Ruberto Ostberg Gallery, Calgary UPCOMING EXHIBITION SEPTEMBER 2023

Opening night Friday September 8

Lisa Brawn and Chris Cran exhibition:
MISS PULCHRITUDE & MISTER MUSCLES

September 8 - September 30, 2023

Ruberto Ostberg Gallery, Calgary
1840 20 Ave. N.W

Opening Receptions:
Friday, September 8, 5 - 9 pm
Saturday, September 9, 12 - 2 pm

Lisa Brawn

One of my best memories is a family vacation we took when I was a kid in 1979. We drove from Calgary to Las Vegas in an old Mercury station wagon without air conditioning but with a great collection of Johnny Cash 8-track cassettes. I vividly recall the hot wind, hissing trees, motel pools, and my mom winning a 75-dollar jackpot at a 25-cent slot machine.

Ding Ding Ding: Hotcakes-Beefcake-Cheesecake-Creampuffs-Dreamboats

Now I find that every single day in our contemporary world is a non-stop, all-you-can-eat, once-in-a-lifetime extravaganza of stimulation. It is both across the spectrum and simultaneously, delightful and horrific.

For Ruberto Ostberg Gallery, I have (re)created a bespoke Las Vegas boulevard populated with one, two, and three-word poems. They are fragments lifted from the swirl of topical ephemera and superimposed with the cognitive dissonance and suspended disbelief of contemporary doublethink. Welcome to the glam debris of Glitter Grumpy Cats in the Age of Disaster; Lucky Sophias; and Gay Golden Himbos!

Before your very eyes: blissfully blinking candy-coloured amusements, attractions, escapes. Miss Pulchritude & Mister Muscles offer confounding propositions of Femme à Moustache, diminishing returns, and... Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels!

Chris Cran

The Chorus Series Paintings (tondo portraits), named after the chorus in Greek theatre are made to float on walls, high or low. They are also meant to be like the putti or cherubs in Renaissance and post-Renaissance paintings who also float around and, like the Greek chorus, comment on the main dramatic action.

These Chorus Paintings are only of eyes, noses, and mouths and the captured expression of those features – enjoyment, surprise, curiosity, doubt, disdain. Most of them are looking to one side or the other, some up or down, and occasionally out at the viewer. They may look at each other as in a conversation of gazes or at some other painting on the wall. They were also intended to cheekily appropriate other artwork that they might gaze at, either singly or as an attentive group. Or they might just enjoy each other’s company.

Chris Cran has made the Chorus Paintings using many different colours and textures as well as varied systems of evoking the photographic image.