Come and Go

Chris Gillespie

July 7 to August 12, 2006

Gillespie draws on the influences of 80s and 90s fashion and design, advertising, black and white comic book illustrations, signage and cultural markings to comment on durational trends in general, and the hybridization/democratization of current aesthetics in particular.

Playing with our innate tendencies for pattern recognition and visual perception amidst media saturation, as well as notions of what constitutes a part or a whole, Gillespie has produced upwards of 100 small to medium sized square paintings for this exhibition, grouped together in clusters in which these referents have been excerpted, abstracted and repeated.

In Come and Go, Gillespie has produced a body of work which requires no translation—where meaning has become unmoored from source material and is no longer crucial to the viewer’s engagement with it.

Chris Gillespie was born in 1972 and lives in Victoria, BC. He received his BFA from the University of British Columbia and his MFA from the University of Victoria in 2000. He has exhibited in Canada and the United States at galleries including Access Art (Vancouver), the MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie), Mercer Union (Toronto), Modest Contemporary Art Projects and The Pond (Chicago). He is the recipient of a recent VADA Award, administered through the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver.