Boom Bits

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John Kisskick, "The Chatham Re-mix," 2014/2015

oil, acrylic and craft glitter on canvas, 80” x 84”

Ontario artist John Kissick's exhibition, The Boom Bits, on view at the Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre in Medicine Hat, Alta. until Dec. 27, features the complex patterned abstracts that have garnered much critical praise. In the show's catalogue essay, Pete Smith, an artist from Bowmanville, Ont., writes that Kissick's work "pushes back against all of the quasi-spiritual rhetoric" of the late-Modernist abstraction of the 1970s. Here's a passage from Smith's essay:

"As much as John’s work is meant as a clear refutation of the idea of painting as personal expression, I can’t help but know that his paintings are, in fact, a deep reflection of his self. His paintings are screaming with a yearning for some kind of “authenticity,” but they are tempered by the realization that unmediated experience is no longer possible, that optimism collapses under the weight of its own naïvety, and that the word “authenticity” itself needs to be placed in rabbit-ear-quotations. John’s paintings are bursting with hope and apprehension, optimism and trepidation. In this sense, they are a totemic collection of the conflicting creeds that have coalesced in his lifetime, and of the visual detritus left in their wake. These paintings are John and his memories. They are where he grew up, and who he is now."

John Kissick, "Groovefucker One"

John Kissick, "Groovefucker Two," 2009

The work, created between 2009 and 2015, will show at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery in Saskatchewan from Feb. 9 to April 16.