Abby Fong, Tim Rechner, Conzo, John Boletta and Jfry Craig will be showing in Monterrey MX. at the Galeria en el Taller Mecanico. The show is presented by El narval in association with Nrmal, Marco, KiCK and made possible with funding from the Alberta Foundation for the arts.
Stayed tuned for lots of blog entries about the show in the next few days.
Artistat
The distance travelled in kilometres by artists Abby Fong, Conz, Tim Rechner, Jon Boletta, Jfry Craig and Terry Miller from Alberta to Quebec so that they could help create an exterior mural for Théâtre Ste-Catherine (264 Ste-Catherine W.): 2,908
After living in Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax, Tim Rechner has been in Edmonton working as a full time artist since 2001. Rechner studied art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, working in the mediums of painting, drawing, installation and film. Tim Rechner is inspired by the uninhibited process with which young children create art and aspires to create similar pure aesthetic expressions with brushes and other mark making tools.
Suite à Vancouver, Montréal et Halifax, Tim Rechner s'est installé à Edmonton travaillant en tant qu'artiste à temps plein depuis 2001. Rechner a étudié l'art au Collège d'art et de Design de la Nouvelle-Écosse, étudiant des médiums tels que la peinture, le dessin, l'installation et le film. Tim Rechner s'inspire du procédé sans inhibitions avec lequel les enfants créent de l'art et aspire à la création d'expressions d'esthétique pure similaires avec des pinceaux et une panoplie d'autres instruments.
artist statement
I work in a free, instinctive way in the mediums of drawing and painting. Explosive, frenzied, chaotic visual energy is the core component of the work I produce. Impulse and intuition play key roles in my process. While I utilize a stream of consciousness approach in mapping out my composition and applying surges of color, to state that this work is a complete and direct expression of subconscious action would be untrue. The art produced is instead the result of a collaboration between the subconscious and conscious minds as contemplative aesthetic response often plays an important role in the creation of the artwork.
My installations explore unions and juxtapositions of painting and drawing as well as foreground and background within the gallery setting. I create environments that are charged with electric slashes of brushwork, line and color. What is constructed is a visually dominating, architectural, abstract language of floor to ceiling aesthetic mayhem with very little negative space.
Throughout the past ten years I have extensively studied abstract expressionist sources from the New York school of the 1940’s and 1950’s. I have always been drawn to dynamic, emotive mark making and the more physical side of abstract painting and drawing. Having been an active contributor to the Edmonton visual arts scene for nearly six years, I am well aware of the strong tradition of formalist color field painting that is prevalent within this city. The University of Alberta painting department as well as many established Edmonton painters have immortalized Clement Greenberg theory. In this aesthetic climate, Barnett Newman and Clifford Still have been favoured abstract painting sources. The Emma Lake workshops in northern Saskatchewan during the 1960’s and 1970’s had a profound influence on painters in many western Canadian cities, especially Edmonton. I however have looked more upon abstract expressionist sources such as Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, Matta, Motherwell and Kline. My artwork has also drawn heavily on Twombly, Rauschenberg, Basquiat, Riopelle and Borduas. I value the passion and poetry with which these artists created work. Similar qualities of emotive, chaotic, impulse make my work quite unique among artists in Alberta.
These same dynamic qualities attract my eye to artwork produced by young children (particularly under the age of five). Over the past few years I have began accumulating a large resource library of such artwork. I am in awe of the raw, reckless, spontaneous courage and confidence that young children naturally possess when facing a painting or drawing surface.
