Tom gets a show at the AGA

WHAT:
Meet the Artist Opening Reception

WHO:
Tom O'Flanagan, Soundings From A Great Divide

WHEN:
November 2 at 7:30 p.m.

WHERE:
Art Gallery of Algoma

SHOW RUNS:
November 2 - 25

OFFICIAL PUBLICITY BUMPF:

In September 2005 Tom O'Flanagan arrived in Sault Ste. Marie to take up a studio art position in the Fine Arts Department at Algoma U.

After a lifetime in western Canada, Tom is coming to terms with being an easterner and is presently finding inspiration in a new landscape and a fine new set of friendships.

He is especially excited about having this exhibition so soon after his arrival and believes that it is another confirmation of the welcoming nature of this part of the country.

Tom's work in painting involves several different idioms, two of which will be included in the Art Gallery of Algoma exhibition.

The first is made up of constructions which exist at the boundaries of painting and sculpture and which juxtapose aspects of colour field abstraction, expressionist figuration and multiple references to art history and experiences in nature.

These works are both tragic and highly comic in nature and employ a rough and ramshackle fabrication for expressive effect.

The second idiom is more classical and refined in its aspect and has been influenced by Roman fresco painting, the glazed oil paintings of the Northern European Renaissance and the The Kacho-Ga (flower and bird) traditions of China and Japan.

Despite their refinement, these works are also formally impure, relying as they do on associations between highly realistic images of birds which are located on gesturally abstract grounds.

Often offered up as elegies to the souls of the departed, these works embrace a notion of a world in which "sorrow and joy have embraced."

Tom has been the recipient of Canada Council, Saskatchewan Arts Board and Alberta Foundation For the Arts grants and became a Walter Murray Fellow of the University of Saskatchewan in 2003.

He has exhibited extensively throughout Canada in both group and one-person exhibitions and his work is represented in various Canadian collections, notably The Canada Council Art Bank, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Albert Foundation for the Arts and the Edmonton Art Gallery.

"Although I have long believed that a sublime and substantive content may arise out of the relational aspects of art in and of themselves, my recent work aspires to overlay succinct formal relationships with an evocative content which is couched in allusions to the comic and tragic nature of life in a contingent world, the relationship between that world and the afterlife, the majesty and frailty of the natural order and the manner in which the vehicle of physical existence gives form and voice to the intellectual, emotional and spiritual facets of human sensibility." - from an artist's statement, 2002

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