MAY 2 - MAY 31
VANITAS: NICHOLAS AND SHEILA PYE
ARTCORE/FABRICE MARCOLINI
Fabrice Marcolini is pleased to announce Nicholas and Sheila Pye’s first solo exhibition at Artcore. Vanitas presents photographic and cinematic work by celebrated Toronto based husband-wife artists Nicholas and Sheila Pye. The exhibition includes several multi-channel video installations and 9 photographic works.
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In Vanitas, the Pyes play with themes present in the art historical genre of still life painting to examine their own relationship. Carefully staged and precisely crafted, one photographic features the symbolic fodder found in the vanitas painting genre, such as skulls, ivy, rotting fruit, and books. Four portraits delve into issues of mortality, narcissism, and the complex issues of youthful existence, death and the nature of being. The artists take their married relationship and allude to the impermanence and illusion of togetherness. It is as though they are faking their deaths to consider their mortality and to repent to one another.
The Pyes relentlessly blur the borders between their lives and their art as they tackle the highly charged yet poetic issues that arise from their own relationship. But theirs is not a self-absorbed biographical fascination. Rather, the relationship depicted in their bodies of work, becomes emblematic of all things that can go wrong in a mutually dependant and suffocating relationship. The Pyes’ artistic output spans photography, film, performance, video, and installation while acknowledging the profound influences of surrealism in film, narrative conventions in painting, 19th and early 20th century portraiture, and conceptual approaches to subject matter. Given this well-versed theoretical blend, they avoid prosaic performance art documentation preferring to transform their photographs and films into works that cleverly reconfigure art historic antecedents. Additionally the finished works acknowledge their intrinsic aesthetic status as art objects.
The Pyes have exhibited their work at museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; The Power Plant, Toronto; The Glenbow Museum, Calgary; the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris.Their work has been screened in numerous international film festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival, Canada; the Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland; and Les Rencontres Internationales in Paris, Berlin, and Madrid. Their work has also been exhibited internationally throughout Toronto, Washington, London, Berlin and Madrid among others.
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