Mitchell Wiebe Vampsites at the Confederation Centre

Mitchell Wiebe: Solo Exhibition VampSites at the Confederation Centre

October 17, 2018 - April 21, 2019

An exhibition that launches a national tour of space activations by the Halifax painter, performer, and installation artist.

VampSites is an 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.is an 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.

-Pan Wendt, Curator