CYNTHIA GIRARD’s painting consciously avoids notions such as professionalism and academically schooled virtuosity. Her pictures and installations are narratives about painting itself, in which she concerns herself with questions of representation and with overcoming the conflict between abstraction and figuration, between purely formal and narrative de-
pictions. By appropriating elements of Minimal, Hard-Edge, Op-Art or Neo-Expressionism in her works and blending them with influences from folk art, applied art, children’s book illustration and Outsider-Art, Girard questions the customary hierarchies of contemporary art.
Her paintings and sculptures often function like com-
ponents of a stage and extend the painterly composition into a spatial experience. "Tous les oiseaux sont ici", for example, resembles an imaginary stage play in which the gigantic painting of a stylised prison wall divides the studio into two zones. In her space-consuming installation, Girard conveys various dialectical meanings through the motif of the prison: it is a metaphor of the restrictive delineations of pictorial space, of a voluntarily chosen place of retreat, of the position of a social outsider, or it is emblematic of conventional perception, from which the aim is to escape.
Cynthia Girard holds a fellowship from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Ministère des Relations internationales du Québec.

At approximately 8 pm on the opening evening, Cynthia Girard will slip into a paper snake costume and recite her own poems as part of a Poetry-Performance in the exhibition.

Cynthia Girard – "Tous les oiseaux sont ici"
2nd – 17th May 2009, Studio 2
Opening: Thursday, 30th April 2009, from 7 pm

SARAH RYAN has been following up her keen interest in lenticular techniques for some time now, and she is one of few artists working with digital lenticular photography. The pictures generated in this way convey the optical effect of three-dimensionality and/or a flowing motion within the image. Lenticular images are found most frequently as 3D-postcards or on souvenirs or gift articles. In the field of artistic applications, the digital lenticular technique now facilitates just as many possibilities. Sarah Ryan employs this technique and specifically its quality of making things seem slightly ‘non-static’, as if in fluid motion, in order to inspire viewers to see in different ways with her works, which actually capture rather unspectacular motifs.
Ryan keeps the images ‘at a distance’ to the viewer, and in this way creates ambiguous situations that permit a variety of interpretations.
The exhibition "the clearing" shows a series of new works which only hesitantly unfold and which are meant to deliberately slow down the process of viewing and deciphering. The dichotomy of emotions and thought, which the artist believes that the lenticular medium reflects excellently with its “lack of clarity” and striving for depth, is also mirrored in the title that Ryan has chosen for the exhibition: on the one hand, the clearing refers to a physical clearing (in the forest), and on the other hand, it also signifies the clearance of an empty physic space or the process of mental “clearing”.
Sarah Ryan holds a fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts, Sydney.

Sarah Ryan – "the clearing"
2nd – 17th May 2009, Studio 3
Opening: Thursday, 30th April 2009, from 7 pm