Gerald Beaulieu: Field Work

With this body of new work, Gerald Beaulieu employs everyday materials to discuss environmental changes on Prince Edward Island, while considering them as small scale indicators of global trends. Depending on how one enters, one encounters either a curtain of jellyfish or a field of tar-covered corn. In the middle are test tubes with wheat, and fish constructed from colourful plastic.

Curated by Mireille Eagan.

Image: Field, 2009. wood, aluminum, wire and tar. Collection of the artist

FEATURE REVIEW EXCERPT

MARC BELL, DID YOO SEE THE EXHIBITION OF THE CHUNKY FLOORS, OWENS ART GALLERY, SACKVILLE, NEW BRUNSWICK. JANUARY 16-FEBRUARY 21, 2010.

Walking in to see Marc Bell’s Did Yoo See the Exhibition of the Chunky Floors at Owens Art Gallery, it’s easy to mistake the artist as a simply a hip cartoonist. But then stepping inside the gallery space it is immediately apparent something more is going on. The enormously high-walled gallery space, in contrast with the eye-level ring, squished full of work circling the room, creates a feeling of reverence. Bell is outside the kitschy, cutesy graphic design-meets-illustration and lo-meets-high brow aesthetics popular on the West Coast and in other hipster hubs. Bell makes “Fine Aht,” a term of his own coining; representing the limbo he works in between fine art and the comic world.

“Doing this and calling it fine I know I can never escape my background of comics,” says Bell.

And yet, anyone familiar with Bell’s serialized comics from Halifax’s alt-weekly newspaper, The Coast, knows how tenuous his ties to the traditional, nay avant-garde, comic strips are. He even received hate mail from comic purists. His freeform, stream-of-consciousness International Doodle Weeks did nothing to help his case as a comic artist.

But the problem wasn’t Bell: it was the medium he was working in. Bell found moving to stand-alone artwork a relief. Kudos to Owens Art Gallery and Bell’s New York City dealer, Adam Baumgold, for recognizing this as Bell’s natural element. I loved Bell’s work in newsprint, but seeing the crisp perfection and Technicolor-delight is dizzying.

Looking too long and hard at Bell’s work is near panic-attack inducing. The density of his impossibly detailed mixed media and illustrations draw you in, but are inevitably too much to process. You don’t fall into Bell’s work—you drown. The best way I found to view them is with a sort of visual-osmosis, letting Bell’s play of colour, texture, surface, medium and meaning percolate... MIKE LANDRY