Mitchell Wiebe: VampSites

VampSites is the latest exhibition from artist Mitchell Wiebe. Wiebe combines making and showing, employing a surreal personal lexicon and mythology of colours and textures, motifs and narratives, Wiebe imports the chaos and theatre of his studio into the well-lit, rational architecture of the art gallery. He adopts a distinctive persona which emerges from the same fictive world inhabited by his array of fantastical animalesque characters.

Wiebe openly embraces an artificial and attention-grabbing mode of address; he loves the cheap attraction of the fun house, the appeal to regressive fantasy, exuberance with a touch of poison. Optical effects coincide with pop culture references, spatial illusion reverberating with the visceral swoop and swish of paint; Wiebe plays with the procedures and boundaries of painting, with the ebb and flow of its credibility. To vamp is to build a rhythmic ground for improvisation; it also means to seduce in the night, to draw us into an alternate life.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mitchell Wiebe lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he practices painting, music, installation and performance. The climate of this village allows for time to stretch and bend while the windy coast stirs the air. Wiebe’s time spent growing up in Regina, SK, influenced an early appreciation of a local whimsical approach to art, and ceramics in particular. Often populated by strange characters, Wiebe’s paintings echo social scenarios in a bombastic, pointed and playful manner. Collaborations with artists such as Ray Fenwick, Graeme Patterson and Craig Leonard inevitably get distilled back at the studio, where large canvases carry blobs and impressions of the rich experiences. Wiebe’s paintings can be found in collections throughout Canada, the USA, Germany and Venice, Italy. He received his MFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, and his BFA from ECUAD in Vancouver.