality. Millard redresses the limits of photographic objectivity with fictions generated by the hand, in the process creating sublime results. by Christian Giroux

ART REVIEW: Surfaces

Five women and their Surfaces

By Nicole Laidler
Gazette Staff

The unique artistic approaches of five Canadian artists are currently on display at the Michael Gibson Gallery in downtown London.
Cathy Daley, Elizabeth McIntosh, Laura Millard, Gina Rorai and Lorraine Simms each use different artistic mediums and explore different themes to create their work.

Daley works with black oil pastel on vellum. Her whimsical drawings depict disembodied party-dresses and slender female legs that end in stiletto shoes. Daley's dresses have an ephemeral quality, encouraging the viewer to question the relationship between fashion, fantasy and female identity.

McIntosh is the youngest artist of the group. Her large, colourful oil-on-canvas paintings are clearly influenced by pop art, presenting minimalist patterns of abstract shapes painted in cheerful primary colours against a white canvas. The paintings make an immediate visual impact, but offer little for further contemplation.

On the other hand, Millard's cool mixed media works merit closer consideration. Millard begins with microscopic photographs of ice and then applies paint in response to the abstraction already found in nature. "Surge/Freeze" seems to capture the movement of light on water and snow, but the photographs actually depict air bubbles frozen in ice.

Rorai's oil-on-canvas paintings are the most traditional works on display. Although abstracted by her bold use of paint, the objects in these interior scenes remain easily identifiable. Rorai paints images of other images, such as paintings and photographs, surrounded by everyday domestic objects.

The foreboding atmosphere of Simms' oil-on-linen paintings makes them slightly out of place among the other works. The Montreal native is fascinated by an image's ability to tell a story and the inherent ambiguity surrounding the truth presented in pictures. Although painted in oranges, reds, yellows and pinks, the shadowy, ambiguous nature of Simms' imagery creates an unsettling effect.
Although Surfaces brings together five seemingly different artists, the exhibit is unified by the vitality and conviction inherent in each work.
Surfaces runs until May 31 at the Michael Gibson Gallery (157 Carling St.). Admission is free.