Michael Caines

Bad Manners

Shauna Born

Galore 

July 5 -29 2012 

Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto 

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MULHERIN + POLLARD, NY

 

Shauna Born, #38, ballpoint pen on paper, 2012

Opening in Toronto and New York, Galore is a new series of intimate, delicately rendered portraits explore issues of desire and mortality through the idealization of beautiful male types. Working from a variety of sources, Born shifts the context in which these images exist—the screen and magazine—to re-imagine them as poetic dandies and romantic heroes, steeped in classic pictorial tradition.

Executed in standard ballpoint pen, these drawings display a technical virtuosity akin to seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas, while implying a casual, 'throw away' quality, creating a dynamic tension between individual vulnerability and youthful energy and abundance. The scale of the drawings, along with the unframed presentation; evoke an intimacy both with the subjects and the artist.

Flowers barely come to a full bloom before they begin to fade, droop, whither. Born perceives her subjects in a stage of perfect youthful bloom that she has plucked in a vain attempt at preservation. In Galore, Born has built a paracosm of tiny drawings, a sensual fantasy world haunted by the faces of Rimbaud, Adonis, Bieber, Andrej; the eternally youthful.

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Michael Caines, Bad Manners 1&2, oil on canvas, 36x24, 2012

 "Bad Manners," the latest exhibition by Michael Caines is, at this very moment, travelling from KM Contemporary to MULHERIN + POLLARD in New York. 

In "Bad Manners", the artist attempts to negotiate images drawn from politics, pop songs, painting history, and post colonialism, among other important ideas that begin with the letter P. Influenced by Jürgen Habermas's Wiki entry, and books he intends to someday read by Public Sphere theorist Michael Warner, Caines reacts to his own passive over consumption of media images, and his depressing inability to effect change in either the world or himself, by mashing together ideas that are probably best left un-mashed. 

 See you in Toronto and New York!