A new exhibit is on at the Art Gallery of Bancroft this month.
It’s called Shifting Contexts and features the work of artist Phil Delisle from Milton.
The opening reception for the exhibit was on Friday and Delisle was in attendance to discuss his work.
The exhibit brings together Delisle’s older and newer works and features canvas paintings with a muted colour palette, as well as newer paintings on the reverse side of plexiglass panels, which cast shadows on his older work.
“The idea is the new work is kind of like haunting the old work,” Delisle said.
“It’s bringing the two bodies of work together in a way that they’ve never dialogued before and try to make sense of why they’re both my voice, even though they look so different,” he said.
Delisle said he’s always been interested in art.
“I’ve been doing art my whole life. My mom is an artist, so (I) was introduced to it at a very young age and then sort of took up that as a passion project and went to university…And just kept pursuing it. And now I also teach fine art as well,” he said.
Paint has always been his preferred medium, but this new exhibit is his first foray out of traditional painting.
“On the plexiglass, I used quite unusual tools. I have squeegees that I exacto-knife little gouges out of until they’re sort of like combs or basically textures that I can slide across. So you paint and then you remove the paint with the squeegee. My main tool I would say is that I put the paint down and then I use razor blades to scrape it away,” he said.
“ So it gives you scraping and chopping. And a lot of times I can layer an image on top of another image and you get this kind of almost like a glitch effect where they’re kind of fading into each other.”
Delisle said the gallery suggested the name Shifting Contexts for the exhibit and he felt it was a great description. He said he often reuses the same image multiple times in his work, as he did with the work in the exhibit, but the context changes each time he revisits something.
Gallery assistant Sophia Wagland said the exhibit is similar to others this year in that it features juxtaposition.
“There are a few different diptych works that are part of this exhibition…Phil mentions that some of the pieces were made at entirely different times, they’re also on different mediums. So you’ll have a more traditional-looking piece juxtaposed against something that’s done on plexiglass,” she said.
Wagland said it’s interesting how you can see your reflection and how the shadows play through the plexiglass onto the pieces.
“And it really just gets you thinking about how work can be interpreted and how meaning changes over time.”
The exhibit runs until Sept. 27.
