For those of you visiting/passing through Kingston, Ontario this holiday season...  Please distribute as appropriate.

Many thanks,

 

Adam Lauder

 

 

 

 

7 November 2009 – 7 March 2010

 

Guest curated by Adam Lauder

 

It’s Alive! Bertram Brooker and Vitalism is an exhibition that explores Canadian artist Bertram Brooker’s search for a visual language capable of animating audiences by appealing directly to their physical desires. Representations of Brooker (1888 -1955) as the “pioneer” of Canadian abstraction have tended to separate his remarkable career in advertising from his artistic production. It’s Alive! takes a fresh and over-arching look at Brooker’s work that locates his interdisciplinary practice at the intersection of developments in biology, communications and visual art in the first half of the 20^th century.

 

A major re-evaluation of Brooker‘s oeuvre, It’s Alive! challenges conventional representations of the mid-20^th century Toronto art scene as a cloistered community of mystics, proposing an alternative vision of the city as a global marketplace of ideas that incubated the utopian communications theories of Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).

 

It’s Alive! Bertram Brooker and Vitalism is organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Windsor. The exhibition is presented with the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council, the Kingston Arts Council and the City of Kingston through the Kingston Arts Fund, the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund and the Janet Braide Memorial Fund.

 

For further information, please contact Matthew Hills at 613.533.2190 or [log in to unmask].