Cheryl Ruddock: Slip

April 24 to July 18, 2010

Opening Reception

Saturday, April 24 from 3-5pm

Guelph artist Cheryl Ruddock has painted for more than twenty years. For her solo exhibition, Slip, Ruddock pushes the frame of her work, expanding her repertoire to include shaped canvases and sculptural drawings, in addition to an expansive exploration of colour and texture on two-dimensional surfaces. As the title of the exhibition suggests, "slip" refers to the sheathed body that, in Ruddock's hands, sometimes takes human form and other times forms the swollen belly of a kayak, painted, stained, and burned. To slip is to move smoothly, easily, quietly, but also to fall and to come to rest. As a movement between two parts where none should exist, Slip embodies Ruddock's practice as she forges relationships between painted surface and sculptured form, robust palettes and white-on-white, organic (sometimes unnatural) botanicals and space rendered from the abstract.

Slip marks the second time that the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre has developed a major solo project with Cheryl Ruddock, whose career began in the mid-eighties. Ruddock has travelled to and lived in regions across Canada but she has made her home and developed her practice in Guelph, Ontario. The 1989 exhibition Girl Colours, curated by Ingrid Jenkner for the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, was Ruddock’s first solo exhibition in a public art gallery. In Ruddock’s rich pastel palette and iconographic imagery, Jenkner recognized the artist’s clear vision and commitment to cultivating a new visual language, a language that continues to evolve in Ruddock’s new works.

Slip focuses heavily on Ruddock's current production, but features seminal earlier works including the gouache paintings Prodigal Girls IV (1992) and Bathing Suit and Plant (1999), as well as works that have never before been shown publicly, including a massive oil-on-canvas triptych of a fallen tree (1987). Ruddock's restrained works in white include Blood Loss (1989) in graphite and acrylic and the Stick Drawings (2007-2010), works made from stripped, bent, bound, and white-washed cedar branches that hang on the wall and arc overhead. Among her pod-shaped canvases is a life-sized kayak, cocooned in a painted skin and suspended from the ceiling to hover inches from the floor. Slip reveals the depth of Ruddock’s imagery and the resilience of her mark making, as she paints across the breadth of her practice and pushes her work onto new and fertile ground.

The exhibition Cheryl Ruddock: Slip is curated by Dawn Owen, assistant curator, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre. Slip premieres in Guelph from April 24 to July 18, 2010 and continues to the SDVA Campus Gallery, Georgian College (Barrie) from October 14 to November 14, 2010. In conjunction with the presentation of Slip at Georgian College, Ruddock’s life sized kayak-shaped canvas will be installed at the MacLaren Art Centre (Massie Family Courtyard).

Cheryl Ruddock: Slip is supported by an exhibition catalogue published by the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre and featuring essays by exhibition curator Dawn Owen and guest writer John Kissick.