Nicholas Pye, To Weather the Storm, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Birch Contemporary.
The Canadian Art Foundation’s annual auction takes place during our 20th anniversary Gala on September 17. In anticipation, we asked members of our art-advisory committee to select their favourite works on the auction block. We’ll be publishing their selections from September 8 to 12—our auction preview week, when all of the works will be on view at Waddingtons.
Sky Goodden, founding editor, Momus
Nicholas Pye, To Weather the Storm, 2014.
Following two decades of entrenched collaboration with his former partner, Sheila, Nicholas Pye has recently re-branded himself as “solo artist” in the lucid series Rise and Fall. Framing his subject (himself) in a state of halting re-assertion, a suite of sunlit, lambent photographs pictures Pye in various postures suggesting potential and romantic ideation. Staring out a window, lying prostrate on a table, bearing down on a desk, all with the hazy French hills grounding his off-book performance, Pye embodies our Neomodernism: a wincing sincerity, an attempt at unapologetic self-accounting. An avidity for the unbent truth in things, if ever it was apparent.
Click here for information on Gala tickets, and the full auction catalogue.
