Catriona Jeffries is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Damian Moppett comprised of paintings and ceramic work beginning from a single image. As a unified body of work, each originates from a small, black and white reference photograph of Alan Jarvis burning the rejected paintings of David Milne at Six Mile Lake, Ontario in 1939. The site and act of destroying artwork, rather than the site and process of its creation in the studio as in Moppett’s previous work, becomes the catalyst for production and centering point for the development of form, line and composition.
The paintings here are abstract and are not obliquely referential, as the image disappears and becomes rendered as drawing, then transformed through a serial, translational process. Transferring only portions of these drawn lines into individual paint marks, they are placed onto an intermediary surface before being applied to the canvas to create new abstract compositions. This process creates a slowly revealed, false spontaneity instead of forcing the accident or incidental in production. The brushstroke or mark is not directly applied on the surface but held in a kind of studio purgatory before application. This process of transcribing line is akin to a sort of record making, but in order to do one thing, you have to do it twice. What appears immediate is firmly determined and the painting becomes a result of purposeful accident, avoiding mastery.
Moppett’s long standing engagement with process, material and their histories also applies to the glazed ceramic work in direct conversation with these paintings. The stoneware takes form as mounted sculptural tableaux, and a figure form holding a painting above a fire in landscape becomes slightly more legible here, but complicated through their seemingly quick execution and amateur craft form, a tradition Moppett has long utilized throughout his practice. The form and line from these three dimensional representations repeat in the surrounding paintings, flipping orientation and scale, the exhibition creating its own hermetic language of marks from a representation of destruction.
Damian Moppett (b.1969, Canada) lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Recent solo exhibitions include, The Bells, Simon Fraser University Gallery, Burnaby (2014); Vancouver Art Gallery Off-site (2012); Rennie Collection at Wing Sang, Vancouver (2011); The Sculptor’s Studio is a Painting, Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2010); Yvon Lambert, Paris (2007); Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (2007); Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa (2006); The Visible Work, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2005). Moppett has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Shine a Light, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2014); Not Photographs, Presentation House Gallery Satellite, Vancouver (2011); Everything Everyday, Vancouver Art Gallery (2010); Don Quijote, Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2006); A Tribute to Cezanne, Yvon Lambert, New York (2006); Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists, Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium (2005); The Cave and the Island, White Columns, New York; Galerie Kunstbuero, Vienna (2004); Bounce, Power Plant, Toronto (2002); Hammertown, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2002).
