Exceptional
For information about available work, please email info@monteclarkgallery
Monte Clark presents a curated selection of works by Greg Girard, Graham Gillmore, Roy Arden, Guido Molinari, Douglas Coupland, Owen Kydd, Stephen Waddell and Beau Dick. Exceptional showcases a collection of photography, painting and sculptures.
Graham Gillmore
Untitled (Glossary)
1999
Mixed media on collaged ledger paper
108 x 94 in
Graham Gillmore is known for his witty and visually provocative works that deconstruct and twist popular phrases and familiar sentences into visual splendor. Gillmore’s humorous verbal puzzles derive influence from literature, film, cultural theory and generic pop culture.
This exceptional work is from his ledger paper series, a medium for which Gillmore has received critical acclaim in the international market. This notion is further strengthened through the acquisition of one of Gillmore’s large ledger paper works by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. These paper pieces explore Gillmore’s investigation into the organization of language; organic forms enclose and link disparate letters and words in a cacophony of visual splendor, depicting musings on the lives of some of the greatest philosophers, artists, writers and composers. Graham Gillmore creates work that continues to fascinate, challenge and question the viewers’ perception and representation of language with a lethal combination of bewilderment, humour and intellectual curiosity.
Graham Gillmore’s work can be found in numerous private, corporate and public collections in Canada, the United States and abroad, including The Ghent Museum, Belgium, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, and The Museum Of Modern Art in New York City.
Greg Girard
Phantom Shanghai
2006
Archival pigment print
48 x 60 in
Between 2000–2006, Greg Girard photographed the disappearance of buildings, shops, homes and neighbourhoods that didn’t survive Shanghai’s vision of its own future. In 2007, the pictures were exhibited at Monte Clark Gallery, Toronto, accompanied by the publication Phantom Shanghia by Greg Girard. The book quickly sold out and The Independent (UK) listed it as one of the top 10 photography books of all time.
In 2021, five large scale pictures were selected from Phantom Shanghai for the inaugural exhibition, City on the Edge: Art and Shanghai at the Turn of the Millennium, which opened at the new UCCA Edge in Shanghai (formerly known as the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art).
These five large scale photographs make up the only remaining available edition.
Greg Girard’s photographs have been featured in TIME, Newsweek, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and numerous other publications. Girard’s publication list includes:
City of Darkness
Phantom Shanghai
In the Near Distance
Tokyo-Yokosuka 1977–1983
HK:PM Hong Kong Night Life 1974–1989
Under Vancouver 1972–1982
Hanoi Calling: One Thousand Years Now
JAL 76–88
American Stopover
Girard’s work has been exhibited at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, The International Center for Photography, New York, PM Gallery (London, UK), the National Gallery of Canada, the Yixian International Photo Festival (China), and numerous other venues.
Greg Girard, Phantom Shanghai, 2006, archival pigment print
Roy Arden
Rupture
2018
Archival pigment prints
43 x 24 in
Rupture is derived from nine ‘archival’ photographic images depicting the event known as Bloody Sunday in Vancouver in 1938. These prints were made directly from negatives in the collection of the Vancouver Public Library Historical Photographs Division. The archival images, which had been cropped for emphasis and composition, depicted the occupation of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Main Post Office by unemployed men demanding relief from the civic government. They were subsequently evicted by means of tear gas and ritualistically beaten. Bloody Sunday remained the most significant physical manifestation of “class war” in the history of Vancouver. The repeated image of a blue sky is a cibachrome photo made by the artist. It has been read as a signifier of a natural, sublime, transcendent opposite to the historical reality depicted in the black and white photos. The image of the sky, and the formal structure of the work in general, emphasizes a verticality which can be understood poetically and allegorically.
At the time, the artist was not working as a photographer so much as making works about photography. They were especially interested in the role that photography plays in the construction of history and memory.
Roy Arden’s work can be found in many public collections in North America and Europe, including:
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo NY
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto ON
Caisse des Dépôt et consignations, Paris
Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa ON
Canadian Centre for Contemporary Photography, Ottawa ON
DG Bank, Frankfurt
Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver BC
Fond national d’art contemporain, Paris
F.R.A.C., Pays de la Loire, Nantes
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA
Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina SK
Metropolitan Bank & Trust Collection, Cleveland, Ohio
Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC, Vancouver, BC
Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, SFU, Vancouver BC
Musée d’art contemporain, Geneva
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal QC
Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Museu d’Art Contemporaini de Barcelona
Museum of Modern Art, New York NY
National Gallery of Canada / Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada, Ottawa ON
Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Ontario ON
Siemens Fotosammlung, Neue Pinakothek, Munich
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart
Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver BC
Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff AB
Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg MB
Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto ON
Roy Arden, Rupture, 2018
Guido Molinari, HSiAO / tA YU “Continuum bleu, rouge et vert”, 2001
Guido Molinari
HSiAO / tA YU “Continuum blue, rouge et vert”
2001
Acrylic on canvas
85 x 85 in
Considered one of Canada’s most influential contemporary artists, Guido Molinari (1933–2004) has made significant contributions to the advancement of non-figurative painting. As a painter, artist, art critic and theoretician, he participated in the debate surrounding the fundamental issues of abstraction, and during the 1950s, drew the premise for a demanding reflection on the specificity of pictorial space.
Guido Molinari’s Continuum series – of which this work is part of – dates from 1998 to 2003, and immediately follows the Quantifiers series (1977–1998). In this series, Molinari revisits the checkerboard compositions, which he first explored during the 1970s to create the Continuums. Complex yet playful, these lozenge-shaped paintings also draw inspiration from Piet Mondrian’s works, which Molinari encountered during his first trip to New York in 1955. Molinari worked on the Continuums until his final series, Hommage à Mallarmé, in 2003.
Owen Kydd
Unknown Man
2019
Video on 4K UHD monitor
48.75 x 27.75 in
This work was included in TRUE PICTURES? CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY FROM CANADA AND THE USA, at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover 2022. The exhibition surveyed contemporary photography from Canada and the US from the 1980’s to the present day. Artists included in the exhibition include the following:
Vikky Alexander
Roy Arden
Walead Beshty
Anne Collier
Gregory Crewdson
Liz Deschenes
Stan Douglas
Latoya Ruby Frazier
Nan Goldin
Rodney GrahamMartine Gutierrez
Carrie Mae Weems
Anthony Hernandez
Ayana V. Jackson
Owen Kydd
Elad Lassry
Louise Lawler
Deana Lawson
Zoe Leonard
Sherrie Levine
Ken Lum
Meryl McMaster
Trevor Paglen
Christopher Williams
Richard Prince
Collier Schorr
Allan Sekula
Cindy Sherman
Laurie Simmons
Xaviera Simmons
Taryn Simon
Lorna Simpson
Stephen Waddell
Jeff Wall
Ian Wallace
James Welling
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA
Center for Creative Photography, Tucson AZ
Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver BC
Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo NY
Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City Pier 24 Foundation, San Francisco CA
After encountering the first monograph on Andy Warhol, Douglas Coupland was profoundly influenced by the artist’s work. In the Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol mentions that wigs would look great pressed behind glass; Coupland decided to execute this idea, paying homage to the pop master by transforming this everyday object into a work of art. These wigs were recreated using synthetic and taxidermy furs native to the Canadian Arctic, connecting the series to the artist’s Canadian identity. In 2012 Monte Clark exhibited the entire set of 25 works, titled Patricide. The gallery is in a unique position to currently offer the entire set.
At the core of Coupland’s practice lies a fascination with popular culture. Not only does Coupland utilize the strategies of Pop Art by incorporating objects and images taken directly from everyday life, but he often passes these through the lens of new media. The result is a provocative synthesis of the common with the extraordinary, set in the here and now. The complete Patricide series was shown in Coupland’s solo exhibition Mom and Dad at the Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, in 2009.
Stephen Waddell
Stain
2012
Silver gelatin print
60 x 49 in
Stain by Stephen Waddell is an important work that inspired his series Dark Matter Atlas, a solo exhibition at the VAG in 2016, curated by Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia and the VAG. Dark Matter Atlas was composed of radically large scale, silver gelatin photographs dealing with the subterranean (the largest work in the exhibition was 115 x 145 inches); this body of work was a departure from his distinctive colour street photography. Stain, an edition of 3, sold out in its year of production and this is a unique opportunity to acquire a work from an edition set that has long since been sold out.
“When Stephen Waddell paused to look at a dark, shadowy form on the wall of an underground parking garage, and made the picture Stain (2012) at the site, he drew upon an ancient tradition of deriving ideas from “chance images”. Stain redirected Waddell’s imagination, and the underground car park became the antechamber to Dark Matter Atlas…” (Stephen Waddell: Dark Matter Atlas, catalog published 2017).
TRUE PICTURES? CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY FROM CANADA AND THE USA, at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover 2022.
Beau Dick
Man who fell from heaven
1992
Cedar, acrylic, horsehair
16 x 10 x 6 in
Chief Beau Dick (1955–2017; B. Village Island, Kingcome Inlet, BC; Kwakwaka’wakw) was a master carver and a renowned contemporary artist, activist and hereditary Chief from the Namgis First Nation. He has an extensive exhibition history, including but not limited to Canada House, London, UK (1998); the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2010); documenta 14 in Athens, GR, and Kassel, DE (2017); and White Columns, New York (2019). In 2012, Dick received the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award for Visual Arts. In 2014, Beau was Artist in Residence at University of British Columbia.
In September 2023 the Vancouver Art Gallery announced their acquisition of 17 masks from Beau Dick’s Undersea Kingdom series exhibited at documenta 14.
Man who fell from heaven (1992) is based on a Tsimshian legend of transformation and reincarnation. The legend tells of a man who was exiled from his community and reappeared to recount a tale of falling from the sky. A leader in his own right, the protagonist presented to the community a dramatic human shaped rock crater shaped to his body. After bringing attention to this connection, the man was welcomed back into the community as a shaman.
