BLINK ARTIST PROFILES
John Climenhage
Known for his landscapes and cityscapes, long time Peterborough artist John Climenhage’s BLINK installation will feature stylized oil painting, which reflects everyday life. The artist has painted various series of cityscapes, bridges, businesses and public buildings in both the Peterborough area and beyond. In this site-specific work, Climenhage will uses the city of Peterborough as both his inspiration and his canvas – painting directly onto the glass of a downtown display window. As Climenhage states, this BLINK installation “continues with a longstanding body of work about observation and perception.” In this site-specific work, Climenhage will give pause to reflect on our own perceptions and understandings of the day-to-day worlds we inhabit.
Peterborough Square Simcoe & Water Streets
The Graphic History Collective
Graphic History Collective (GHC) is a group of artists and writers, working in both Peterborough and Vancouver, who aim to raise awareness around social justice issues via comics and graphic novel imagery. For their BLINK installation, the GHC will install graphic panels from their recent body of work, The Graphic History Project. Sean Carleton, member of the GHC states: “For this project, we brought together writers and illustrators from across North America to produce, on a volunteer basis, a number of short graphic histories of resistance that illustrate the various ways people from a diversity of backgrounds and experiences have fought for economic and social justice.” Through the accessible yet complex medium of comics, the GHC exists at the intersection between history, politics, art and activism to engage a broad array of publics.
Peterborough Public Library 345 Aylmer St N.
Matthew Hayes
Primarily a narrative filmmaker, artist Matthew Hayes departs from this practice to produce a durational video work, and continue to expand his contemporary art practice. This conceptual video will feature a series of scenes from everyday Peterborough life in extreme slow motion transforming them into glimpses of shape and motion verging on the unrecognizable. Hayes states: “Especially for those who live and work and spend the majority of their time downtown, the city can become routine and unremarkable. My video project will present people, gestures, places and movements in extreme slow motion, as a means of reinterpreting everyday routines.” Hayes aims to reflect the visual landmarks and gestures of everyday life, which become invisible, to engage viewers in reinterpreting their everyday surroundings.
Custom Copy 171 King St.
Andrew MacDonald
Andrew MacDonald’s work explores the physicality of textiles. He works primarily by twisting, stretching, layering and felting machine-knit and hand woven textiles to produce unique results. MacDonald’s BLINK installation features woven sculptures, highlighting the formal qualities of textiles in a variety of ways. As MacDonald states: “The things I make and the materials I use often shift between the familiar and the uncanny. Sculpture, figure, articles of clothing, and other materials, morph into ambiguous objects and installations that reveal and conceal.” MacDonald’s work explores the ambiguity of form along with themes of memory and materiality, walking the line between the familiar and the unknown.
Hi Ho Silver 392 George St N.
Patrick Moore
Patrick Moore is a visual artist who works in painting, printmaking, photography and sculpture. Moore’s BLINK installation responds to the landscape Assumption, his long time family home. This work explores the powerful role of place in defining our lives and our identities. Moore works with assemblage techniques including: papers, photographs, pressed flowers, pencil sketches, and textured clay. As Moore states: “The viewer will be stimulated to reflect on the different ways in which particular landscapes have been instrumental in the formation of their own identity.” Moore’s work aims to open up a dialogue surrounding landscape, place and selfhood.
Catalina’s Hair Salon 131 Hunter St W.
Tara Azzopardi
Tara Azzopardi’s current artistic practice focuses on collections and artifacts. Azzopardi’s BLINK installation explores the art of window displays and the relationship between artistic composition and consumerism. The artist investigates the history of window displays through a photographic collection of historic Eaton’s display windows. Azzopardi states: “The bulk of these photos are from the late 30’s to early 50’s –they represent a significant transition in our history: and it is here we can see how window displays/installations provided an escape from the economic slump of the great depression.” Azzopardi’s work explores the evolution of display culture, memory and nostalgia, inviting us to reflect on the intersection between art, consumerism, and voyeurism.
Dolce Vita 413 George St N.
Paul Oldham
Paul Oldham is a professional stained glass artisan. Oldham’s BLINK installation features intricately carved suspended wood panels. Oldham first explored the technique of plywood housing to support glass which, due to its fragility, often requires other media such as lead or wood to act as its frame or border. With this installation, Oldham positions this wood housing as an artistic medium in and of itself. Oldham states: “For subject matter, I’m using the decorative patterns found in nature, especially the strange-yet-familiar images of micro- and macro-photography. Patterns of stars in the galaxy. Cell structures in the stem of a plant.” Oldham’s work invites us to re-imagine highly processed wood materials as a complex and organic structure that calls to mind cellular detail and universal expanses simultaneously.
Pammetts Flowers 208 Charlotte St.
Elizabeth Sullivan
Elizabeth Sullivan works primarily in drawing using pencil, charcoal, watercolour and ink. Sullivan creates her work by documenting cityscapes in ten second intervals and then integrating these multiple viewpoints into a single frame. The artist begins by travels through the city, documenting the streets and energy. As Sullivan explains: “I translate these images into a drawing by projecting each photo onto one piece of paper, for a predetermined amount of time. This allows for the gesture, speed and the controlled chaos of the streets to be present in the work.” Sullivan’s visually intricate, gestural and layered style is representation on the verge of abstraction. Sullivan reflects a familiar yet uncanny world back to viewers.
Peterborough Square Courtyard, Charlotte & Water Streets
Joe Stable
Joe Stable has been a Peterborough based artist for almost 40 years. In his artistic practice he is known for working in a wide variety of media. For Stable’s BLINK installation he is reproducing a series of digital drawings dubbed his Picasso Series. In this series, Stable’s loose gestural style captures both balance and motion drawing our attention to creative processes at work. Stable’s new series will be installed on the windows of St. Veronus, referencing the artist’s long time career of exploring line, figuration, and movement on that very site in his upper level studio at the corner of Water and Hunter Streets.
St. Veronus Café and Tap Room, 129 Hunter St W.