Les Ramsay, Night Moves, oil on canvas, 2021.
EXCITATION STATION | LES RAMSAY
18.02.2022 to 24.04.2022
Opening Reception | February 18 at 7 PM
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
-A Woman of No Importance, Oscar Wilde
Excitation Station riffs on kitschy visual culture as a vehicle for artist Les Ramsay’s deeper ecological concerns. Ramsay’s recent embroideries, paintings, and sculptures begin with the oddities, knick-knacks, and discards of domestic craft and outsider artists. Whether combing the beaches for washed up materials or sketching on an iPad, Ramsay assimilates the humorous and decorative visuals of his environment with mythical and surreal results. Living and working in a rural location near Powell River on the Sunshine Coast of B.C. has deepened his relationship to folk art and the environmental issues of the Pacific Coast.
Material choices of painted driftwood and needlepoint deliberately prod at the hierarchies of artistic taste. Previously excluded from serious art discourse because of its association with femininity and domesticity, embroidery allows Ramsay’s practice to exist outside of the studio in a more casual, steady, and focused way. Whether planned in advance or improvised as sketches, the slow, pixelated-looking needlepoint process has a way of influencing the figures of Ramsay’s larger paintings and vice versa.
By refusing the usual good-bad dichotomy of artistic taste, Ramsay offers viewers a different set of artistic standards. With an eye for the absurd, he pairs the awkward mannerisms of hand-painted roadside signs or antique ceramic cats with new partners to create a visual punchline. His foray into painting fish-shaped driftwood was inspired by the folk tradition of decoy fish, the proliferation of driftwood sculpture on the coast, and easy access to the material. Carved and painted fish decoys are one of the earlier forms of folk art in North America and Ramsay’s repetition of fish forms represents concern for the constant threat of extinction faced by marine life on the Pacific coastline.
Ramsay’s playful combination of everyday excess with the slow artistic processes of painting and needlepoint make light of our own visual overstimulation. However, just as humour often masks criticism, Ramsay’s witty depictions of marine scenes, forest life, and knick-knacks cloaks a pointed awareness of the material surplus contributing to Canada’s worsening climate disasters.
Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator
Les Ramsay was born in Vancouver and studied fine arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Universitat de Politecnica in Valencia (Spain) and completed his MFA at Concordia University in 2015.
He has taken part in group and solo shows such as Local Cherries Sweet Corn, presented at Towards in Toronto (2020); The Adventures of Atrevida Reef at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal (2019); Li Salay, at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton (2018); Border X, at Winnipeg Art Gallery (2016); Retreat of the Horstman, at the Field Contemporary in Vancouver (2016); Ignition 10 at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery Montréal (2014); and Keep the Glove at Sunset Terrace in Vancouver (2014). His works can be found in many private and corporate collections such as The Claridge Collection, Medcan, the TD Bank and RBC collection. He has exhibited in Canada, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, as well as in the US.
This exhibition was made possible with funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.
Thank you to our volunteers and sponsors who assisted with this exhibition.
Victoria Lasalle
Dominique Marcil
Ian Thompson