COLOUR BURST

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Chila Kumari Burman

Chila Kumari Burman, "Desi Style," 2010-2013

mixed media, courtesy of Surrey Art Gallery, photo by Scott Massey

Opening Reception Friday, September 15 | 6pm - 8pm 

Colour Burst is not an exhibition about colour but an exhibition of colour. Colour Burst presents an exuberantly colourful display of local, national and international works assembled from artists and from collecting institutions in British Columbia. The exhibition opens the 2017-18 season at the Art Gallery at Evergreen.

Colour Burst features works that explore and exploit formal relationships between works of colour. As colour emerged as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product, in the twentieth century, long held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific veracity of particular colours dissipated. In fact, many artists began to look at colour as a ready-made object, reinventing the material practice of painting. Such practices, – a kind of colour chart sensibility – by the middle of the twentieth century, were associated to a rhetoric that favored the democratization of art. The reference points for these artists was to acknowledge colour’s role in everyday life and industrial or consumer culture, rather than as occupying a transcendent realm. They positioned themselves and their work not as an exclusive but as a part of the real world - as exemplified by the blunt utilitarianism of the housepainter's color chart.

Within recent years a nationwide obsession with dull neutrality became predominant in western cultural preferences. Colour Burst reveals a critical response to the way colour has been industrialized and standardized into colour charts or colour-coding systems. This commercial demand for consistency has eliminated a host of subtle variations. A combination of deregulatory economics and a heavily commercialized and materialistic culture has amplified a chromophobia,

Chila Kumari Burman, Desi Style (2010-2013) Courtesy of Surrey Art GalleryPhoto by Scott Massey

or fear of colour. As artist and critic David Batchelor makes clear in his book entitled Chromophobia, a chromophobic impulse - a fear of corruption or contamination through color - lurks within much of Western cultural and intellectual thought. Chromophobia is marked, not just by the desire to eradicate colour, but also to control and master its forces. When we do use color, there’s a sense that it needs to be controlled and ordered; that there are rules to its use, either in terms of its quantity or its symbolic applications.

Cultural preferences have deep-seated histories, associations, and legacies. The very idea of ‘good taste’ in the selection, arrangement and application of colour in artistic and environmental contexts is highly influenced by arbitrary social and cultural conventions that are played out on home improvement televisions shows and home furnishing catalogue designers. Within western culture, the absence of colour represents order and rationality, and thus colour remains dangerous and disruptive; it threatens chaos and irregularity. Colour Burst takes a critical position in the relationship of art with the wider world in which it is situated.

Brief descriptions of the work:

Colour Burst presents audiences with an exuberant display of local, national and international works assembled from collecting institutions in British Columbia. The exhibition will feature work in a variety of media from paintings to prints to mixed media from such artists as Andy Warhol, Kenneth Noland, Joan Balzar, Michael Morris, B.C. Binning, Ellsworth Kelly, Alan Wood, Jack Shadbolt, Robert Davidson, David Ostrem, Gary Lee-Nova, Chila Kumari Burman, Josef Albers, Greg Curnoe, Roy Kiyooka, Ann Kesler Sheilds and Frank Stella.

Artwork on loan from Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Richmond Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, and Simon Fraser University Art Collection.