Visiting Artists Exhibition: Mario Doucette & Liza Eurich

Artist Talks: Friday, June 17, 2016, 6:00 – 7:00 PM
Opening Reception: Friday, June 17, 2016, 7:00 – 9:00 PM

Each year Open Studio selects four professional artists with or without printmaking experience to create traditional and/or experimental works in the print medium of their choice, working collaboratively with a print media artist. The Visiting Artist Residency, in operation since 1983, is a popular program that receives applications from artists from around the world. In conjunction with the residency, each artist exhibits the work produced during their period in the Studio and gives an artist talk. These exhibitions are the result of this intensive work period. The second of two Visiting Artist exhibitions feature work by artists Mario Doucette and Liza Eurich. The accompanying brochure, with essays by Jennifer Winter and Kendra Ainsworth, is available upon request.

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Mario Doucette: Dispersions

Mario Doucette has recently transitioned towards oil painting to further immerse himself in the genre of history painting. Painters historically understood the value of printmaking, and many fostered close relationships with printmakers. It is this type of collaborative work that Doucette undertook during the Visiting Artist Residency program at Open Studio, working with a skilled printer using intaglio printmaking techniques to recreate compositions from recent paintings. This project also involves an ongoing attempt to further Doucette’s research on the art of propaganda. His work stems from the hypothesis that history is a lie that no one ever questions. Often artists were obligated to convey an official message, sometimes largely tainted by political motivations, thus evoking an incomplete version of the facts. This is certainly the case of the artists who represented the history of the Acadians in Canada. It is a history that is often a one-sided perspective from a Colonial British viewpoint, which presented the Acadian population in terms of a problem that needed to be solved. The residency at Open Studio adds to the series of works that presents a new version of history, shedding light on our colonial past, reframing key figures and exposing false ideas.

Mario Doucette is an Acadian artist from Moncton, NB. He is a painter but also works with video, digital animation, performance and Super8 film. In 2004, after a residency in the French village of Brouage, he created Histoires, a series of works combining drawing and painting that reflects on the effects of colonialism. He has been featured in many exhibitions in several Canadian museums and galleries, notably at Toronto’s ROM where he was a Sobey Art Award finalist in 2008. He recently contributed work to Oh Canada in 2012 (MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA), The Painting Project in 2013 (Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal, QC), and Shine a Light: Canadian Biennial in 2014 (National Art Gallery, Ottawa, ON). He is currently working on a new series of paintings and sculptures called Harias. Mario Doucette is represented by Galerie Division (Montréal/Toronto).

Mario Doucette’s residency is supported by the New Brunswick Arts Board.

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Liza Eurich: Staging

Liza Eurich completed her BFA from Emily Carr University in 2010 and her MFA from Western University in 2012. She co-publishes the online project Moire and recently completed international residencies in the UK at Glasgow Sculpture Studios and Acme Studios. Her work has been exhibited by MKG127, Neutral Ground, Hamilton Artists Inc., Plug-In ICA, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, the McIntosh Gallery, and the Power Plant Gallery. She has forthcoming exhibitions at Open Studio and G Gallery.

Visibility can be understood in a broad context, oscillating between prominent and impressive displays to the desire for withdrawal and deferral. Throughout the culture industry, there is an increasing demand to generate work that performs, whereby transparency and legibility allow it to be speedily and easily consumed.¹ Reversing this approach is the foregrounding of work that hides—that obfuscates. Through mechanisms of misalignment, layering and transparency these prints intend to conceal; in doing so they attempt to delay perception, complicating immediate and spectacular consumption.

¹Adorno, Theodor. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein, 98-106. New York, New York: Routledge, 2001.

Exhibition Brochure: Download Brochure Here