Artwork by Jean Lapointe
Gallery Gachet and Folie/Culture present
Faire manie
featuring art from the Folie/Culture Workshop Series
Exhibition runs: Feb 3rd – March 18th 2012
Opening Reception: Fri Feb 3rd, 7 – 10pm
Quebec’s leading mental health and arts centre, Folie/Culture through artistic creation has been pursuing work of information, reflection, and promotion in mental health, as well as around social questions relating to this sometimes painful reality. Their Faire manie workshop series was designed by the artist, Josée Landry Sirois as a way for people suffering from mental health problems to express themselves through creating an immense tapestry of obsessions on paper that took the form of drawing, stamping, photocopying, and other media. The Faire manie workshop allowed Folie/Culture to establish their first partnership with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and to have its inaugural Vancouver showing at Gallery Gachet.
Each participant were tasked with graphically filling the landscape of paper with their obsessions and were challenged to replicate the same patterns over and over defining their own language. This automation and repetition of artistic gesture allowed the emergence of a new expression of imagination, lyrically and visually expressing the idea of mania.
The exhibition Faire manie presents the collectiion of works by Blar, Yacynthe Couture, Caroline Dion, Jean Lapointe, Marie-Dominique Rouleau, Shental and Sylvestre.
Josée Landry-Sirois
Josée Landry-Sirois is an emerging artist from Québec City whose art form of preference is drawing. Influenced both by architecture, urbanism and codified writing, she puts in her works graphic gestures with great energy where structure and deconstruction live together. Her work has been presented in numerous collective and solo exhibitions across Canada.
Faire manie creation workshops
The approach of these workshops is unique. Folie/Culture offers to people an experience of creation which is connected to mental health only by its theme. Thus, no social worker is present, no therapeutic analysis has its place, only creation takes place. These workshops are places which allow connection between participants and professional artists. They always take place in locations that stimulate the creation and promote deregulation of social settings. The first workshop was offered at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the second at the Maison des métiers d’art de Québec.
Folie/Culture
Since 1984, Folie/Culture has been pursuing through artistic creation a work of information, reflection, and promotion in mental health, as well as around certain social questions related to this painful reality. Their action is characterized by their desire to promote innovative approaches as much in the mental health field as in that of creation. Their objectives lean toward the realization of contemporary art projects and toward promotion and awareness-building in mental health, most specifically in the encounter between these two aspects of their work. They would like to encourage the work of artists who intervene in the field of social perceptions and to make it known to people who are not necessarily familiar with art.
Folie/Culture wants to thank Gallery Gachet, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and Maison des métiers d’arts de Québec.
www.folieculture.org
*********************
In the second half of the gallery space, we are showcasing Collective works from the Gallery Gachet stable.
The Gachet Gallery
featuring Laurie Marshall, Leef Evans and W.N. (Bill) Pope
Exhibition runs: Fri Feb 3rd – March 18th, 2012
Opening reception: Fri Feb 3rd, 7 – 10pm
This month’s featured artists in our Gachet Gallery are Laurie Marshall, Leef Evans and W.N. (Bill) Pope. All three long-term members have been with Gallery Gachet for around a decade and through this time they have developed and bloomed into senior, acclaimed, non-mainstream artists who are recognized and revered for their individual and unparalleled painting styles. All three have experienced the power of art and creation to heal, transform and instigate change in their lives.
Gallery Gachet is a unique artist-run centre located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Gachet is a collectively-run exhibition and studio space built to empower participants as artists, administrators and curators. The organization’s cultural services have grown from the operation of a small, basement studio in downtown Granville South, offering one exhibition a year in 1993, to coordinating approximately 3,000 square feet of public-access arts space with up to 16 exhibitions each year, in addition to residencies, workshops, artist talks, symposia, special projects and other events. We strive to provide a focal point for dialogue amongst outsider/dissident artists. Through artistic means, we aim to demystify and challenge issues related to mental health and social marginalization in order to educate the public and promote social and economic justice.
Laurie Marshall is a person marginalized by mental illness, his diagnosis being chronic depression. He sits down and draws and paints what comes into his mind: people, animals, streets, and rural landscapes. His inner world teems with fanciful animals with human faces and gentle expressions, botanical marvels, and a population of round, dreamy-eyed inner-city inhabitants. Completely self-taught and uninterested in contemporary art theory, Marshall is what is known as an outsider artist, an art-world term for someone working outside the established boundaries of mainstream culture.
Before painting, Leef Evan’s life was varied and fragmented, full of ribald tales of debauchery, scholastics, sports and mayhem… more congruent than consecutive. The only true constant in his adult life has been the persistent and massive bouts of depression; the last of which put him in hospital some five years ago. When he was discharged he found himself without his apartment, his car, or the capacity to interact with friends or family. Evans ended up in an SRO in the Downtown Eastside, rattling between doctors’ appointments and thin soup. If he had not found the Art Room at the Coast Resource Centre and the Gallery Gachet community and, subsequently, the opportunity to paint he cannot conceive of where he might be now. He has since built a successful art practice. Evans has exhibited at various galleries in Vancouver such as Gallery Gachet, The Gathering Place and Coast. He has been interviewed by Readers Digest and provincial newspapers.
Leef Evans “Smithrite”
W.N. (Bill) Pope was born in Belleville, Ontario, in 1952 into a caring family of various challenges and disabilities. Pope started art training at Quinte Secondary School (Belleville) and later O.C.A.(D.) in Toronto, where he studied drawing and painting with Gordon Raynor, Graham Coughtrey, and multi-media with Denis Pike. He worked and was mentored in photography by Murray Mosher, Justin Wonnacott and Bob Anderson, in the 1970’s. Pope sold slide show “Dupes” to the NFB still photo division and he was a founding member of the Gallery 101 collective in Ottawa. Pope entered into treatment for depression, hypertension, and alcoholism in 1991 and has worked since then in support of persons with disabilities in the arts. Pope has lived in Vancouver since 2000 and joined Gallery Gachet Collective in 2002.
For more information on these exhibits or Gallery Gachet, please contact Lara Fitzgerald, programming@gachet.org, 604 687 2468.
To see pictures from this exhibition, please visit our Flickr account https://www.flickr.com/photos/gallerygachet/sets/72157629415557018
Faire manie + Gachet Gallery
Artwork by Jean Lapointe
Gallery Gachet and Folie/Culture present
Faire manie
featuring art from the Folie/Culture Workshop Series
Exhibition runs: Feb 3rd – March 18th 2012
Opening Reception: Fri Feb 3rd, 7 – 10pm
Quebec’s leading mental health and arts centre, Folie/Culture through artistic creation has been pursuing work of information, reflection, and promotion in mental health, as well as around social questions relating to this sometimes painful reality. Their Faire manie workshop series was designed by the artist, Josée Landry Sirois as a way for people suffering from mental health problems to express themselves through creating an immense tapestry of obsessions on paper that took the form of drawing, stamping, photocopying, and other media. The Faire manie workshop allowed Folie/Culture to establish their first partnership with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and to have its inaugural Vancouver showing at Gallery Gachet.
Each participant were tasked with graphically filling the landscape of paper with their obsessions and were challenged to replicate the same patterns over and over defining their own language. This automation and repetition of artistic gesture allowed the emergence of a new expression of imagination, lyrically and visually expressing the idea of mania.
The exhibition Faire manie presents the collectiion of works by Blar, Yacynthe Couture, Caroline Dion, Jean Lapointe, Marie-Dominique Rouleau, Shental and Sylvestre.
Josée Landry-Sirois
Josée Landry-Sirois is an emerging artist from Québec City whose art form of preference is drawing. Influenced both by architecture, urbanism and codified writing, she puts in her works graphic gestures with great energy where structure and deconstruction live together. Her work has been presented in numerous collective and solo exhibitions across Canada.
Faire manie creation workshops
The approach of these workshops is unique. Folie/Culture offers to people an experience of creation which is connected to mental health only by its theme. Thus, no social worker is present, no therapeutic analysis has its place, only creation takes place. These workshops are places which allow connection between participants and professional artists. They always take place in locations that stimulate the creation and promote deregulation of social settings. The first workshop was offered at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the second at the Maison des métiers d’art de Québec.
Folie/Culture
Since 1984, Folie/Culture has been pursuing through artistic creation a work of information, reflection, and promotion in mental health, as well as around certain social questions related to this painful reality. Their action is characterized by their desire to promote innovative approaches as much in the mental health field as in that of creation. Their objectives lean toward the realization of contemporary art projects and toward promotion and awareness-building in mental health, most specifically in the encounter between these two aspects of their work. They would like to encourage the work of artists who intervene in the field of social perceptions and to make it known to people who are not necessarily familiar with art.
Folie/Culture wants to thank Gallery Gachet, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and Maison des métiers d’arts de Québec.
www.folieculture.org
*********************
In the second half of the gallery space, we are showcasing Collective works from the Gallery Gachet stable.
The Gachet Gallery
featuring Laurie Marshall, Leef Evans and W.N. (Bill) Pope
Exhibition runs: Fri Feb 3rd – March 18th, 2012
Opening reception: Fri Feb 3rd, 7 – 10pm
This month’s featured artists in our Gachet Gallery are Laurie Marshall, Leef Evans and W.N. (Bill) Pope. All three long-term members have been with Gallery Gachet for around a decade and through this time they have developed and bloomed into senior, acclaimed, non-mainstream artists who are recognized and revered for their individual and unparalleled painting styles. All three have experienced the power of art and creation to heal, transform and instigate change in their lives.
Gallery Gachet is a unique artist-run centre located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Gachet is a collectively-run exhibition and studio space built to empower participants as artists, administrators and curators. The organization’s cultural services have grown from the operation of a small, basement studio in downtown Granville South, offering one exhibition a year in 1993, to coordinating approximately 3,000 square feet of public-access arts space with up to 16 exhibitions each year, in addition to residencies, workshops, artist talks, symposia, special projects and other events. We strive to provide a focal point for dialogue amongst outsider/dissident artists. Through artistic means, we aim to demystify and challenge issues related to mental health and social marginalization in order to educate the public and promote social and economic justice.
Laurie Marshall is a person marginalized by mental illness, his diagnosis being chronic depression. He sits down and draws and paints what comes into his mind: people, animals, streets, and rural landscapes. His inner world teems with fanciful animals with human faces and gentle expressions, botanical marvels, and a population of round, dreamy-eyed inner-city inhabitants. Completely self-taught and uninterested in contemporary art theory, Marshall is what is known as an outsider artist, an art-world term for someone working outside the established boundaries of mainstream culture.
Before painting, Leef Evan’s life was varied and fragmented, full of ribald tales of debauchery, scholastics, sports and mayhem… more congruent than consecutive. The only true constant in his adult life has been the persistent and massive bouts of depression; the last of which put him in hospital some five years ago. When he was discharged he found himself without his apartment, his car, or the capacity to interact with friends or family. Evans ended up in an SRO in the Downtown Eastside, rattling between doctors’ appointments and thin soup. If he had not found the Art Room at the Coast Resource Centre and the Gallery Gachet community and, subsequently, the opportunity to paint he cannot conceive of where he might be now. He has since built a successful art practice. Evans has exhibited at various galleries in Vancouver such as Gallery Gachet, The Gathering Place and Coast. He has been interviewed by Readers Digest and provincial newspapers.
W.N. (Bill) Pope was born in Belleville, Ontario, in 1952 into a caring family of various challenges and disabilities. Pope started art training at Quinte Secondary School (Belleville) and later O.C.A.(D.) in Toronto, where he studied drawing and painting with Gordon Raynor, Graham Coughtrey, and multi-media with Denis Pike. He worked and was mentored in photography by Murray Mosher, Justin Wonnacott and Bob Anderson, in the 1970’s. Pope sold slide show “Dupes” to the NFB still photo division and he was a founding member of the Gallery 101 collective in Ottawa. Pope entered into treatment for depression, hypertension, and alcoholism in 1991 and has worked since then in support of persons with disabilities in the arts. Pope has lived in Vancouver since 2000 and joined Gallery Gachet Collective in 2002.
For more information on these exhibits or Gallery Gachet, please contact Lara Fitzgerald, programming@gachet.org, 604 687 2468.
To see pictures from this exhibition, please visit our Flickr account https://www.flickr.com/photos/gallerygachet/sets/72157629415557018