woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131\nThe work of Damian Moppett subjects the history of art to a precarious balancing act, a suspension of belief, and a number of catastrophic falls. His survey exhibition at the Rennie Collection is testament to this, bring-ing together work from the last fifteen years, spanning the breadth of his practice in its sweeping range of painting, drawing, sculpture, and video. The collected works represent an intensely thoughtful and self-reflexive investigation of the practice of making art, characterized by an effacing monumentality and deadpan wit. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nA gigantic Alexander Calder-like mobile, more than twenty-five feet tall, is suspended from the ceiling, high above viewers\u2019 heads. Bright red aluminum disks branch out like tentacles, each piece carefully balanced on the other in a play of levity and movement, as if in spite of their massive scale and weight. One piece, however, appears to have fallen and lies hap-hazardly on the ground. Is it a prank? A trap? Moppett\u2019s most recent work, Broken Fall <\/em>\u2014 both an homage and an irreverent doubling \u2014 is a culmination of his interests to date. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout the exhibition a series of \u201cstabiles,\u201d or floor-based mobiles, appropriate the form of modernist sculpture as a base for amateur ceramics. Apparent tensions \u2014 between craft and high art, amateurism and expertise, manufactured and handmade \u2014 rest in careful balance in these works, often literally. In a similar vein is Studio at Dawn, <\/em>a fifteen-foot long steel form modeled after Anthony Caro\u2019s Early One Morning<\/em>. Instead of Caro\u2019s original red, Moppett has painted it matte white (camouflaging it within the framing devices of the gallery: walls, plinths, etc.) and placed handmade pottery on its surface. The pottery is a lure, drawing one into the space of the sculpture, whose massive size, long bars, and sharp edges suspended high in the air, appear subtly threatening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moppett\u2019s work is often described through its referentiality. Indeed, this work is hyper-aware of its historical contexts and draws on a notable cast from the history of art \u2014 from Calder and Caro to Constantin Br\u00e2ncusi and Lygia Clark \u2014 appropriating iconic works in an interrogation of authorship. Looking closer, Moppett\u2019s references are more eclectic than predictable, and refuse to chart a singular trajectory through the canon by giving equal weight to the everyday. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What is most impressive in its quiet and insistent monumentality, is Moppett\u2019s Watercolour Drawing Project<\/em>, an omnibus of the artist\u2019s personal archive, over 100 drawings that together comprise one work, created over nine years. It seems that everything that passes before his eyes becomes the subject of drawings, from studio ephemera to iconic artworks, the covers of art magazines to the Gulf Islands. Clustered in thematic group-ings, the work forms a comprehensive index to Moppett\u2019s complex oeuvre and underscores the idea that art is not just the practice of making but the practice of looking. <\/p>\n