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Gallery Assistant

Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts
App Deadline: 22 / 05 / 2013

Office Administrator

On Screen Manitoba
App Deadline: 22 / 05 / 2013

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Like clay in the hands of the potter

Several recent instalments in the Manitoba Craft Council’s ambitious exhibition program have focused on the hazy distinction between "fine art" and "fine craft." Touring museums and galleries province-wide, accompanied by critical essays and smartly designed publications, shows like last year’s excellent Hovercraft have highlighted artists of all persuasions who make relevant, engaging and forward-looking artwork with what have historically been considered "craft" media. Apart from perhaps helping to dispel the outdated notion that there exists some kind of conspiratorial art-world hostility toward materials like fiber, glass and clay, these exhibitions call attention to innovative and unconventional applications of processes that, while rooted in decorative and functional traditions, need not be constrained by them.

As with Hovercraft, the prevailing approach in Distributary, the exhibition currently at Aceartinc. of recent ceramic works selected by self-described "novice curator" Chris Pancoe, is to favour formal diversity over thematic unity: the seven artists represented each use clay, but the similarities mostly end there. This idea of a group of artists moving in different directions from a common point of departure is central to the show’s logic — a "distributary" is a stream that branches off of and away from a larger river — but it occasionally leaves works stranded for lack of context and some potentially fascinating reinterpretations of the medium frustratingly half-articulated.

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