Montréal, May 10th 2011. This saturday May 14th, Galerie Division is inaugurating its new space at L’Arsenal with the first Canadian solo exhibition of internationally acclaimed American artist Allison Schulnik (b.1978). The day of the opening,
Schulnik’s clay-animation video “Forest” - commissioned by Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear, and dedicated to their song “Ready, Able” – will be projected in the special project room of L’Arsenal.
Allison Schulnik paints rejects, misfits and their landscapes: “My fixation on these characters is not intended to exploit deficiencies, but to find valour in adversity.” Whether hobos, clowns, misshapen animals or alien beasts, they are usually built upon a human frame which, at times, gives them an awkward humanity. Schulnik’s sculptural use of oil paint references her clay-animation background. A motion-like sensibility provides her paintings unparalleled depth and energy.
Drawing from film, music, cartoons and dance, she likes to blend earthly fact and blatant fiction to form a stage of tragedy,
farce, and raw, ominous beauty -- at times capturing otherworld buffoonery and other times, presenting a simple earthly dignified moment.
The corpus PERFORMANCE was created for this exhibition. The artist explains her approach: The works from PERFORMANCE were inspired by people and creatures around me I know and don’t know, discarded once-sentimental relics, old books, movies, cartoons, flea markets, music, trash, food, dance, history, the Salton Sea, Los Angeles National Forest, cake, black metal, musical theatre, Vikings, Dionne Warwick, etc... These things made their way into my brain and then made a home amongst imagined realities.
Painting to me is another form of dance and movement. For example, Performance #3 is a large painting depicting a mound of characters. I tend to mosey about in a crestfallen, lonely kind of world sometimes with my work, but these feel kind of theatrical - almost like the figures are nesting together and hunkering down in performative glory and flight, or they are just a big mountain of stubborn fools conducting the big lampoon or ridicule.
Galerie Division: L’Arsenal, 2020 William street, Montréal, Qc
For additional information, please contact
Hugues Charbonneau
hcharbonneau@galeriedivision.com
+1.514.476.3650
or Dominique Toutant
dtoutant@galeriedivision.com
+1.514.971.7156