For Immediate Release
February 14, 2003

The Walter Phillips Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Super Modern World of Beauty, a new exhibition curated by Calgary independent curator, Diana Sherlock. The exhibition brings together seven contemporary artists from across Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Super Modern World of Beauty features work by Robin Arseneault (Calgary), Daniel Barrow (Winnipeg), Shary Boyle (Toronto/Winnipeg), Elizabeth LeMoine (London, UK), Naomi London (Montreal), and Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby (Chicago). Working in a variety of media including, performance, drawing, video, installation, digitally animated film and soft sculpture, these artists' works resonate with what Russian poet Sergei Gandlevsky termed a "critical sentimentalism." These artists revisit beauty through their examination of desire, empathy, love, romance, nostalgia and pain.

Works in the exhibition include Robin Arseneault's stormy, soft-sculpture shipwreck installation, Capsized. Daniel Barrow's, Catalogue of the Original includes a preprogrammed slide animation and 9, digitally reproduced, miniature trading cards representing popular entertainers such as Charles Nelson Reilly, Rip Taylor and Wayland Flowers. Perfect Nature World, a collaborative project by Shary Boyle, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, combines Boyle's illustrative drawing style with Duke and Battersby's wit and childlike, poetic narrative to create a rear-projected video and drawing installation addressing social pressures experienced by youth and adults. A selection of Shary Boyle's fantastical figurative drawings of whimsical characters, and Duke and Battersby's most recent, single-channel video, Bad Ideas for Paradise are also on view. Elizabeth LeMoine's theatrically inspired work, That Shadow of Yours Must be Such a Comfort to You, develops 20 short, personal stories or memories through a series of digitally animated films and a "cast" of ten miniature sculptures. Moving from the personal to the public and the miniature to the gigantic, Naomi London's larger than life series of domestically patterned upholstered foam letters, One Gargantuan Optimistic Metaphor, spells "hope" in English, Arabic and Hebrew.

Super Modern World of Beauty runs at the Walter Phillips Gallery from February 22 to April 19, 2003. Please join us for an exhibition tour by the curator and artists on Saturday, February 22 at 2 p.m. Immediately following the tour we will celebrate the opening with a reception at 3 p.m. All events are free.

The Walter Phillips Gallery is located in Glyde Hall at The Banff Centre, and is open Tuesday to Sunday, from noon to 5 pm. Admission is free.

Click here to view images and to learn more about this exhibition.

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