Past Exhibition

Mitchell Wiebe: VampSites

Mitchell Wiebe
Oct 01, 2021
to
Jan 08, 2022
EXHIBITION
Installation view of "VampSites," photo by Rachel Topham Photography
Installation view of "VampSites," photo by Rachel Topham Photography

Mitchell Wiebe imports the chaos and theatre of his studio into the well-lit, rational architecture of the art museum.

VampSites is an exhibition-as-temporary-occupation. Combining making and showing, employing a surreal personal lexicon and mythology of colours and textures, motifs and narratives, Mitchell Wiebe imports the chaos and theatre of his studio into the well-lit, rational architecture of the art museum. The artist then adopts a distinctive persona who emerges from the same fictive world inhabited by his array of fantastical animalesque characters.

Wiebe openly embraces an artificial and attention-grabbing mode of address; he loves the cheap attraction of the fun house, the appeal to regressive fantasy, exuberance with a touch of poison. Optical effects coincide with subcultural references, spatial illusion reverberating with the visceral swoop and swish of paint; Wiebe plays with the procedures and boundaries of painting, and with the ebb and flow of its credibility. To vamp is to build a rhythmic ground for improvisation; it also means to seduce in the night, to draw us into an alternate life.

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