Upcoming exhibitions celebrate works of Dr. Paul Kelly

North Bay’s WKP Kennedy Gallery will be exhibiting the works of Nipissing University’s Dr. Paul Kelly February 16 – March 14, 2013; with the opening reception on Saturday, February 16, from 1 – 4 p.m. The show is titled Paul Kelly: Echoes of the Past, Design Art.

Here’s a bit more on it from the Gallery’s website:

Paul Kelly’s drawing and paintings add to the lineage of historical works that have become the international hallmark of Canadian painting and drawing. His subjects and processes reference the work of the Group of Seven, Charles Goldhamer, Doris McCarthy, Virginia Luz and Bob Ross. And though Kelly’s practice is often a sincere, invested stylistic homage to these influences, it also suggests a contemporary inquiry into the place of representational painting in culture today.

Like his renowned landscape paintings and watercolours of dilapidated scenes of Northern Ontario and Quebec’s modernist past, the works included in Paul Kelly: Echoes of the Past, Design Art also allude to a deconstruction of histories – art and design histories and personal histories: aging barns and abandoned bridges are placed amongst domestic objects in colour and form that also suffer the revisions and ravages of time. Kelly acknowledges the contemporary suspicion of modernist traditions of form and skill while employing those same methods to draw and paint the common objects. Through fractures in design and composition, bright planes and juxtaposition of colour, and stylized patterns of hue consciously placed to simultaneously supply and deny visual depth that takes on one or three social statements, Kelly’s design art are constructed to narrate through form and space. These pieces tell the story of common domestic objects showing their status on their own merit. In these works the individual elements exist within their own space, while at the same time occurs within a larger space.

Paul Kelly’s interpretation highlights the momentary brilliance and ephemeral nature of not only each design but the entirety of the compositions.

This exhibition will be shown in the WKP Kennedy Gallery's Gallery I Space.

Dr. Kelly work will also be exhibited at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington in Paul Kelly: A Retrospective, which runs from May 27 to June 24, 2014. All three exhibition gallery spaces at the Centre will celebrate his landscape, still life, life drawing, printmaking and graphic design from the 1960s to the present.