Welcome to The Annex: Gallery de Boer Expands Again

Gallery de Boer – Fine Art & Jazz is beating the odds by expanding during a recession. We have added new retail space, a street level storefront known as The Annex, as well as additional staff to its downtown Owen Sound location.

“We’ve been bursting at the seams for some time,” says owner and curator Ron de Boer. “As our reputation has grown, we’ve hosted some very prestigious exhibitions, added to our native art collection and expanded our services. When the extra space became available, I felt we had to jump at it.”

The Annex is staffed by Sarah Slater, a former staff person at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery and an artist in her own right, as well as Tracy Pink-Cleverley. The Annex houses Gallery de Boer’s high-end lithographs, limited edition prints, vintage posters, photography, pottery as well as the complete Audrey Holrod collection.

In addition there will be a featured artist on a monthly rotation. The first featured artist is painter Patric Ryan. All of this has freed space in the main gallery for major exhibitions, an expanded native and aboriginal art gallery and additional services.

The framing department is busier than ever with Jean Leonard adding Master Framer Richard McNaughton. The fine art restoration department has expanded as well with Master restorer Michael Anderson bringing his daughter Beth on board.

“I really feel these changes will work to cement our reputation as one of the finest commercial galleries in Canada, even though we’re not in the big city,” says de Boer.

Gallery de Boer – Fine Art & Jazz is located, Upstairs, 970 – 2^nd Avenue East, Owen Sound. The Annex is immediately below. For more information call 519-376-7914

Robert S. Montgomery

Robert S. Montgomery is one of 14 artists participating in the Ontario Society of Artists Summer Exhibitions 2009. Montgomery says:

At the age of 16 I saw my first Alex Colville image and literally stared transfixed for many minutes, and it took me several years before I fully understood what made his work so magical.  The tight geometric composition reminded me of Renaissance painting and the highly technical arrangements stood for the omnipresent Higher Power. The crisp focus placed emphasis on the notion that each and every object was a unique and handcrafted by that same Higher Power. The love of vast spaces seemed to make the comforts of local environments all that much more protective, given the implied threat of the unknown.

And his discordant assembly of subject matter spoke of disconnection and isolation, contradicting any comfort meted out by the intimate setting.  There are other, more subtle strategies he employs, but these were the ones I decided to use in the pursuit of my own visual language.

It took many years to finally find a “voice” that was my own-based upon my own experiences, my own psychology and my own view of the world.  Neither storytelling nor the conveyance of specific messages holds much interest for me.  I think that art is much better at raising questions than it is at providing answers.  All any artist can work towards is images with a broad perspective, that can engage a wide enough audience so as to seduce at least one other person- a person who wonders in the same way.

Art is to be shared with the community.  It is there that our commonality as well as our uniqueness can be explored and understood, and art has a special role to play in this process.  The handmade object takes us back to the dawning of our culture, our personalities and our sense of self, and by its very existence imparts meaning to our lives.

The art process allows us to separate ourselves from society’s shared obsessions while at the same time explore our participation in them.  It is an ambivalent procedure but ultimately one in which we can, in the best possible way, reveal our most graceful and repulsive moments.  Through imagery, we confront our fears, our regrets, our clinging to tragedy, our failures and frustrations all of which are leavened by brief encounters with joy and the never-ending quest for significance.

I make paintings and prints, and I enjoy both processes equally.  There is one main objective in these operations: to rethink how I affix meanings to my experiences.  By congregating objects and spaces in unexpected contexts and through denying ordinary associations with mundane events, I hope the viewer too, can revisit his/her own personal myth with the same lack of deference to singular, linear narrative. What do things mean?  What importance should we assign to any given event?  How can we be sure that our conclusions have any validity, much less merit?  As Alex Colville posed the question, “Is this what life is like?”

Diana Harding Tucker

A native of Québec, Diana Harding Tucker began life as a classical musician surrounded by a family of painters.

In 1975, she received her BA from Queen’s University where she studied Studio Art. In the 1980’s, high in the mountains of California, a fascination with the beauty of her surroundings inspired her to render her interpretations through photography. She studied a Freeman Patterson photography course at Loon Lake, New Brunswick, and colour photography with Ed Burtynsky in Toronto.

After a few years of experimentation and self-teaching, and inspired by Picasso Still Life drawings and the softness of Renoir paintings, Diana developed her own unique technique of hand colouring fibre base black and white silver gelatin prints. She has received grants from Ontario Arts Council and Hamilton Arts Council and awards from the Canadian Association of Photographers and Illustrators in Communications (CAPIC) and Applied Arts Magazine.

Diana is one of 14 artists whose work is appearing in the Ontario Society of Artists Summer Exhibition 2009 exhibition and sale at Gallery de Boer.