Black and White with Storylines

Opening Reception Thursday 27 August at 8 pm In the Spring of 2009, the Dalhousie Art Gallery invited Ron Shuebrook, a senior Canadian painter based in Guelph, Ontario, to exhibit an overview of his current work. In concert with this, Shuebrook was asked to suggest the name of a younger artist – for whom he played a mentoring role and with whom he now has a relationship based on mutual peer respect – that he would like to share the exhibition space with. Based on Shuebrook’s recommendation, Peter Dykhuis, Director/Curator of the Gallery, initiated a three-way conversation with Shuebrook and Ottawa artist Carol Wainio who was happy to continue a conversation begun with Shuebrook in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where Shuebrook was a teacher and Wainio was a student. Each artist has since established significant national reputations for their uncompromising studio practices. Known for his commitment to abstract and non-representational painting, Shuebrook is also respected as a talented colourist. This exhibition, however, combines recent paintings with earlier constructions and collages that are explorations in black, white and the spectrum of grays in between. Stripped of the seduction of colour, these works share many formal affinities with the drawings that Shuebrook has also abundantly produced throughout his career. Whereas Shuebrook’s work is often on the edge of constructing pictorial space, Wainio’s paintings create landscapes framed by book-like towers and populated with fictional figures from childhood storybooks and the bric-a-brac of children’s footwear and toys. Both artists, however, share strong formal concerns about how their ‘figures’ integrate into or weave through the ‘grounds’ of their spatial constructions. An illustrated exhibition catalogue will be published in mid-September and will include an essay about Shuebrook’s black and white work written by Toronto visual arts critic and author Gary Michael Dault, and an essay by Shuebrook about Wainio’s latest paintings.