Vancouver-educated, Saskatoon-based artist Sean Weisgerber debuted Electric Mud, his most recent collection, at Scotia Street’s WAAP gallery last Thursday.
The highly textural, tactile exhibit effectively evokes a juxtaposition of delight and squeamishness. Canvases grow jungles of writhing, 3-D paint stalagmites, reaching out toward viewers like anemone arms, creating the illusion of soft malleability and movement. Poised at the axis of painting and sculpture, the collection conveys a certain joyful, vibrant ghastliness, in the spirit of classic Tim Burton (Beetlejuice stripes and Nightmare Before Christmas tendrils come to mind). This sense of celebrated oddness is compounded by Weisgerber’s organized allowance of "errors" within his work to re-characterize as points of interest in the ultimate picture plane (for instance, where the fingers tilt over each other like trees in a haunted forest).
Of course, the exhibit is incredible to witness within the apartment-gallery space of WAAP, where domesticity and high art collide. —Adrienne Matei
Electric Mud, until October 11th, 2014, at Wil Aballe Art Projects, 2050 Scotia St., Vancouver, www.waapart.com
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