Christopher Donnelly, Ewan McNeil, Reece Terris: Builders
to
Pendulum Gallery 885 W Georgia St, Vancouver, British Columbia V6C 3E8
Christopher Donnelly, "Trial," 2013
mixed media, 61" x 71" x 48”
There is a subset of artists that are also professional contractors and builders. The work of these artists is directly informed by their involvement in the construction and building trades. They share a common interest and appreciation of how things are made and the history behind the shaping of our man-made environment, acutely aware of the impact the materials and processes they use in their working lives can have on their art making practices.
Christopher Donnelly makes sculptures employing both the materials and the tools of the building trades. Traditional joinery techniques are pushed to extremes turning easily recognizable materials into beautifully crafted visions of elegant absurdity and tension. Underlying this work are the descriptive drawing techniques of architectural blueprints. His sculptures often suggest the cutaway and the axonometric image, referring the physical thing back to its instructive illustration, reimagined through the lens of dada and the ready-made.
In the work of Ewan McNeil, the focus lies in the stripping down of the formal qualities of a building or structure to its basic forms and replaying these through a painted reproduction of a photographic reproduction. The source images are appropriated from film and the internet; media landscapes which consider architectures fundamental influence on our lives. His work is inspired by the form of these structures and the underlying ideas that impact their design and construction.
In some cases, the art that is produced is a direct response to the place itself. Reece Terris provides us with a site-specific work and its photo documentation, the results of a residency that took place in Lichtenstein in 2015. Here, the buildings and their geographic location are of historical and political significance: during WW2 this was the site of a forced-labor camp and prisoners were compelled to construct the original dam. The history of the structures and their current re-use as a location for artistic exploration informed the intervention that Terris staged, involving the construction and placement of large signs on top of the buildings – Work Camp over one set of buildings, Art Camp over another - with the resulting B&W photographs portraying the bucolic melancholy that infuses this place.