PRESS RELEASE: 15 RESTLESS NIGHTS BY DEREK BESANT
15 RESTLESS NIGHTS BY DEREK BESANT
EXHIBITION: APRIL 8 TO MAY 13, 2010
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, APRIL 16 AT 5PM
The Board of Directors and staff of Gallery Connexion invite the members and the general public to an exhibition opening on Friday, April 16 at 5pm in the Chestnut Complex at 440 York Street in Fredericton.
15 Restless Nights is a contemporary art installation by Derek Besant that includes sound and text as well as 15 large-scale printed images of unmade hotel beds. Besant drove across Canada, spending nights in strange motels. Each morning the artist would wait and watch as people vacated their rooms and left their doors open. Before the maids could make their rounds, Besant photographed the unmade beds and disarray like a crime scene. The large-scale images are printed on industrial veil scrim. As a viewer experiences the installation, all the various aspects (sound, text and image) come together to engender an intense emotional impact.
15 Restless Nights was exhibited in Europe as a solo project for the 2008 International Print Biennial in The Municipal Museum of Art in Györ, Hungary, which toured it to the Veszprem Art Museum, Veszprem, Hungary and The Dunaszerdahely Contemporary Art Gallery in Slovakia. In Canada, 15 Restless Nights has shown at the Harbourfront Centre in Ontario, the Raymond-Lasnier centre d’exposition and Engramme Centre art actuel in Québec, and at the Kelowna Art Gallery and The Reach Art Museum in B.C.
Derek Michael Besant was born in 1950 in Alberta where he studied at the University of Calgary, 1969-74. Head of the Drawing Program/ Dept of Fine Arts, Alberta College of Art and Design, Calgary, from 1977-1993, he remains on the Fine Arts Faculty. Since 1973, solo exhibitions of his work have been held at museums and galleries in Québec, Bratislava, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Montenegro, Denmark, Macedonia, Canada, Russia, Argentina, Finland, USA, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and England. His work has also featured in innumerable international group exhibitions and publications and is represented in 100 university, museum and other public collections worldwide. He divides his time between home/studios in Alberta and Mexico.
“I suppose, ultimately, I am still searching and mining the context of human trajectories through the spaces no one thinks about much. Motel rooms, construction sites, back alleys, swimming pools. In hunting and gathering my resources from those places, I come up with recurring themes like those out of film scripts: sleeping, wandering, falling, drowning, assembling or migrating. But I’ve always found something lingering in those places between things, some kind of connective tissue to something like a basic truth we collectively understand.” – Derek Michael Besant
We hope to see you there on Friday, April 16 at 5pm at Gallery Connexion to open this exciting new exhibition.
For more information please contact the gallery at 454-1433 or connex@nbnet.nb.ca
Gallery Connexion gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of New Brunswick, The New Brunswick Foundation for the Arts, Kingswood, and Picaroons
