CONCURRENT: BRIAN HOWELL & GORDON SMITH

brian howell & gordon smith

Pairing by Winsor Gallery

These works were selected by Winsor Gallery to demonstrate the harmonious qualities of natural dualities. Howell’s Burn #17 captures the abstract quality of a bleak winter landscape, hearkening back to Pollock’s scattershot compositions and the history of postmodern painting through his lens. In Gambier Island Stream, Smith’s iconic brushstrokes splinter an idyllic scene into energetic instances of darkness and light. Together, whether in photography versus painting, or in winter turning against spring, the two works put on display the constantly changing energies of our known world.

Burn #17,  2015

44 x 60, edition of 4

Archival inkjet print

Brian Howell

This photograph was taken in the winter of 2014-2015, Howell travelled in and around Barriere, British Columbia. This charred forest was destroyed in a fire in 2003.

Brian Howell graduated from Ryerson Polytechnical University in Toronto in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Film and Photography. His contemporary photographic work examines vernacular expressions of shifting societal and personal values. Howell’s subjects are drawn from fringe, or marginalized communities; people and places resonant with allegorical meanings for an age that seems to Howell both broken and blinded. Howell’s photographic series build on the truth-telling mantra of an earlier era of documentary photojournalists though are given structure and further meaning by a more rigorous contemporary conceptual framework. 

Gambier Island Stream, 1995

Acrylic on canvas

72 x 36”

Gordon Smith

Gordon Smith is a Canadian painter, printmaker, sculptor and teacher living in Vancouver.  Smith taught with contemporaries Bruno Bobak, BC Binning and Jack Shadbolt at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design). His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Musuem of Modern Art in New York, The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He was given the Order of Canada in 1996, the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in 2007, the Governer General’s Award in the Visual and Media Arts in 2009, and he was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.