Opening reception - University of Waterloo Art Gallery / UWAG

Gallery One
C. Wells - Place and Space (Redux)

Since 1996, C. Wells has developed a painting practice akin in spirit to that of a contemporary topographer, exclusively using line marker paint—an industrial medium used to mark the borders and boundaries of highways and roads to regulate vehicular or pedestrian movement. Whether replicating the language of the lines or using the paint itself as material to create various narratives, he investigates the history and heritage of line marking, beginning with its origins in Trenton, Michigan in 1911. Analogous to a social cultural pursuit that can be read equally as art, abstraction or as a new treatise on landscape painting, Wells purports the ubiquity of the line marker as the emblem of city, country and spaces in-between. (REDUX) comprises a body of works that debuted in the 2012 exhibition Place and Space, organized by the artist for 270 Sherman Avenue North in Hamilton.

Gallery Two
Soft Turns - Behind the High Grass

Soft Turns is the artistic partnership of Sarah Jane Gorlitz and Wojciech Olejnik. A post-war travel book authored by Czech travelers and filmmakers Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund discovered at a flea market has inspired much of their recent practice. P19720 is the license plate of the Tatra 87 passenger vehicle that Hanzelka and Zikmundfound travelled in across Africa, Latin America and eventually Asia. Their journeys became a metaphor for addressing ‘otherness’ within the context of the social, historical, political and psychological milieu of the post war period. As the artists familiarized themselves with the book—which had by now lost all of its text, leaving behind only enigmatic sepia images—inevitably their work began to parallel the original authors’ journeys and research. Recording notes and observations, logging and filming their own travels; they became artist-anthropologists referencing the book as a rough guide to their explorations.

Please join us for these visually arresting exhibitions.