Screen and Décor

Exhibition Design by Rodney LaTourelle and Louise Witthöft

Screen and Décor  

Exhibition Design by Rodney LaTourelle and Louise Witthöft 

Curated by Rosemary Heather  

Shannon Bool, Simone Gilges, Bernhard Kahrmann, Sanaz Mazinani, Pamela Norrish, Kristine Roepstorff, Emmy Skensved, Tanya Rusnak 

 

The question of why there are no significant digital artworks is a red herring. It’s a problem of looking in the wrong direction – of looking to the computer for evidence of the type of art this media makes possible. The effect digital media is having on art-making is rather found off the screen. There is ample evidence for this in contemporary art practice. Screen and Décor creates the context for looking at this phenomenon through the work of eight artists.   

 

For Screen and Décor the use of pattern and ornament, in the sense of extended motif, in contemporary art is understood as an organizing principle in a world of excessive data. It is a structural strategy that responds to the cultural zeitgeist, one in which the index of the image is subjected to the infinite slippage of the digital.  

 

The unit of composition in many contemporary artworks is not the pixel but the screen. Today, the screen takes many forms: on the computer, the phone, the TV, in the cinema. But for the last, these technologies share an ability to be image-capturing devices. The screen as the unit of composition is therefore understood as the digitally manipulated image source the artist works from. The screen is also a frame that re-contextualizes segments of space-time, a tendency that finds a parallel in the artist’s use of décor. Today’s artists use décor and decoration both ironically and in earnest, often to evoke stylistic periods or atmospheres, or to specify a conditional space that may expand or contract accordingly.  

 

In the same way artists use the frame of artwork as a kind of capturing device, the exhibition itself makes use of a framing device in the form of its overall design. To investigate the relationship between the digital motif and its influence on three-dimensional space, Screen and Décor has been created in collaboration with artist Rodney LaTourelle and exhibition designer Louise Witthöft. LaTourelle is known for expanding the aesthetics of Colour Field painting into room-sized installations.  

 

LaTourelle and Witthöft’s overall exhibition design for Screen and Décor uses coloured Plexiglas panels to affect the visitor’s physical experience of the exhibition space and their perception of the artworks on display. Based on a series of displacements between apprehension and experience, the exhibition design expands and enhances the show’s theme. The other artists participating in Screen and Décor present contemporary iterations of the artwork as a dynamic multiplicity, assembling patterns, fields or ‘distributed images’ into singular, autonomous forms.  

 

The exhibition is curated by Rosemary Heather, and is jointly produced by the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at Hart House, Toronto, and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge. The inclusion of work by artists Pamela Norrish and Tanya Rusnak unique to the IKG presentation. 

 

The IKG would like to acknowledge the important support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the City of Lethbridge, the Alberta College of Art + Design, CADA and an anonymous donor.  

 

For more information on the exhibition and the Illingworth Kerr Gallery please contact: 

Wayne Baerwaldt, Director/Curator, Exhibitions at wayne.baerwaldt@acad.ca  

Alexandra McIntosh, Assistant Curator, IKG at alexandra.mcintosh@acad.ca 

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Rosemary Heather writes about art, the moving image and digital culture for numerous publications, artist monographs and related projects internationally. She is a co-author of the collectively written novel Philip, Project Arts Centre (Dublin) (2006). Exhibitions she has curated include: Ron Giii: Hegel’s Salt Man, Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto) (2006) and Art Gallery of Carlton University (Ottawa) (2007); Serial Killers: Elements of Painting Multiplied by Six Artists, Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto (2000) and Platform, London, UK (2001); I Beg to Differ, Milch (1996) London, UK. From 2003-2009, she was the editor of C Magazine (Toronto). Since November 2012, she has been working as Director of Publishing and Communications for Fogo Island Arts on Fogo Island, Newfoundland.  

 

Rodney LaTourelle was born in Winnipeg and is currently based in Berlin. Educated as an architect and a landscape architect, LaTourelle works as an artist, designer and writer. He has received numerous grants and awards and was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2003-04. His work has been exhibited at numerous international venues including the Winnipeg Art Gallery (2012), National Gallery of Canada (2008, 2010), Exit Art, New York (2010); University of Quebec, Montreal (2009); Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2009); Artnews Projects, Berlin (2009); Kunsthalle Göppingen, Germany (2008); and Program Gallery, Berlin (2007). Upcoming solo exhibitions include Optica, Montreal; Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon; Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, and Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary. 

 

Louise Witthöft was educated at the Danish Design School (Department of Spatial and Furniture Design). She currently works as an independent designer in Berlin, working on projects at a range of scales, She also produces objects, furniture, lighting, and spatial concepts, and has completed a number of projects as exhibition designer and curator, including: Treasures Project (2006) co-curated with Ana von Stackelberg, Königstadt Brauerei, Berlin, and ÜBERleben (2007) co-curated with Sophie Hamacher, Program, Berlin. Collaborations with Rodney LaTourelle include public commissions for Königs Wusterhausen (2008); University of Winnipeg, Canada (2010-13) Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2010); and 'Who is Lou' at Proekt Fabrika, Moscow (2010). Together they won the Deutscher Fassadenpreis 2012 in collaboration with SMAQ Architects, and recently completed a public art commission at HOFA College, Berlin-Mitte in 2012. 

Photos by David M. C. Miller and Petra Mala Miller.