In
Medias
Res
an exhibition of
artworks by
Jacqueline O Rogers &
Matthew Talbot-Kelly
Gibsons Public Art Gallery (GPAG)
Sunshine Coast, BC, Canada
January 31 - February 28, 2014
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View of the original “In Medias Res”
exhibition from the entrance
“When born we are literally dropped into the
middle of things - 'in medias res'. We each
grapple with our surroundings, strive to make
sense of it all....
Collectively, our work has lots to do with finding
our way in the world; it is the result of an alchemy
of wonder and imagination and of our
relationship with the impermanence of things.
We hope the audience will enjoy the
juxtapositions, intersections, contradictions, and
narrative questions evoked in this gallery display
of our works.”
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One of the painting/assemblage constellations
in the “In Medias Res” exhibition
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Jacqueline O Rogers and Matthew Talbot-Kelly
met 23 years ago in Ottawa. They were
introduced by Matthew’s dog, Kaya. Today,
they share three children, their ever evolving
house and garden, and various globe trotting,
business and creative adventures.
Their sharing/creating/living relationship is an
intimate, creative and parallel artistic practice.
Their work is focused around a shared
fascination with words, collage, painting,
narrative, film, and architecture. These works
are rarely prescriptive, mostly eschewing
figurative and narrative conventions and
instead inviting the viewer to explore, discover
and make connections.
Though most of these works were produced
separately, at different times and preserve a
sense of autonomy, displayed together they
establish and explore common grounds.
A detail from “The Ruptured Threshold”, a site specific installation by MTK
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Additional details from the “In Medias Res” exhibition.
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Various views of the “In Medias Res” exhibition,
featuring “The Ruptured Threshold”, a site specific installation
by MTK. Mixed media - assemblages, paintings,
found/recycled objects and materials.
This construction is at once an installation, an organizing device/
doorway, and a piece of furniture - the piece houses various
works, including MTK’s “3d Graffiti” interactive iPad app, a video
installation, a children’s seat and a theatre showing MTK’s films.
Evoking Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau, the set of The Cabinet of Dr
Caligari, and a “fast moving” partially deconstructed raft or
hoarding, the piece plays with notions of public and private faces
(facades), liminality, and enclosure, by setting up, concealing
(screening) and revealing (framing) different spatial
configurations in an otherwise spatially banal gallery.
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Detail from the physical set of MTK’s film “Blind Man’s Eye”
Detail from JOR’s mixed media on wood cradle work
“Calling Us Back Why, How”
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Additional views of the “In Medias Res” exhibition,
featuring some of JOR’s stacks and fabric creatures.
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Additional views of the“In Medias Res” exhibition,
including MTK’s interactive “3d Graffiti” app and
a still from his film “Blind Man’s Eye”
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Additional views of the “In Medias Res” exhibition.
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One of the painting/assemblage constellations in the “In Medias Res” exhibition.
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Jacqueline O Rogers is a visual artist and writer who lives and works in a
small Western Canadian town called Gibsons.
Matthew Talbot-Kelly is a Pacific Northwest based artist, filmmaker and
entrepreneur.
The playful and endlessly curious person that is Jacqueline is strongly
evidenced in her artistic practice - bold colors, progressive patterns and
strong primal forms. Paint on wood, paper, cloth, the odd bit of metal,
painted stacked blocks, hand sewn puppets are brought into play, playfully,
dynamically. Self taught Rogers likes to get lost in the garden and gather the
essential things of life about her.
Graduate architect Matthew’s works - physical, cinematic and digital explore found and created fragments and implied partial narratives.
His work defies containment by a frame, bursting into three and four
dimensions. Matthew’s experimental 3d collage films - Blind Man’s
Eye (2007) & The Trembling Veil of Bones (2010) - have been screened in
cities all over the world to much acclaim. Through his new media company,
Moving Tales Inc, Talbot-Kelly is the creator of five animated and interactive
apps, and seven interactive Ebooks. Matthew continues to explore his
lifelong interest in film and architecture, both as an animation and vfx
professional and as an amateur pilgrim.
Jacqueline is the co-founder of the new media company Moving Tales Inc.
She is the author of three App/Ebook titles, including the acclaimed 'The
Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross', and the author/illustrator of one of the world’s
first interactive ebooks, 'Elly’s Lost & Found Sounds'.
Matthew started showing his artwork in gallery contexts in the fall of 2013. Jacqueline started showing her artwork in gallery contexts in 2011. www.matthewtalbotkelly.com
www.jacquelineorogers.com
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Detail from JOR’s mixed media on wood cradle work
“thinking about the first time i held a crayon”
Details from MTK’s film
“The Trembling Veil of Bones”
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Introduction to Jacqueline O Rogers
by Jon Peters
The notion of play is intrinsic to human experience - it is our first vehicle
for understanding the world and our position within it, it is the
manifestation of imagination made real, and it is the outlet by which the
single most important human ability presents itself: our ability to create.
Jacqueline O Rogers’ bright, layered paintings are borne from a playful
spirit - they are questions asked and answers revealed (slowly). Not
about the tangible world but about our own interpretation of it, they are
windows to her self-reflection, and mirrors to our own.
A visceral palette of cerulean blue and turquoise, red, yellow, and
black, combines over wood panel to form a deeply complex work that
recedes deeper into space than expected from the flatness of her
picture plane. Through the proximity of bright blue colors and deep
reds, the eye buzzes forward and back, as though the picture itself
were breathing, a welcoming escape from the jarring reality of lived
experience into a nuanced, liminal space that allows for our reflection
on it. For the artist, the work “shapes itself around the making of
meaning in a subjective world”, and her poetic approach to art making
is immediately visible through the honest, soulful treatment of her
materials.
nothingness and wholeness; a direct link to her mindful meditation on
our ability to perceive the world subjectively.
Her impulse to document with sensibility the deep and slow-moving
currents of human experience is not without contemporaries. There
exists a current focus on the universal in the art world – a return to the
idioms and concerns of movements that were often shunned by
Contemporary Art. The recent revival of Arte Povera and its current
practitioners – artists like Mike Nelson of Great Britain and local
practitioners Gareth Moore and Geoffrey Farmer, signals a shift in the
conscience of Art with a capital ‘A’; a move away from gloss and glitter
into the subtle, accessible, and real. It is within this context O Rogers
operates, shirking the idea of art for art’s sake in preference of art for
introspection.
Jacqueline O Rogers’ works are compassionate, allegorical
manifestations of the uneasy idea of a finite existence. They allow for a
suspended temporality that shares a sensibility with poetry and story
telling for its transcendent ability to whisk us away. It is once we’ve
accepted her invitation that we’re allowed to join in on her playfulness,
reminded that we, too, are creative.
It is her process in arriving to her images that is accessed in our
viewing of them, layers of paint are accumulated to conflate
interpretation, and then sanded down to reveal it once more. This
dynamism allows for a work rife with compassionate energy, a voice
that invites us enthusiastically to consider what it means to exist, and
how creativity is perhaps our only way to grasp at our true meaning.
And while the work is certainly abstract, the repeated representation of
circles or O’s is a semiological expression of both
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Detail from JOR’s mixed media on wood cradle work
“close up of the conjured detail”
Detail from MTK’s assemblage
“framed”
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Introduction to Matthew Talbot-Kelly
by Jon Peters
Matthew Talbot-Kelly’s experimental films (Blind Man’s Eye and The
Trembling Veil of Bones) find protagonists oscillating between the real
and the imagined, leaving his audience to wonder whether our world is
in fact universal, or perhaps the accumulation of a vast number of
individual experiences and memories. His work applies the physicality of
dimensional space into the irregularity of the unconscious mind, through
the rigor of process owing to his formal training in architecture, the
opportunities of 3d digital space and creative operations learned in the
creation of his physical assemblages.
If space is the spiritual dimension of architecture, Talbot-Kelly is perhaps
also its geographer, mapping out this internal environment as though it
were the real, alluding to physicality previously untold. This idea is
reinforced through a number of seductive still and animated gesture
studies, where both their aesthetic and ethos borrow from Robert
Motherwell. In his 3D Graffiti series, painterly strokes rotate within the
camera’s frame, receding and advancing from space in an endless loop.
The effect is one of abstraction and inversion, where our expectation of
flat surface is confused by the spatiality of the interior animated realm,
only to be reinforced once more by the graphic quality of black figure on
white ground. This oscillation is at the core of the artist’s work, where
vague boundaries between internal and external realities are broken
down.
It is often said we are more aware of a thing through its absence. This
strategy of overtly decentralizing our perspective - by not framing the
expected - allows his audience to confront, in an oblique way, the role
our own interpretations of an experience may affect its true reality. In this
sort of solipsism, what remains after we move beyond the liminal
boundaries of our lived experience is what Talbot-Kelly describes as
“nostalgia for the future”, a longing for an experience not yet lived or
recorded. It would not be a long reach to identify within the artist’s
practice the influence of Surrealism and Dada, art movements very
engaged with similar ideas of the absurd, psychic space, automation,
and chance.
In describing the 3D Graffiti series, the artist recalls his mark making as
a process of discovery, implying the marks inherent existence and his
chancing upon them. His collage work is equally susceptible to whims
and discovery, where an assemblage of found objects unites in
diagrammatical compositions reminiscent of maps or architectural plans.
This mode of working exists even in his 3d cinematic work, where
streetscapes and characters manifest through an assemblage of created
and found digital models, filmed elements, and scanned images. The
result is an oscillation between real and imagined spaces, between
image plane, dimensional object and architectural experience, each
aspect relying on the found and discovered nature to give shape and
body to the work.
Matthew Talbot-Kelly’s work operates under two separate but parallel
motifs; the first being the use of chance and improvisation as production
tools, and secondly the manifestation of psycho-space into the real. His
dialectical reconfiguration of our world allows us to reinterpret our
relationship to it, that we are all affected by our own past experiences,
and that these accrue over time to control our own behaviour. It is
through giving up control that he illuminates the profound affect
discovery and the imagined can have on our lives, and by reinstating
these found objects into a concrete dimensional composition illustrates
this internal world as having a place outside of our imaginations, as
having a literal affect on our physical world as well.
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Detail from MTK’s assemblage
“untitled 02”
Detail from JOR’s mixed media on wood cradle work
“beneath motionless trees”
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In Medias Res ~ An Exhibition of Things
The turn of phrase “In Medias Res” (in the middle of things) presents
some evocative ideas and questions to me.
That things are unfolding; incomplete; in process - that the residual
story of these things continues. The phrase also implies that one is
engaged, occupied, focussed on the present, looking neither forward
nor backward. A beginning implies a gathering of energies, an end
evokes a sense of completion and release - the middle of things is the
tension of the present, the here and now.
I also like that the phrase implies a centre around which activity takes
place. To be in the middle of things is where the action is, to be
immersed in the creative waters, to be inside the circle.
The wisdom that one should appreciate the journey as much as the
destination also comes to mind. Our journey carries on, never
completely stopping at any station. Instead we move from one thing to
another seamlessly. A perceptual continuum. The phrase raises the
question if there are any endings to things. Or beginnings.
To be in the middle might also refer to our age, being in the middle of
our lives. Certainly middle age is where Jacqueline and I find ourselves
today. It is a good place to be.
Please, step in and join us in this exhibition of things, you are most
welcome.
Matthew Talbot-Kelly
Because we are born into a continuum, we are, each and every one of
us, dropped into the middle of a story, at every given moment of our
lives, from birth to death. In living my life, I try to remain open and willing
to respect the mystery of the unforeseeable - to turn left when I planned
on turning right… For better or worse, unpredictable elements are built
into the journey of living, and endlessly place us in the middle of new
stories. For me, this notion applies equally to the process of making something
within the journey. Because we live in an ever changing world with many
always evolving middles, I find it useful to be ready to unexpectedly
renew and exchange the kinds of metaphors we use to describe it.
Process oriented art is shaped around mystery - always steering me
back to new middles, always offering up endless new ways of placing
the this, and the that against me as I attempt to define and redefine my
relation to the world. The same way we don’t have to understand what life means in order to
live it, so to, we needn’t understand what’s inside ourselves to let it
come alive on the page. By accepting that we are part of an endless
stream of change, and that anything we produce is subject to the
irrevocable laws of change, makes everything possible. Therein lies the
great adventure of both living a fluent and imaginative life, and staying
open to inscrutable acts of creativity within it.
Jacqueline O Rogers
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Detail from MTK’s assemblage
“wood architecture”
Detail from JOR’s mixed media on wood cradle work
“view from the window of an abandoned house”
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“In Medias Res”
Artworks by Jacqueline O Rogers & Matthew Talbot-Kelly
Gibsons Public Art Gallery (GPAG)
Sunshine Coast, BC, Canada
January 31 - February 28, 2014
Enquiries: [email protected]
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