12th of 21 works found
Large Painting and Caryatid Maquette in Studio at Night (Sculpture Version)
Title
Large Painting and Caryatid Maquette in Studio at Night (Sculpture Version)
Artist
Moppett, Damian
Date
2012
Medium
aluminum
Type
sculpture
Owner
SFU Art Collection
Accession Number
NA
Location
Simon Fraser University, Academic Quadrangle
Category
SFU Art Collection
Collection
Public Art
Lat/Long
49.279815,122.924881
View in Google Maps
http://www.google.com/maps?q=49.279815,122.924881
Installed on the south side of the SFU Residences Dining Hall is Damian Moppett’s Large Painting and Caryatid Maquette in Studio at Night (Sculpture Version). In this work the artist has transformed a painting of his studio into a three- dimensional space — taking abstracted shapes of canvases, lights, and sculptures-in-progress and reproducing them as large-scale cutouts in painted aluminum — such that the final work presents the artist’s studio as a stage set. Originally commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery for their Offsite space, the work has been reconfigured for SFU. This work is part of the Simon Fraser University Art Collection. The SFU Art Collection contains over 5,800 works. Approximately 1,000 works of art are shown throughout the campus and integrated in public, administrative and common learning spaces. A selection of the most accessible in this diverse repository are incorporated into the City of Burnaby Public Art Registry. For more extensive information about the holdings at SFU, visit: https://www.sfu.ca/galleries/Collections.html (text provided by SFU)
Damian Moppett (b. 1969, Calgary, Alberta; lives/works: Vancouver) has long been engaged with the processes and materials of painting and sculpture, and their histories, which he uses for the construction of his own vernacular. In his work, Auguste Rodin and Mike Kelley hold court alongside amateur ceramics and humourous interpretations of classical modernist sculpture. In recent years, the eccentric personal and art historical references found in his earlier works remain significant, but much less overt. Newer sculptures, paintings, and installations take on more abstracted forms that are more difficult to pin to their referents, as they sit just beyond the limits of figuration. For example, in Moppett's recent work, as in his painting Alan Jarvis Burning Milne Paintings at Six Mile Lake, 1939 (2016), a large work on canvas which appears to be created in an abstract-expressionist style, the artist in fact creates new compositions by citing brushstrokes or marks appearing elsewhere, but made unidentifiable through a painstaking and labourious process of translation: tracing free expressionistic gestures on paper, and placing and transferring these using unconventional tools that may not be apparent in the finished work. The process is akin to a sort of record-making, closer to printmaking than painting, and what appears to be immediate in the works is predetermined like a purposeful accident aimed at playing with and commenting on the idea of artistic mastery.