Curated by Pan Wendt, VampSites catalogues the Confederation Centre Art Gallery multi-year touring exhibition of the same name. Showcasing the work of ground-breaking Nova Scotia artist Mitchell Wiebe, VampSites considers exhibition as temporary occupation. Combining making and showing, employing a surreal personal lexicon and mythology of colours and textures, motifs and narratives, Mitchell Wiebe imports the chaos and theatre of his studio into the well-lit, rational architecture of the art museum. And he adopts a distinctive persona who emerges from the same fictive world inhabited by his array of fantastical animalesque characters. Wiebe openly embraces an artificial and attention-grabbing mode of address; he loves the cheap attraction of the fun house, the appeal to regressive fantasy, exuberance with a touch of poison. Optical effects coincide with pop culture references, spatial illusion reverberating with the visceral swoop and swish of paint; Wiebe plays with the procedures and boundaries of painting, with the ebb and flow of its credibility. To vamp is to build a rhythmic ground for improvisation; it also means to seduce in the night, to draw us into an alternate life. Mitchell Wiebe (artist) Pan Wendt (curator) 122 pages, colour 2025 Bilingual (English/French)
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