Melvin Charney  Fugitive Cities November 1 - December 7, 2002 Opening reception: Friday, Nov 1, 2002 Frederieke Taylor gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Fugitive Cities by well-known artist and architect Melvin Charney. Fugitive Cities is a series of art works - photo-based, oil-pastel and acrylic painting, wood and metal constructions - that highlight the evacuation of urban content from the agglomerations where most people now live. Pieces of cities are seen slip sliding away, fleeing the amorphous sprawl and the standardized containers that overwhelm contemporary human settlement. The Fugitive Cities evoke populations in transit, carrying city life with them and creating new cities in regions of chaos and despair. Charney elucidates metaphors of urban form and emphasizes its collective potential. Cities are on the move, but ready to regroup in ways that sustain deeply ingrained reflexes of collective urban life. Melvin Charney has successfully blended art and architecture into a unique body of work. He was recently the subject of a retrospective at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. His work is currently on view in the exhibition Sans Commune Mesure at the Centre national de la photographie in Paris. Charney is known for a series of large-scale installations, such as Les maisons de la rue Sherbrooke, Montréal, 1976, and A Chicago Construction, 1982, and for the creation of the Canadian Centre for Architecture Garden, Montréal, 1987-91. He has executed major commissions for public sculpture and has won a number of competitions including the Canadian Tribute to Human Rights, Ottawa, inaugurated in 1991. He is also known for his photo-based paintings, and works such as UN DICTIONNAIRE, a thirty-year compilation of photographic traces of news events that have altered our perception of contemporary urban iconography. His work has been exhibited in museums in the United Sates, Canada, Europe and Asia, including P.S.1, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Musée National d'Art Moderne and the CCI, Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstverein, Stuttgart; the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the National Gallery of Canada; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Musée du Québec; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery; Canadian Centre for Architecture. His work was included in the Paris Biennale, 1980 and the IBAU exhibition, Berlin, 1987. He was invited to Documenta, Kassel, 1982. He represented Canada at the 42nd Venice Biennale International Exhibition of Art, 1986, and at the 7th Venice Biennale International Exhibition of Architecture, 2000. For further information and visuals please contact the gallery. Home | Exhibitions | Artists | Contacts Copyright © 2002 by Frederieke Taylor gallery