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Meanwhile out on Hudson’s Bay
Melt: a new series of paintings by Kurt Swinghammer

Show Room Gallery and special to the Dennis Tourin Members Gallery
Opening Reception Friday 27 April at 8PM
In conjunction with In the Soil Arts Festival

It was close to 100 years ago that Group Of Seven founder Lawren Harris painted highly stylized depictions of snow capped Rocky Mountains and Artic ice flows. As a young art enthusiast, Kurt Swinghammer absorbed this work via reproductions hung in his public school. In his teens, Swinghammer was soaking up library books on the modernist colour field work of Group of Eleven’s Jack Bush along with the British Op Art movement’s Bridget Riley. These three streams of influence come together in Swinghammer’s new series of acrylic paintings called “Melt.”

Each canvas shows a graphically designed iceberg floating in an infinite body of water. Hundreds of carefully mixed shards of colour achieves a strong sense of depth and has become a signature technique for Swinghammer. The Melt series continues his interest in exploring a traditional Canadian subject matter in a contemporary manner.

Complimenting the exhibit is a screening of Swinghammer’s Turpentine reWIND. These animated videos accompany instrumental remixes of five tracks from his song cycle homage to Tom Thomson, Turpentine Wind from 2010. The animations slowly explore a series of paintings that are based on the digital WAV files of the vocal recordings from the album. Swinghammer painted on 8”x10” birch panels, the format used by Thomson in the field. WAV files can look strikingly similar to shorelines reflected in a still lake, one of the common themes of Thomson’s landscapes. The music was written, arranged and performed by Kurt with contributions from a number of prominent Toronto musicians and production by multiple Juno Award winning producer Michael Phillip Wojewoda.