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The Exhibition paragraph at Galerie Grita Insam is presenting Eric Glavin, Tania Kitchell and Nestor Krüger, three artists who are representing the younger generation of Canadian artists. Tania Kitchell (born 1970) was introduced to the Viennese public in several group shows and one solo exhibition (2002) at Galerie Grita Insam. Eric Glavin (born 1965) was Artist-in-Residence on invitation of ORTE Architekturnetzwerk Niederösterreich and taking part in the exhibition „… and in between …“ at Galerie Grita Insam. Nestor Krüger (born 1965) had many solo exhibitions in Canada and was invited to the 7. Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates).
paragraph presents thematically serialized works by three Toronto based Canadian artists. Nestor Krüger’s Calendar are digital prints depicting used and crumpled office desk-calendar pages—in this case each of the days paragraph is on view in Vienna. Eric Glavin’s sleek frontal elevations idealize existing industrial, governmental and commercial architecture. Tania Kitchell shows a series of atmospheric, low-res images of snow-covered roads. In each of these projects the artists have employed computers as a primary tool, and all are created using desk-top software programs. While Kitchell’s images are most immediately recognized as “photographs”, they are printed using the same digital print technology as Krüger’s and Glavin’s images, and as such, raise similar questions about what we are seeing.
TaniaKitchell’s images are sourced from internet web cams used to monitor weather and road conditions. After downloading she overlays a time and date, temporally fixing ‘photographs’ that otherwise remain anonymous. We are given no information about the location – what road or even what country we are in. We could be looking at North America Europe or Asia. We know when but not where, and are frustrated in our desire to understand more about their hallucinatory sense of “place.” For me as a Canadian viewer, they tap into a deep seated nostalgia around winter and winter travel, contorted and romanticized through their bird’s eye, cinemagraphic view.
Eric Glavin takes photographic studies of extant buildings—of generic and utilitarian modernist design—before rendering and abstracting them as computer files. Where Kitchell’s work is closely aligned with photography, Glavin’s is more properly appreciated as painting. His reductive schemas play on the post-war, pan-global alignment of Modernism with the need for cheap and quickly made industrial and commercial architecture. In doing this Glavin’s purified renderings return the buildings to the drafting table, eradicating the passage of time and the idiosyncrasies of their built contexts, and so give equal pairing to the relationship between their brutal banalities and exquisite harmonies.
NestorKrüger’s images, like Glavin’s, are created exclusively as a “painted” digital files, but here a curious loop is created if one imagines that the pages Kruger bases his recreations on probably began as a digital files in the printing house that makes this kind of desk calendar. Further, Kruger’s digital portraits appear as renderings of discarded pages from the ‘real world’, but more accurately create an ellipsis around it. The existence of the paper pages as real things is the central fiction, as Kruger probably never crumpled up the paper in order to render it. Calendar is a fake—a digital hardcopy of the idea of a hardcopy of a digital file.
Each of the images in this exhibition, by each of the three artists, looks realist. They depict ‘something’ that can be appreciated for its contextual specificity. paragraph shows us images of existing buildings, real weather conditions, and what appears to be a used calendar. They are images of the things in the world. But in contradiction to normative ideas about what might constitute a ‘realist’ project, the information about what, precisely, we are looking at is withheld. What was (possibly) specific has been abstracted, and while Kitchell, Glavin and Kruger point to the destabilization of meaning within a world of increasingly digitized representation, they direct our interest and attention to how a desire for specificity might lead toward greater precision and away from the act of portrayal.
Reid Shier, Curator –The Power Plant, Toronto
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