February 23 — March 30, 2019
Pizza Boats
Keer Tanchak
Conduit Gallery Project Room is honored to announce a solo exhibition of work by Dallas-based artist, Keer Tanchak.
A witty, considerate British Columbian, Keer Tanchak has always been deeply curious about the lives of others. Her work shows her palpable need to connect with the postures, dress and ceremony of bygone eras. Her figures, historical portraits of propriety and pomp, are painted with brevity, and she sometimes produces the same image in multiples, trying on different color and texture combinations. The material, hand-cut slices of aluminum, is inspired by the folk art style of the Ex-Voto and Retablo paintings of Latin-America. Works in this style, Tanchak muses, are often nailed directly to the wall, as she is known to exhibit her own works. This interaction with the material brings to mind concerns of what is really precious, and what is considered luxurious across different cultural and political contexts.
The subject of Tanchak’s interest of late is the Ukrainian ceramicist Oksana Zhnikrup (1931-1993), whose porcelain figures are as expressive as they are gentle. Recently, two of Zhnikrup’s figures were licensed and replicated exactly by American artist Jeff Koons. Critics contend Koons brought little attention to her name through the process of reproducing her imagery. Conversely, Tanchak’s interpretations of Zhnikrup’s feminine forms play out Tanchak’s fascination with the strength hidden just beneath the demure female expressions, gestures and postures depicted in Zhinkrup’s figures specifically and throughout art history in general.
For Pizza Boats, Tanchak will utilize the intimate scale of the Project Room to create an installation of paintings that speaks to her interest in theatricality and performance in the context of contemporary painting practices.
Keer Tanchak is a Canadian artist currently based in Dallas, TX. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 and a BFA with distinction from Concordia University in Montreal in 2000. Tanchak won the Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council in 2009 and the Brucebo residency in Visby, Sweden in 2003. She has exhibited extensively in Canada and the United States as well as in Puerto Rico, London, Switzerland, Dubai, and Mexico. She was included in the Texas Biennial 2017 and had a solo exhibition “Soft Orbit” at the Dallas Contemporary in 2017.