Flying Lotus Flower, 2024, 12 x 16 inches, digital collage and mixed-media on paper
Gavin Sewell is showing new work in We Are Not Going Back, a Kamala Harris themed exhibit at Zenith Gallery running from September 20 – October 12, 2024 with opening receptions and artist talks on Friday, Sept 20, 4-8 PM & Saturday, Sept 21, 2-6 PM.
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Work We Eat — Inconvenient Truisms is Gavin Sewell’s 2024 project for Convention Collective Agreement (CAA) an artists group working at the intersection of art and labour. The membership consists of artists of various disciplinary backgrounds working on labor related themes through their individual practices. Current members including Selena PB and Corie Waugh are working on a collaborative project focusing on the theme of food.
Critical to human survival, food remains a subject of deep mystification in the capitalist economy. Less than 2% of working people in Quebec are employed in food production and very few of us spend substantial time at farms or food processing facilities. Food we eat — or don’t eat — at supermarkets, corner stores, restaurants and food banks appears there as if by magic, decoupled from the human labour that produced, refined, packaged, stored, shipped, and distributed it. This disconnection between work and consumption becomes particularly problematic as food becomes less accessible.
In 2023 the inflation rate for food in Canada reached 10.4 percent, its highest level in nearly forty years, forcing many to choose between food and other basic necessities. Fourteen percent of Quebec households live in food insecurity — the condition of not having access to sufficient food, or food of an adequate quality, to meet one's basic needs — while Canada wide the food insecurity rate is nearly 23%. According to a Food Banks Quebec report published last October, the organisation had an unprecedented average of 2.6 million requests for food each month in 2023. The number of food baskets donated each month also doubled in four years, from 345,000 in 2019 to 682,000 in 2023. Last year 71% of the food banks the organisation supplies ran out of food. In a society as wealthy as Canada this raises the intersectional labour question — why are people not getting enough to eat?
On the production side, the Quebec agricultural sector averaged 55,900 jobs over the period 2020-2022, accounting for only 1.3% of total employment in Quebec.
While the sector is predicted to grow in the coming years, wages are low and many of the workers are highly vulnerable, difficult to unionise foreign temporary workers, the numbers of whom rose sharply in 2022 and are predicted to increase. Despite de facto food shortages in Quebec, the province exports over $8 billion of agricultural products every year, with more than 69% going to the United States.
The economic situation at supermarkets is revealing: Profits in the Canadian grocery sector exceeded $6 billion in 2023, setting a new record as they rose eight per cent in one year. Food retailers are now earning more than twice as much profit as they did pre-pandemic. Although grocery industry real wages grew substantially from 2018-2020, inflation has since negated those gains, regressing wages back to 2018 levels. The decline in real wages has correlated strongly with the increase in corporate grocery retailer profits. This dynamic between price increases, wage decline, and profit growth are consistent with what economists call, ‘seller’s inflation’ — sometimes called ‘greedflation’ — as prices and profits grow alongside declining wages.
At this troubling intersection of food and labour, Convention Collective Agreement aims to deepen the public conversation about these issues through creative artwork. By exploring these questions we hope to reduce the mystification around a system of production, distribution, and consumption that is failing to meet basic human needs. We wish to encourage both reflection and action on the part of audiences and creatively advance the day when our whole society can — without hypocrisy — wish each other, ‘Bon appetit!’
thank you qpirg concordia
For their generous financial and logistical support for this project.
Proud to announce Gavin’s work is included in the upcoming FORM + SPACE 2024, The Museum of Art - DeLand. Opening reception Friday, October 4th, 2024.
Between Us - Double Panel, 2023, mixed-media on panel, 24 x 14 x 2 inches
Show Dates: March 8 – April 6, 2024
MEET THE ARTISTS RECEPTIONS: Friday, March 8, 4-8 PM & Saturday, March 9, 2-6 PM
PRESS RELEASE
Featuring Artists: Doba Afolabi, Linda Atkinson, Bert Beirne, Joanathan Bessaci, Richard Binder, Jackie Braitman, Ram Brisueno, F. Lennox Campello, Sheryll Cashin, Lea Craigie-Marshall, Julee Dickerson-Thompson, Marija Djakovic, Bulsby “Buzz” Duncan, Renee duRocher, Cheryl Edwards, Cheryl Elmo, Margery Goldberg, Carolyn Goodridge, Stephen Hansen, Chris Hayman, Len Harris, Philip Hazard, Bernie Houston, David Hubbard, Hubert Jackson, Robert C. Jackson, Ronni Jolles, Mihira Karra, Barbara Kobylinska, Joan Konkel, Michela Mansuino, Anne Marchand, Donna McCullough, Carol Newmyer, Katharine Owens, Qrcky, Larry Ringgold, Suzy Scarborough, Gavin Sewell, Ellen Sinel, Patricia Skinner, Lynda Smith-Bugge, Bradley Stevens, Jennifer Wagner, Marcie Wolf-Hubbard, Paul Martin Wolff, Curtis Woody, Michael Young.
PoetryXCollage is a printed journal of artwork and writing which operates at the intersection of poetry and collage. We are interested in found poetry, blackout poetry, collage poems, haikus, centos, response collages, response poems, word scrambles, concrete poetry, scatter collage poems, and other poems and artwork that inhabit this world.
Each issue presents six movements of work by artists and curators. Page spreads are meant to be free zones of thinking where the contributor has chosen all elements of the layout: font, image place, composition, etc.
Initial volumes are being produced by participants in Kolaj Institute’s Poetry & Collage Residency in March 2022 and April 2022 under the direction of Christopher Kurts with support from Ric Kasini Kadour and Christopher Byrne. Learn more about Kolaj Institute’s Poetry & Collage Project.
PoetryXCollage, Volume Five
Johnette Downing
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Stacy DeBritz
Schenectady, New York, USA
maryhope|whitehead|lee
Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Aimee-Beth Martens
Saskatoon, Saskatechewan, Canada
Kelly McGovern
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Gavin W Sewell
New York, New York, USA
On the Cover
A detail of mountain hike by Johnette Downing
PURCHASE THE VOLUME
Gavin Sewell is proud to announce his participation in Exchanges: Dialogues Between Poetry and Art at The Ruth Foster Gallery at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire. This exciting juried exhibition consists of both visual and literary art; poets writing original poems inspired by a selection of professional visual artworks, and visual artists creating original works inspired by a selection of professional poems.
Exhibition runs September 8 - October 4
A public reception will be help on Thursday, September 14, 6-7:30 pm. All Foster Gallery events are free and open to the public.
Unburying Alive - Second State, 2023, digital collage and pencil on paper and acetate, 10 x 20 inch image on 13 x 22 inch paper
We are pleased to announce that Gavin Sewell’s work for the forthcoming book Poetry X Collage Vol. 5 was selected as an Explore and Create Program recipient by the Canada Council for the Arts. This suite of digital / analogue collage hybrids exploring the intersection of poetry and mixed-media work will be published by Kolaj Magazine in the coming months.
These haunting environmental portraits of essential workers during the depths of the COVID pandemic form an impressive debut show for photographer Selena Phillips-Boyle. The contrasts between the extreme lighting choices and the intense, hyper-fatigued gazes of their subjects are deeply compelling and succeed in illuminating something about both that particular moment and also about the tiredness and precarity that many of us have lived with ever since.
As Albert Camus said about Sisyphus, “A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself. I see [Sisyphus] going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end.” Phillips-Boyle’s work insinuates that same tenacity and sheer stubbornness to keep helping in the face of exhausting repetition. The show is tribute to human courage drained of middle-class sentimentality and romanticism — it is definitely worth checking out. — G. Sewell
Phillips-Boyle was kind enough to do a short phone interview about the exhibit — see below. Opening reception and artists walk through are at Gallery 44 on Saturday, April 15 from 1-3pm.
Gavin Sewell is proud to be part of the 45th Anniversary show of this Washington DC cultural institution.
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Current solo show at Zenith Gallery
Gavin Sewell’s solo exhibition Embracing the Storm - a celebration of change and transition in uncertain times is on now at Zenith Gallery in Washington DC.
Go Go Go
Unlike traditional artmaking practices however, the very choice of collage as a working medium implies certain values by virtue of the artist’s choice to make a collage rather than a drawing or painting.
Collage is an intriguing and unique art medium that has captivated artists and art lovers for over a century. It is a versatile and dynamic technique that involves the assemblage of different materials, textures, and images to create a new visual experience. Collage has a rich history that spans various artistic movements and has been used as a means of expressing diverse themes and concepts. Like painting or sculpture it can be deployed to say almost anything, to evoke, to insinuate an interesting question or set a mood.
Unlike traditional artmaking practices however, the very choice of collage as a working medium implies certain values by virtue of the artist’s choice to make a collage rather than a drawing or painting. In this essay, I will explore what makes collage special as an art medium, and what meanings and messages are inherent to collage as a way of making art.
Collage is a medium that enables artists to create new meanings and narratives through the juxtaposition of disparate elements. By combining found objects, photographs, text, and various materials, artists can create new relationships and meanings that were not previously present. This technique has been used by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Kurt Schwitters, who were pioneers in the early development of collage as an art form.
Collage is special in that it has an ability to create a sense of depth and texture. Unlike traditional painting or drawing, collage allows artists to create a physical and tactile surface that adds another dimension to the work. The layering of materials and textures creates a visual depth that invites the viewer to explore the work in a more physical and interactive way. This is particularly evident in the work of artists such as Romare Bearden and Hannah Höch, who used collage to explore themes of identity and social commentary.
Collage also has a unique relationship to time and memory. By incorporating found objects and photographs, artists can create a visual dialogue between the past and present. This is particularly evident in the work of contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu, who uses found images and materials to create new narratives that speak to issues of colonialism, feminism, and identity. Through her work, Mutu explores how our past experiences and cultural histories continue to shape our present identities and experiences.
Another unique aspect of collage is its ability to challenge traditional notions of composition and form. The juxtaposition of disparate elements creates a visual tension that can be both unsettling and intriguing. This is particularly evident in the work of artist Joseph Cornell, who created intricate box collages that explored themes of memory, nostalgia, and desire. By creating a tension between objects and images, Cornell invites the viewer to engage with the work in a more intimate and personal way.
Collage also has a rich history of political and social commentary. During the early 20th century, artists such as John Heartfield and Hannah Höch used collage to critique and challenge prevailing social and political structures. Through their work, they explored issues of gender, class, and power, and challenged traditional notions of beauty and representation. The use of found objects and materials in their work also spoke to issues of consumerism and mass production, highlighting the ways in which these systems shape our cultural and social identities.
In addition to its political and social commentary, collage also has a unique relationship to the unconscious and the subconscious. By incorporating found objects and materials, artists can create a visual dialogue between conscious and unconscious experiences. This is particularly evident in the work of artist Max Ernst, who used collage to explore the surrealist movement's ideas of automatic writing and the unconscious mind. Through his work, Ernst created a visual language that was both intuitive and irrational, inviting the viewer to explore their own unconscious experiences.
Overall, collage is a unique and dynamic art medium that has captivated artists and art lovers for over a century. Its ability to create new relationships and meanings through the assemblage of disparate elements makes it a powerful tool for exploring complex themes and ideas. Whether used for political and social commentary, personal expression, or exploring the unconscious mind, collage continues to be a rich and fascinating medium that speaks to our shared cultural experiences and histories.
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