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Reading Art Words and Pictures 1993 to 2005, installation view, 2006, SFU Gallery. Photo: SFU LIDC.
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Dave Ostrem, Keen Fitful Gusts are Whispering Here and There, 1996-2004, oil on canvas. Contains an image detail of a painting by Paddy Williams, “Christ and the Battle”, ca. 1980.
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Dave Ostrem, Considerations of Ambition and Talent, 1989-2003, oil on canvas.
Dave Ostrem: Reading Art Words and Pictures 1993 to 2005
January 10 – February 18, 2006
SFU Gallery
Dave Ostrem's paintings show us an artist at work in a live-work studio space that is remarkably like the one he inhabits in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Like Vermeer before him, Ostrem incorporates a window into his paintings but, unlike Vermeer, gives us the view from his window and not just the rosy glow from the exterior world. Ostrem's view is of a Vancouver, or a Vancouver look-alike, that seems to suffer from a terrible bout of flatness, even though his world is painted with brilliant hues reminiscent of the primary colours in Mondrian's paintings. Each Ostrem painting is a formal proposition about the structure of the world; his ideas about structure would be familiar to Mondrian and each version of the artist-in-the-studio that he creates explores yet another paradox of human existence in the modern world.
Dave Ostrem's painted world has a comic book appearance, but his ever-present invocation of research categories and subject-areas, as manifested on the spines of the thousands of books that inhabit his paintings, reminds viewers of Lévi-Strauss's dictum that humans will only find names for those things that are truly important to them. Ostrem's paintings are a universal catalogue of those areas of importance that, in turn, provide a context for the making of contemporary art.
Curated by Bill Jeffries.