John Armstrong & Paul Collins

Trails, cache misère (2010), oil on chromogenic print, 20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.3 cm)

John & Paul’s website

NEWS

During their tenure at the International Art Residency in Beijing this summer, John Armstrong & Paul Collins held an outdoor screening of their 2008 feature-length video, Four Sisters at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, in Caochangdi. Collins supplied the musical soundtrack for the movie, improvising to field recordings he’d made in and around Beijing.

John Armstrong & Paul Collins are featured on the Lens Culture website this month. Lens Culture is a high-profile on-line magazine out of Paris. The collaborative series cache-misére is on display at the gallery until April. http://www.lensculture.com/armstrong-collins.html

BIOGRAPHY

Since 2000, John Armstrong, who lives in Toronto, and Paul Collins, who lives in Paris, have maintained a collaborative, intermedia art practice. Their photographs, videos and painted images record places, events and objects they come across in the course of their daily lives in Toronto and Paris. These elements are variously juxtaposed to suggest narratives that play with the porous nature of individual and collective memory.

cache-misère is the title of a series of colour photographs on which the artists have painted images, text and swatches of colour. The photographs are compositionally completed by the addition of painted elements that, to varying degrees, obscure the initial picture. The painted images represent primarily domestic bric-a-brac and typographical elements that form short poetic statements. Once painted, the photographs no longer represent seamless windows onto reality, but assume a new logic where any editorial content is complemented by the associative synergy found in abstract painting.

Armstrong and Collins have had over twenty exhibitions in Canada and Europe. A selection of galleries, museums, festivals and site projects they have exhibited in include the following: Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival 2010 at the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art (Toronto); Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2008 (Toronto); Artothèque de Caen (France); Kunsthalle Erfurt (Germany); Faux Mouvement (Metz, France); Maison de la culture Côtes-des-Neiges, Le Mois de la photo à Montréal; Truck (Calgary, Alberta); Platform Centre for Photography and Media Arts (Winnipeg, Manitoba); La galerie ESCA (Nîmes, France); Oakville Galleries (Oakville, Ontario); Sir Wilfred Grenfell College Art Gallery (Corner Brook, Newfoundland); and VAV Gallery, Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec).

John Armstrong is a studio professor on the collaborative Art and Art History Program with Sheridan in Oakville and the University of Toronto Mississauga. Paul Collins is a studio professor in the Department of Communication/Intermedia at the École supérieure d’arts et médias de Caen.

Installation view of cache-misère (2008-10) by John Armstrong and Paul Collins in the exhibition The Mechanical Bride curated by Bonnie Rubenstein at the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, Toronto, Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival (catalogue)

Bottle, cache-misère (2008-10), oil on chromogenic print, 20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.3 cm)

T.S.P.,cache-misère (2008-10), oil on chromogenic print, 20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.3 cm)

re elec, cache-misère (2008-10), oil on chromogenic print, 20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.3 cm)

Four Banger Grocery, cache-misère (2008-10), oil on chromogenic print, 20 x 30 inches (50.8x76.3 cm)

Happy, cache misère (2010), oil on chromogenic print, 20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.3 cm)

cache misère (2010, oil on chromogenic print,20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.3 cm)

Real Estate, cache misère (2010) , oil on chromogenic print, 20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.3 cm)