Alice Crawley Retrospective:
Celebrating 50 years of of Art Making
April 16 - May 22, 2005
This exhibition gathers work from private and public collections throughout
Ontario and provides an opportunity to glimpse the lifetime effort
of an artmaking career: the growth and development of an artist, who
stayed within the regional context, explored the avant-garde conventions
of the day but followed her own specific course of inquiry. That inquiry
saw her designing and painting the stage sets for the first production
of the Shaw Festival, honing her consummate drawing skills and investigating
sculpture, the medium in which she would realize her potential for
provoking the sublime and challenging the obvious.
Her sculptural prowess draws heavily upon the juxtaposition of a common
format or familiar object and the unconventional material used in
its construction. For example, the hexagonal forms comprising a honeycomb,
rendered in urethane soaked silk, expand the prosaic into an ethereal
translucence of fragile rigidity. This play between the temporal
nature
of structure and her affinity for material and its transformative
power imbues a speculation of ritual or totemic value to the sculptural
form.
From 1950 to the present day Alice has been actively engaged in concerns
and issues around art and contemporary artmaking practice. As a
founding member of one of Canada’s longest standing artist-run centres,
the Niagara Artists’ Company in St. Catherines, she played a
significant role in the area’s art community: exhibiting gained
her much recognition in her efforts to confront the world as a woman,
an artist, a parent and a breadwinner.
This exhibition will travel later in the year to the Niagara
Artists’ Company
and then on to the Grimsby Public Art Gallery. Made possible through
the support of the Ontario Arts Council's Touring and Collaboration
Program.
