La Petite Mort Gallery

Collaboration with YESSR 4 (Santiago, Chile & Buenos Aires, Argentina)

& La Petite Mort Gallery (Ottawa)

July 6 – 29, 2012 / Vernissage Friday July 6 / 7 – 10pm

Co-curator Felipe Bracelis (Santiago, Chile) will be present on opening night.

PERFORMING LIVE:  KIDS ON TV    Kids On TV      http://www.kidsontv.biz/

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Emerged from the drainage pipe of a Toronto bathhouse in the spring of 2003. The group consists of John Caffery, Minus Smile, Roxy and Wolf.  Their music explores the worlds of house, experimental rock, no-rave, punk, and soul. Their multi-media performance is apocalyptically gay and transforms environments with projections of their film and video work. In 2007, they released their debut album “Mixing Business With Pleasure” on Chicks on Speed Records (internationally) and Blocks Recording Club (Canada). The band has toured Europe and have played with Gang of Four, CrystalCastles, Ladytron, Dat Politics, Angie Reed, Les Georges Leningrad, and Lesbians on Ecstasy. They have worked and recorded with Boy George, traded remixes with Man Parrish, and recently collaborated with Yo Majesty, Katie Stelmanis, and Diamond Rings.
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Statement:

FLESH GARDEN

This exhibition is an opportunity to cross meet South/North America, where geographical limits are exceeded by the visceral urge to create and meet. We expect our artists to chop limbs, scatter around organs, to take maximum advantage of multiple chromatic attributes of skin; here we can all be surgeons and butchers.

FLESH GARDEN will bring together artists from across the Americas to share the experience of representing the body in the New World. Canadian artists will be presented in the context of colleagues from the United States and South America in a travelling exhibition that will be presented in galleries in the Sala +18 (Santiago, Chile), in Casa Brandon (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and La Petite Morte Gallery (Ottawa, Canada).

FLESH GARDEN provides an opportunity for artists to collaborate with each other and to share with gallery visitors their paintings, photographs and mixed media collages depicting social and physical trauma. The images are linked through their shared exploration of corporeal extremes, invoking the anomalous and the exotic, the dismembered and the disturbing. Collectively, the figurative works visualize the external evidence of internal states of disintegration, disfigurement, and dysmorphia.

Between the tangible reality of lived experience and the surreality of psychic hallucination, this selection of artists in the Americas reflects their diverse responses to the terrain of the human body as the impact point of the social body.

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BUENOS AIRES @ Casa Brandon
March 15 – April 8th

SANTIAGO @ Sala +18
May 10th – June 3^rd

 

OTTAWA  @ La Petite Mort Gallery
July 6^th – July 29th

 

ARTISTS:

Aleks Bartosik  (Toronto, Canada)

Matthew Stradling  (London, England)

Peter Shmelzer  (Ottawa, Canada)

Nani Lamarque  (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Celio Braga  (Sao Paulo, Brazil)

Lucas Simoes  (Sao Paulo, Brazil)

Andrew Salgado  (London, England / Born in Canada)

Martin La Roche  (Santiago, Chile)

Rodrigo Cienfuegos  (Santiago, Chile)

Felipe Bracelis  (Santiago, Chile)

James Huctwith  (Toronto, Canada)

Juan Carlos Noria  (Barcelona, Spain / Born in Canada)

Martin Douville  (Montreal, Canada)

Ashkan Honarvar  (Amsterdam, / Born in Iran)

Scooter LaForge  (New York, USA)

Francisco Navarrete Sitja  (Santiago, Chile)

Hayden Menzies  (Toronto, Canada)

 

 

Co-curator Felipe Bracelis, Santiago, Chile:

Felipe Bracelis is an emerging artists and curator from Chile. He is also

the founder and director of YESSR, an art platform that includes fanzines,

exhibitions and online publications. Bracelis became a regular name in

student exhibitions in Chile during his last high school years, to later

on become part of the Plan Basico en Artes Plasticas (University of

Chile), where he first developed digital collage as a way to take a step

aside from what he’s fellow students were doing. In 2010 he founded the

Yessr project curating he’s first exhibit at the University of Chile,

including indumentary pieces, copies if YESSR1 fanzine and video work by

him and Chilean performance artists Felipe Rivas San Martin and Gustavo

Solar.  Another two exhibits curated by him took place during 2011. YESSR2

included artists from Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil and USA, and was

opened in two cities: Santiago (Sala +18, Biblioteca de Santiago) and

Valparaiso (Centro cultural el columpio).  . YESSR3 was also launched in

2011, being Bracelis’ curatorial day view outside of Chile. YESSR3 was

opened in two times in Buenos Aires, in Isla Flotante (gallery) and Casa

Brandon Cultural Centre, showing the work of 25 artists from Chile,

Argentina, Mexico, USA, Colombia and Brazil to the Argentine public. After

this curatorial achievement Bracelis launched his personal fanzine project

(YESSR MAGAZINE) under the YESSR platform, this publications features

landscape and male nude photography and is sold online throughout the

world. He has also worked in parallel in video installations and

international publications, using porn images as a common resource for

he’s digital origami and other known pieces.

Felipe’s imagery reflects heavily on the relationship between landscape

–technology and the human body, and his curatorial work has included

artists from many latitudes of America, making him a very promising figure

in the future of the Latin-American art world. During 2011 he had his

first solo Exhibit Valle Central on Sala +18, Santiago; where he showed to

the public his skills as a photographer, in several pieces that reflected

country-side nostalgia to a metropolitan audience.

 

 

 

CURATORIAL WORK

 

Arte en California (2009) co- curated with Rodrigo Cienfuegos / Rodrigo

Cienfuegos’s Apartment / California 2261 Providencia, Santiago, Chile.

 

YESSR1 (2010) curated /  Auditorio Facultad de Artes Visuales Universidad

de Chile /  Las Encinas 3370, Santiago, Chile.

 

YESSR2 (2011) curated /  Centro Cultural El Columpio Ecuador 382

Valparaíso, Chile / Sala +18, Biblioteca de Santiago Matucana 151,

Santiago, Chile.

 

YESSR3 (2011) curated / Isla Flotante Av. Pueyrredón 1565, Buenos Aires,

Argentina /  Casa Brandon Luis María Drago 236, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

 

VALLE CENTRAL (2011) curated / Sala +18, Biblioteca de Santiago /

Matucana 151, Santiago, Chile.