Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Downtown thoughts. Shawn Shepherd, Gareth Gaudin & Rachel Berman. Philip Willey, 14th June 2014

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Shawn Shepherd has a new series of prints at Polychrome. He has taken some old Times Colonist plates and used them to explore the idea of anonymity. The result is a series of small prints.

He says…“Downtown, there’s lots of people and you think they’re anonymous — they’re lost, nobody knows them. So that was the idea of titling the show Downtowners. I’ve taken these celebrities and made them invisible.”

These are the vague half-remembered faces we pass on the street. Shawn Shepherd is always coming up with neat ideas. There’s something very appealing about this one.
The show is at Polychrome until June 26th.

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Gareth Gaudin of Legends Comics & Books has a show at Dales. It’s collaboration with Shane Koyczan about cyberbullying and internet trolls. But there’s more going on than that. Gaudin is a very prolific artist. He is is the mastermind behind the well-known comic character Perogy Cat. A lot of the work at Dales is based on comic books he’s made about his daughters’ adventures in Victoria. The show runs until June 30th.

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I just want to mention Rachel Berman. She passed away recently. I can’t say I knew her well. I’d run into her in Chinatown occasionally. We had coffee a couple of times. It was as if we both had a lot to say but words were somehow inadequate. She struck me as being on some kind of quest. She travelled a lot and it all went into her paintings. She lived with feelings, memories, her paintings evoke a world of dusty boarding houses, waiting rooms and diners populated by characters who look like extras from old movies. I wish I’d written something more substantial. Robert Amos did a good job in the Times Colonist I thought.

http://www.timescolonist.com/robert-amos-artist-embraced-darkness-and-light-1.1119272








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