A Conversation with Damian Moppett
Art Gallery of Alberta Executive Director and Chief Curator Catherine Crowston joins artist Damian Moppett in a discussion of his practice and latest installation in the latest edition of #AGAlive
Thanks to an Alberta Foundation for the Arts Public Art Commission grant, the Art Gallery of Alberta has commissioned renowned contemporary Canadian artist Damian Moppett to create an installation for long-term display in the AGA Atrium. The work, Untitled Abstract Drawing in Space, was installed right before the gallery closed its doors to the public.
The installation is intended to be a scaled-up sketch that occupies the space in the AGA’s atrium as if it was drawn in the air. Shapes and lines are fabricated out of cut aluminum plate, which have been arranged and painted to recreate a ‘fast’ artistic abstract drawing. Moppett’s recent large-scale public sculptures have all been centred around the idea of making a relatively ‘quick’ drawing or painting into a large three-dimensional sculpture while still trying to convey the immediate graphic simplicity of the original drawing or painting. Untitled Abstract Drawing in Space maintains the qualities of a sketch and blows them up to larger than life scale.
Thursday, June 11
About the presenters
Catherine Crowston is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Alberta, having joined the gallery in 1998. From 1994-1997, Crowston was the Director/Curator of the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre (Banff, Alberta) and Editor of the Walter Phillips Gallery Editions. Prior to this, she was Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (1986-1994) and was both an Editor and Chair of the Board of Directors of Fuse Magazine in Toronto (1989-1995).
In 2019, Crowston served on the curatorial team for the Canada Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, which featured the work of the Inuit film and video collective ISUMA. In 2016, she was the Commissioner for the Canada Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture and was Canadian Commissioner for the Sydney Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2002. Under Crowston’s leadership, the Art Gallery of Alberta received two Canadian Museums Association Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Arts Management (2012) and Outstanding Achievement in Exhibitions (2013). She was awarded the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts (2002); the City of Edmonton Salute to Excellence Award (2005); and was inducted into the City of Edmonton Cultural Hall of Fame in 2015.
Over the course of her career, Crowston has curated over 70 exhibitions and overseen the production of numerous national travelling exhibition projects, partnerships and publications. In addition to her work at the AGA, Crowston has taught courses on curatorial practice and public art at the University of Alberta, and currently serves on the MacEwan University Fine Arts Advisory Board. She served as Vice-Chair of the City of Edmonton Public Art Committee (2008-2012) and currently serves on the Board of the Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization.
Damian Moppett (b. 1969, Calgary, Alberta; lives/works: Vancouver) has long been engaged with the processes and materials of painting and sculpture, and their histories, which he uses for the construction of his own vernacular. In his work, Auguste Rodin and Mike Kelley hold court alongside amateur ceramics and humourous interpretations of classical modernist sculpture. In recent years, the eccentric personal and art historical references found in his earlier works remain significant, but much less overt.
Newer sculptures, paintings, and installations take on more abstracted forms that are more difficult to pin to their referents, as they sit just beyond the limits of figuration. For example, in Moppett's recent work, as in his painting Alan Jarvis Burning Milne Paintings at Six Mile Lake, 1939 (2016), a large work on canvas which appears to be created in an abstract-expressionist style, the artist in fact creates new compositions by citing brushstrokes or marks appearing elsewhere but made unidentifiable through a painstaking and labourious process of translation: tracing free expressionistic gestures on paper, and placing and transferring these using unconventional tools that may not be apparent in the finished work. The process is akin to a sort of record-making, closer to printmaking than painting, and what appears to be immediate in the works is predetermined like a purposeful accident aimed at playing with and commenting on the idea of artistic mastery.
Moppett has an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal, as well as a BFA from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, where he has taught for over a decade. Recent solo exhibitions include Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2016), Simon Fraser University Gallery, Burnaby (2014); Vancouver Art Gallery Off-site (2012); Rennie Collection at Wing Sang, Vancouver (2011); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2010); Yvon Lambert, Paris (2007); Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (2007); Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (2006); and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2005). Moppett has also been included in numerous group exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2016); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2014); Satellite Gallery, Vancouver (2011); Vancouver Art Gallery (2010); Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2006); Yvon Lambert, New York (2006); Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp (2005); White Columns, New York; Galerie Kunstbuero, Vienna (2004); Power Plant, Toronto (2002); and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2002).
Resources
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