Ian Johnston Dazzles with Art Made from Medicine Hat Household Waste at the Esplanade Art Gallery
Announcing our new summer exhibition in the Esplanade Art Gallery: Ian Johnston: Reinventing Consumption, until August 10. The public is invited to a reception for Ian Johnston’s exhibition on Friday June 21, at 7 PM during the Downtown Medicine Hat Art Walk. The artist will be present.
Ian Johnston: Reinventing Consumption
Artist Ian Johnston brings his architecture and ceramic background to Reinventing Consumption, a dazzling installation in three parts. The first section, The Inventor’s Room, presents artifacts related to his original experiments and investigations. The Antechamber is a repeating-motif ceramic environment which evokes the massive scale of consumer goods manufacturing today. And finally, The Chamber is an inflating and deflating piece which shrouds and reveals an enormous mass of household items diverted from the waste stream in Medicine Hat.
Mesmerizing, intriguing and sobering, Reinventing Consumption brings home to viewers, as Johnston comments, “the paradoxical relationship between limited resources and seemingly unlimited appetite.”
Ian Johnston is based in Nelson, BC, and holds a Bachelor of Architecture (with distinction) from Carleton University, Ottawa. His work has been supported by major project funding from Columbia Basin Trust and several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council. He received an Honourable Mention for the Winifred Shantz Award for excellence in ceramic art, the Award of Excellence from the North-West Ceramics Foundation and the Award of Merit, 15th San Angelo National Ceramic Competition.
He has presented solo exhibitions at Museum London, Surrey Art Gallery, Kelowna Art Gallery, Richmond Art Gallery and Langham Cultural Centre, amongst others, and has recently participated in group exhibitions in San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, Texas, the 5th East-West Ceramics Collaboration at University of Hawai’i Mānoa, and 6th World Ceramic Biennale, Icheon World Ceramic Center, Korea.
The Esplanade Art Gallery is pleased to collaborate with the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, the McMaster University Art Gallery, the Dunlop Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Swift Current in the touring exhibition of Reinventing Consumption, and accompanying publication (forthcoming in late fall 2013.)