Peterborough artist Alex Bierk is fascinated by the everyday. Through his camera, he captures an object, a moment, a feeling or a memory with an urgency that outside eyes may view as random.
But the 12 paintings that make up Bierk’s solo exhibition “A Thin Place” at the Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York City reveal a coherence of artistic purpose that is not only painstakingly intentional, but a means of relating to and making sense of the world around him.
Speaking to The Examiner about his work, Bierk explained his process: he begins with a photograph, which is mapped onto a grid of quarter-inch squares and painted one by one. The final painted image emerges over the course of a month.
“I’m not just taking random photos — I’m taking photos through my day as someone who paints photos,” Bierk said.
The paintings and the labour behind them exist in contrast to the photos, but remain connected to the instant of their creation.
“The moment the photograph captures seems to appear out of nowhere,” poet, novelist and professor Cynthia Cruz writes in an essay that accompanies “A Thin Place.”
“The event is a window that opens suddenly and closes just as fast. It is a moment of twilight — a fragile threshold between worlds where the possibility of something genuinely new comes to the fore.”
“I think a lot of it comes from the experience of losing my parents and having that big upheaval of loss in my early adulthood — it created a world that existed in memory and feeling,” Bierk said.
The reality created in the artwork becomes its own place, Bierk says.
While he knows where the photos were taken — a street sign in Peterborough, a car in London or a train in Cobourg — the attachment to the original location or photograph is secondary to the meaning produced through the act of creating.
“I actually don’t want anyone to see the photo, because then it becomes about how well did he reproduce it,” Bierk explained.
This approach to the image — existing as it does before the labour of painting — prompts reflection on the weight of Bierk’s personal attachment to it. The process of painting allows time for this relationship to develop, lending the work a meaning that extends far beyond the everyday.
“I know as much about cars as I do about a lit window, the highway, a ferris wheel, the night,” Bierk writes in an artist statement for “A Thin Place.”
The works in “A Thin Place” underscore the tension between photography and memory, as well as between the personal and the universal, the local and the global.
Managing this tension between personal experience and a visual language is something Bierk says he can’t help, describing it as almost obsessive.
“Alex has a very specific way of portraying what he means,” gallery owner Nathalie Karg said in an interview with The Examiner. “When I saw the work, I immediately thought about the Vancouver school of art from the ’80s, Jeff Wall and all these post-conceptual artists. Of course, their medium was photography, it wasn’t painting, but I love that period and I love this very specific group.
“When I go to Peterborough, I am sure I’m going to have the same type of déjà vu that I had when I went to Vancouver, and I immediately felt like I was transported into, let’s say, a Jeff Wall piece,” she said. “There’s something definitely Canadian about his work, but then also something very personal about his work — about the fact that he went to rehab and all that. It’s a very intimate portrait of himself as a person and his surroundings and where he lives.”
Three of the paintings in “A Thin Place” deal with the subject of recovery.
For example, one piece highlights the phrase “I had arrived” from “Bill’s Story” in the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book.” This accompanies a piece called “Meeting,” which foregrounds a moving ceiling fan beneath a banner reading “The Twelve Steps,” with the steps themselves out of frame.
Another painting, “Two Stars,” depicts what appears to be graffiti on a metal surface. Bierk explained it was inspired by a notebook he kept in rehab; it reproduces dates and lines tracking his early sobriety, featuring the word “MEMORY” scratched into the surface alongside harshly crossed-out thoughts.
“A Thin Place” runs until June 28 at the Nathalie Karg Gallery.
Bierk’s work is also currently featured in two group exhibitions that started last month, one at the Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, N.Y. that started Saturday and goes until July 13 and the other at the Leo Koenig Gallery in Andes, N.Y. that runs until July 26 and also features the work of Bierk’s brother, Nicholas.
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