main gallery + drawing room

PHOTOREAL

Support for this FotoFocus Biennial 2016 exhibition
was provided by FotoFocus.

The Photo-Realism or Hyper-Realism movement responds to photography through painting, drawing, sculpture, and other media incorporating photographic qualities such as flatness, the illusion of depth, reflections, depth of field, and extreme detail.

The two companion exhibitions presented by Manifest for the FotoFocus Biennial 2016 each explore the biennial-wide concept from different aspects of 'undocument' or 'untruth'. PHOTOREAL presents non-photographic media and reveals how it can do many of the same things as photography, deepening the consideration of the 'undocumented'.

For this exhibit 64 artists from 25 states and 4 countries submitted 192 works for consideration. Twenty-one works by the following 16 artists from 11 states, and the countries of Canada and Colombia were selected by several jurors from across the U.S. for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication.

RELATED WORKSHOP
In conjuction with this exhibit a studio workshop at the Manifest Drawing Center will also be offered, focusing on achieving photorealism through drawing. The two-day workshop, and a related but separate evening public drawing demonstration, will be led by artist Joseph Crone. Get complete details and register here.

Presenting works by:

Erika Baez
Honolulu, Hawaii

Katlyn Brumfield
Richmond, Kentucky

Jeanne Burris-Johnson
Cottrellville, Michigan

Walter Castro
Bogota, Colombia

Carrie Fonder
Croton on Hudson, New York

June Glasson
Laramie, Wyoming

Brandon Hearty
Alberta, Canada

Timothy Jahn
Milltown, New Jersey

Travis Little
Framingham, Massachusetts

Nick Long
Thompson’s Station, Tennessee

Tim Main
Sheridan, Wyoming

Armin Mersmann
Midland, Michigan

Richard Morris
San Diego, California

Jon Murrill
Roanoke, Virginia

Jeremy Plunkett
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Pia Sawhney
New York, New York

     Timothy Jahn

     Walter Castro

     Jeremy Plunkett

     Jeanne Burris-Johnson

parallel space

The Best of Life
Paintings and collage by Jay Senetchko

This exhibition of Jay Senetchko’s work is one of 8 selected from among 137 proposals submitted for consideration for Manifest’s 13th season.

When Jay Senetchko's grandmother passed away in December 2012, he was given her collection of Time Life magazines from the 1960s, an era she had once described as being 'the happiest of her life'. This declaration, combined with the name of the magazine, forms the title of this series. Each painting is based on images that are cut away from their associated text. New narratives are formed by recontextualizing them into black and white, and colour collages. Selected images are then transformed into paintings that are part collage, part photograph and part painting, maintaining distinctions between each medium while drawing parallels between them. The goal in both the creation of the collages and the paintings is not a faithful depiction of either an historical or fictitious event, but the creation of a new narrative for exploration and interpretation. The viewer is welcomed to wade through confusing and sometimes contradictory visual information in an attempt to make sense of what they are seeing.

The result are pictures that are unbalanced and uncomfortable, and simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar as they visualize the pathological nature of the North American dream. Through the reoccurring themes of nuclear family, violence, racial tension, labour and leisure, the dreamlike aspirations of a 1950-60's North America are presented, but never reached. Rather, they parallel many of the social tensions and obstacles we face today, but in unsettling, and at times nightmarish iterations.

Of his work the artist states:

"We all have a relationship with the past. Be these memories positive, negative or neutral, they are all inaccurate. We distort events mentally as a matter of course as soon as they have happened, and the further they recede in our private histories the more distorted they become. Considering how influential our individual pasts are in framing our personal presents, how we recall an event can have dramatic consequences upon our engagement with our present and future selves. The Best Of Life explores the dangers of our nostalgic, romantic, and distorted relationship with the past and its impact on our present lives by drawing contrasts and parallels between a halcyon era of history and contemporary Western life.”

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Jay Senetchko now lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a University of Alberta graduate (1997 - Bachelor of Commerce with Distinction) and spent several years as a professional soccer player in Edmonton and Montreal before pursuing entrepreneurial interests in Canada and the United States. In 2000 he moved to Vancouver and received a Diploma of Classical Animation from the Vancouver Film School in 2001. Primarily self-taught, his painting has been strongly influenced by apprenticeships with both Gideon Flitt and Odd Nerdrum. His work has exhibited since 2002 and shown in North and Central America and Europe.

Recent awards and events of interest include an honourable mention in the 2013 Kingston Portrait Competition, shortlist for the BP Portrait Competition (2011, 2012, 2015), shortlist for the Kurt Beers 100 Painters of Tomorrow publication (2013), shortlist for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2015), inclusion in the recently published The Nerdrum School (a collection of paintings by those who have apprenticed with the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum - 2013), and 1st place in the juried 2012 Painting on the Edge competition sponsored by the Canadian Federation of Artists.

He is the author of Making Pictures Speak: Composition for the Visual Arts, a textbook on perspective and composition for visual art; as well as the adult storybook Fishes and Wishes. He is currently developing another storybook, The Dragon and the Unicorn: An Ideological Fairytale. He has been teaching life-drawing, perspective, composition, colour theory and art history at Vancouver Film School since 2002, and teaching painting privately since 2003.

central gallery + north gallery

REAL-PHOTO

Support for this FotoFocus Biennial 2016 exhibition
was provided by FotoFocus.

From photography’s earliest inception into the culture at large, there was a recognition of both the artistic and scientific potentials of the medium. Within the art camp there was a push to validate photography’s role as ART by producing photographs that emulated the High Art of painting and drawing, peaking (possibly) with the Pictorialism Movement. At the opposite end were those who saw photography as a tool for ‘straight’, objective, representation —celebrating the photograph’s inherent characteristics as unique and valid in their own right.

For this exhibit Manifest sought submissions of works that were made through the photographic process exclusively, but which appear to not be photographic in nature, at least at first glance. While we were eager to discover just what artists are making that could qualify, we imagined our pool of entries might include works involving manipulated film, photograms, abstracted digital photographic imagery, direct emulsion exposure, photo-transfers, historical and alternative processes, and the like. We got far more than we expected, as this exhibit reveals.

The two companion exhibitions presented by Manifest for the FotoFocus Biennial 2016 each explore the biennial-wide concept from different aspects of 'undocument' or 'untruth'. REAL-PHOTO takes the common media involved in photography but presents resulting artwork that one may not suspect is photographic in nature, further expressing the boundaries of everyday assumptions, and cultural memes.

For this exhibit 113 artists from 29 states and 9 countries submitted 394 works for consideration. Twenty-four works by the following 19 artists from 14 states, and England were selected by several jurors from across the U.S. for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication.

RELATED WORKSHOPS
In conjuction with this exhibit two studio workshops at the Manifest Drawing Center will also be offered, focusing on photgenic drawing and drawing with the neolucida (drawing machines).

The two-day Photogenic Drawing workshop will be led by local photographer/artist pair Michael and Marilyn Willson with complete details here.

The Neolucida workshop will be led by Pablo Garcia, professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, with complete details here.

Presenting works by:

Claudio Ahlers
Bristol, England

Robin Assner-Alvey
St. Louis, Missouri

Diane Chung
San Francisco, California

Ashley Czajkowski
Tempe, Arizona

John Deamond
Burtonsville, Maryland

Rose Desiano
Brooklyn, New York

Brooks Dierdorff
Orlando, Florida

Patricia Drummond
Dunkirk, Ohio

Mitch Eckert
Louisville, Kentucky

Josh Jalbert
Savannah, Georgia

Ron Janowich
Gainesville, Florida

Jenny Knavel
Delavan, Wisconsin

David McCrae
Seattle, Washington

Bailey Miller
Middletown, Ohio

Robyn Moore
Morehead, Kentucky

Caroline Roberts
Houston, Texas

Francis Schanberger
Dayton, Ohio

Patrick D. Wilson
Kalamazoo, Michigan

Rachel Wolf
Portland, Oregon

     Francis Schanberger

     Patrick D. Wilson

     David McCrae

     Brooks Dierdorff