Scrappy

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Juliane Hundertmark, "Vaccinated Beauties," 2021

mixed media on paper. Courtesy of the Gallery.

Opening reception Friday, October 14, 6 - 10pm

Scrappy, featuring works by Kyle Beal, Richard Boulet, Evin Collis, Violet Costello, Beth Frey, Braxton Garneau, Jude Griebel, Juliane Hundertmark, Jon Pylypchuk, Tammy Salzl, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Allison Schulnik and Fischli & Weiss.

I’ve had the word “Scrappy” fermenting in my brain for over a decade, following an artist tour with Jon Pylypchuk at his solo exhibition at Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montréal. I had been puzzling over common ways of making at the time; process abstraction (now commonly referred to as zombie formalism) and “sh*t on the floor” (my term) sculptural accumulation were lost on me. I knew there were artists working with scrappy material in a rigorous, thoughtful, and sometimes exquisite way, and others using pristine materials to make things that looked really rough. That was a “scrappy aesthetic” I could feel and value. In addition, the artists I was privileged to know were, nearly all of them, the very definition(s) of scrappy. Thus started a decade+ long cloud of intrusive thoughts about - SCRAPPY.

Scrappy is a term that can imply so many things about art, about us. Pugnacious, feisty, resilient and steadfast, independent, bits and pieces tentatively glued, badly organized or put together, untidy and not very attractive, persistent and combative, surviving against odds. It is a word that aptly describes what the world feels like to me after the past several years, and also describes what we’ve all had to strive to be to get us through the tumult of the present and the questions of the future. All the art presented in this exhibition, coming from artists in Alberta, NY, Barcelona, Berlin, Mexico City, LA, and Munich, is one or many versions of scrappy. I hope this work makes viewers feel something deeply, see some beauty in the imperfect, and feel some joy in their own scrappiness.

David Candler - curator