Andrew Wright.................................CANADA

City Hall Ottawa
on display at Corridor 45|75 from January 16 to March 29, 2020. 

110 Laurier Ave W, Ottawa, ON K1P 1J1

Filmtrack 4 A Sound: Suite Kurelek de Fiala (2010-2020) is inspired by a pristine, unopened box set of records from the 1980s that Wright found in 2009. A perfectly preserved artefact of a more idealistic time, Canadian Anthology (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 1987) is carefully unboxed, played and recorded a single time, and then resealed. Within the anthology is George Fiala’s (1922-2017) Kurelek Suite (1982), an orchestral piece in which each of the five movements is composed in response to a particular painting by William Kurelek (1927-1977). Taking Fiala’s homage one step further, Wright makes a filmic chronicle of the unboxing event, which is then screened as three contiguous fields on the gallery walls. The result is a visual journey across vast arctic landscapes of snow and ice – or so it would appear.
-Excerpt from the essay by Adrian Göllner
Biography
Artist Andrew Wright (link is external) creates works in many media and has been preoccupied with using photography in traditional and decidedly non-traditional ways for over 25 years. Wright has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad with shows in places such as the U.S., the U.K., the E.U., Korea and China. He has exhibited at such venues as the London Gallery West; the Polygon Gallery, Vancouver; the Art Museum at the University of Toronto; the Art Gallery of Ontario; the University of California, Berkeley; Oakville Galleries; and the Today Art Museum, Beijing. His works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the X'i’an Art Museum in China, the City of Ottawa, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, the University of Toronto, the Ottawa Art Gallery, Canada’s High Commission in London at Canada House and private collections around the world.
A six-time nominee for the Sobey Art Award, Wright was a semi-finalist in 2007. In 2011, Wright won the inaugural Gattuso Prize at Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto. His work has been curated by Joan Fontcuberta and he has shown alongside artists such as Michael Snow, Iain Baxter&, Ed Burtynsky, Rebecca Belmore and Kelly Mark. Andrew Wright is an Associate Professor of Visual Art and the Graduate Program Director in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa.
FILMTRACK 4 A SOUND: SUITE KURELEK DE FIALA coincides with another exhibition by 2019 Karsh Award laureate Andrew Wright. APEX: Interloper will be on display at Corridor 45|75 from January 16 to March 29, 2020.