Inbetweening: Nick Novak Fellowship Exhibition

Philippe Blanchard, Work in progress, video still, HD, 2016.


Main Gallery
Inbetweening: Nick Novak Fellowship Exhibition
Philippe Blanchard
October 21, 2016 – November 19, 2016

Artist Talk Time: 6:00 – 7:00 PM

Each year, Open Studio awards two, yearlong residencies to artists of merit. The Nick Novak Fellowship is awarded to an artist currently involved with Open Studio as an artist member.

Recipients are provided with rent-free access to Open Studio facilities for a period of one year, materials allowance, professional development assistance, and tuition-free access to Open Studio’s education program. This exhibition is a result of this intensive work period. An artist’s talk accompanies the exhibition.

Philippe Blanchard, 2015-16 Nick Novak Fellow, is a Toronto-based artist and teacher at OCAD University. His recent work explores printmaking and animation as expanded art forms, using the reaction of coloured lighting and printed pigment to generate the illusion of movement through sound and light installations. His approach attempts to de-familiarize the viewing of moving images, inviting renewed curiosity at animation’s fundamentally illusionistic and magical properties. Philippe Blanchard’s installation work has been shown at the National Museum of Print (Mexico City), Festival Chromatic (Paris), Wayhome Festival (Oro-Medonte ON), Idea Exchange (Cambridge ON) and Galerie Glendon/York University (Toronto ON).

With Inbetweeening, Blanchard is further exploring intersections between printmaking and animation. Rectangular frame, repetition, layering and image registration provide a common vocabulary between printmaking and animation, a base to elaborate upon and to challenge. In a departure from his light-based installation work, Blanchard works from a series of screenprinted collage materials created from hand painted originals. Blanchard then treats these as modular compositional elements in mural works that evolve and coalesce over time in a form of improvised animation. Throughout the project, process and result, intentionality and indeterminacy, permanence and ephemerality alternate as guiding principles to ultimately result in a layered piece that challenges these binaries. The exhibition consists in a final collaged installation juxtaposed with stop-motion iterations of the elements being reorganized over time.

You can access the exhibition brochure here.

Exhibition Brochure: Download Brochure Here