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Collector's items >> Canadian art makes good at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery by KEITH MARCHAND
This is the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery of Concordia University, located in the pink and mint-green bomb-shelter known as the McConnell Building. The present exhibition, rather dryly titled Five Years of Collecting: A Selection of New Acquisitions, shows that, since Karen Antaki took over the directorship five years ago, they are coming much closer to achieving their goals: to display what is the gallery's mandate of Canadian art, while remaining an educational source for the university and the broader community. This is obvious by the ratio of strong, recent acquisitions, as opposed to the weaker work from the gallery's earlier history. Things are not quite right when Peter Krausz and Tony Scherman--two excellent painters in their own right--are represented with strong and significant canvases, while Paterson Ewen and Mousseau show up as inconsiderable little studies in abstraction. Obviously, the gallery's shamefully restrictive budget obstructs it from having a comprehensive Canadian collection. But, as I said, things are changing. It seems that the Ellen gallery's strongest suit is contemporary art, which works swimmingly with Concordia's excellent reputation as a margin-pushing fine-arts school. And with new exhibitions being mounted at an ambitious rate of once every six weeks, the role of purveyor of the largely here-and-now falls to Antaki and crew. Judging from the fact that over 100,000 people have been through its doors over the past five years, and from the usually excellent quality of exhibitions that it has hosted, the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery is doing quite well. While some slack-jawed collegiate-types still slough past the gallery on the way to the Pizza Hut kiosk without even a passing glance, the institution has nevertheless enriched campus life and should be considered a source of pride. The community needs art education as much as it needs amply funded math and science programs if we're ever going to agree on any sort of Canadian cultural identity. All of this talk of art's role in the community brings us to another facet of the exhibition. Five Years of Collecting is dedicated to the memory of Ann Duncan, the Gazette art critic who passed away last year, and who spent 10 years as an art-writer, reporting on and supporting the Montreal art scene. The exhibition is intended to be a launching point for the Ann Duncan Award for Visual Art, which will be granted to an undergraduate student in fine arts who will be given internship at the gallery for one year. The portion of the exhibition which stands out as especially strong is the section devoted to photography. Aside from the more Canadian-content names (like Geneviève Cadieux and Jana Sterbak), there are some less-exposed artists in the show. Tim Clark's "The Melancholy of Maleness" is a diptych utilizing and blending antiqued, 20th-century photography and renaissance images. David Duchow's sepia soaked "Hinchinbrooke River" is gentle, poetic and pretty. Angela Grauerholz gives new meaning to the terms dark and moody with the difficult, yet compelling "Moon." In the painting camp, Tony Scherman offers up two show-stopping works using the all-but-forgotten lore of encaustic painting and "Napoleon's Last Shave," which demonstrates the healthy new direction that portraiture has taken. Sara Stevenson's piece, consisting of a vessel made of fabric suspended above the plans for its design, is simple, elegant and, for some reason, visually arresting. The show has some successes and some mediocre moments, but remains interesting and engaging throughout.
Five Years of Collecting: a Selection of New Acquisitions is at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 1400 De Maisonneuve until Dec. 2 |
Nestled in the heart of what might just hold the title for the city's ugliest building lies an excellent gallery that is, unfortunately, often overlooked by mainstream art-watchers.