Toronto, October 19th, 2005 – The Monte Clark Gallery Toronto is pleased to present Winlaw/The Lost Works , an exhibition of new work by Vancouver and New York-based artist Graham Gillmore.


GRAHAM GILLMORE: WINLAW/THE LOST WORKS

October 27th – December 4th, 2005
Opening reception: Thursday, Oct. 27th, between 6 and 8pm
Artist will be in attendance.

Graham Gillmore is sorry you're having problems, but right now he just wants to talk about himself. Renown for his large-scale panels and darkly comedic malapropisms, Gillmore's newest works, on both panel and ledger paper, are the kind of confessionals you'd expect from a master of the enigmatic phrase– snippets of internal dialogue and external reports that both confess and conceal his most inner thoughts and anxieties.

By blowing the whistle on himself Gillmore draws attention away from his private life and directs it towards his own artistic process, protecting the seductive ambivalence of his message. For what Gillmore wants is “to reconstruct past experience truthfully while maintaining an allegiance to, and/or custody over potential backfires, misinterpretations and spin-offs.”

Pitting officious psychology against his subconscious and the canvas, “Custody and Access Study” puts into words and onto the wall in a big way the competing forces that would define him (if they could only catch him).

Set against a minimalist wash of primary colours, his words, like their meanings, are multidimensional: routed into board, often obscured and unevenly spaced, they are unstable and unsettling, simultaneously addressing and rebuffing the viewer. Phrases such as “Save Yourself Go On Without Me”, “Don't Be Naive” and the longer, “Persuade And Inspire Any Audience” read simultaneously as mantras, testimonies, statements of fact, and ominous invectives, all before offering themselves over to the viewer for interpretation.

Less known in Canada are Gillmore's ledger paper works, one of which was acquired in 2003 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York . “Turns on You, Turns you on”, is a collage of mixed media on ledger paper mounted to canvas. Mirroring his fluid, organic approach to language, where disparate letters are bound and tied by the thinnest of lines, the ledger paper provides a natural setting to a message that is both vaguely threatening and enticing.

Graham Gillmore was born in Vancouver in 1968. He lives and works in New York City and Winlaw, B.C.