Tiko Kerr
b. 1953, Edmonton, Alberta
CV
Tiko Kerr is a Canadian artist who has developed his artistic processes in Vancouver since the early 1980’s. Kerr attended the University of Calgary and graduated with a degree in Biological Science, which he believes has enhanced his ability to translate the 3-dimensional world into 2 dimensions.
Kerr has been commissioned by The City of Vancouver, the BC Centre for Excellence, Vancouver Opera, The Vancouver Symphony, the Celebration of Light and The Vancouver Sun Run. He has collaborated with Ballet British Columbia, painting in performance on 2 projects and was commissioned to create sets for “Boy Wonder”, Canada’s first original 3 act ballet, again working with Ballet British Columbia, and with Touchstone Theatre and Vancouver New Music. He was commissioned to create the sets for another theatre production of “Marion Bridge” at The Kay Meek Arts Centre in 2018. He did an Artist Residency at the Brodsky Centre for Innovative Printmaking at Rutgers University, another at the West End Community Center in Vancouver, where he created 3 murals and more recently, another outdoor wall mural in 2018 for the Kitsilano 4th Avenue Business Association. Kerr has been Guest Artist twice for the Paradise Valley Artists for Kids Summer Camp and is active in teaching and lecturing. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at The Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art in North Vancouver, BC and a group show at the Grosvenor Building in West Vancouver, BC.
Tiko Kerr is a Vancouver-based visual artist whose 30 year long exhibition history includes fervent explorations into performance, set and mural design and social activism. Kerr’s abstract paintings and works on paper explore his interest in the consumption of images, cultural motifs and authorship.
Often beginning as paper collages cut from artists’ monographs and interspersed with personal ephemera, Kerr’s work relies on a kind of cross between surrealist and pop art sensibilities in their automatic and irreverent mashups of high and low culture. The resultant work with its immediacy of gesture and free association, evoke spatial and figurative illusions which encourage viewers to reconsider their relationship to the familiar.
CV
Tiko Kerr is a Canadian artist who has developed his artistic processes in Vancouver since the early 1980’s. Kerr attended the University of Calgary and graduated with a degree in Biological Science, which he believes has enhanced his ability to translate the 3-dimensional world into 2 dimensions.
Kerr has been commissioned by The City of Vancouver, the BC Centre for Excellence, Vancouver Opera, The Vancouver Symphony, the Celebration of Light and The Vancouver Sun Run. He has collaborated with Ballet British Columbia, painting in performance on 2 projects and was commissioned to create sets for “Boy Wonder”, Canada’s first original 3 act ballet, again working with Ballet British Columbia, and with Touchstone Theatre and Vancouver New Music. He was commissioned to create the sets for another theatre production of “Marion Bridge” at The Kay Meek Arts Centre in 2018. He did an Artist Residency at the Brodsky Centre for Innovative Printmaking at Rutgers University, another at the West End Community Center in Vancouver, where he created 3 murals and more recently, another outdoor wall mural in 2018 for the Kitsilano 4th Avenue Business Association. Kerr has been Guest Artist twice for the Paradise Valley Artists for Kids Summer Camp and is active in teaching and lecturing. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at The Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art in North Vancouver, BC and a group show at the Grosvenor Building in West Vancouver, BC.
Tiko Kerr is a Vancouver-based visual artist whose 30 year long exhibition history includes fervent explorations into performance, set and mural design and social activism. Kerr’s abstract paintings and works on paper explore his interest in the consumption of images, cultural motifs and authorship.
Often beginning as paper collages cut from artists’ monographs and interspersed with personal ephemera, Kerr’s work relies on a kind of cross between surrealist and pop art sensibilities in their automatic and irreverent mashups of high and low culture. The resultant work with its immediacy of gesture and free association, evoke spatial and figurative illusions which encourage viewers to reconsider their relationship to the familiar.
PAST EXHIBITION
PLEXUS
January 9, 2021 - February 20, 2021
From his early paintings of landscapes, nature, and interiors; to his catalogue of buildings in the changing Vancouver cityscape, through his collage works and related paintings and on to the most recent body of abstractions on Plexiglass, Tiko Kerr’s work has been fundamentally about ‘seeing’; both how he personally sees the world and the ways the human visual system functions to interpret the world.
The Plexus works would be considered merely successful abstract works if produced on canvas, but with the expressionist marks set out over multiple layers, the paintings become a hybrid of painting, relief and sculpture, providing complexity and contradiction to works that use clear sheets of Plexiglass as both material and metaphor.
A man-made and intrinsically modern material, Plexiglass has a long history. Invented in Germany during the last century. Chemist Otto Röhm came up with the idea in 1901 but it took him another 30 years to figure out what to do with it. Low-cost and versatile, plastics immediately drew the attention of artists with a penchant for exploring new materials and techniques to develop revolutionary means of expression.
Plexiglass is a perfect expression of our contemporary moment – a modernist material repurposed for the age of the pandemic, a protective barrier that allows us to see but not physically connect. Cultural theorists note it foregrounds the visual sense at the expense of other senses such as touch, smell and sound.
Kerr focuses on the historical and contemporary cultural references of Plexiglass, informed by the properties of the material itself; particularly, its use as a transparent, yet solid surface on which to paint. He repurposes the Plexi sheet from a barrier to a window, one through which we connect to the action beyond, using a visually permeable surface to stack his imagery and radically activate colours, shapes and painterly actions.
These works all share the visual experience of looking through and into and in this way, they remind us of windows, aquariums, laboratory slides. They challenge us to locate the brush marks in space and to follow along with the rhythms and patterns of paint as they blend in and out, push forward and fall back. They contain literal depth rather than illusional depth and this pushes them into the realm of reliefs. Yet they are, pardon the pun, clearly paintings and it is the brush marks and colours that hold our attention.
Your eye continually pulls focus between the full image with all the layers combined and the individual strokes on each of the layers. It’s a bit like three-dimensional chess in the way your brain needs to fit things together into an image of two-dimensional space in order to understand how these works operate. While your brain is manipulating the conceptualization of the space, your eye is moving in and out of various depths of field, locating the brushstrokes in the space.
These layered paintings excite our visual sense through a reading of the individual marks in combination with the relationship of various colours in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional proximity. Blue, green, magenta, and orange dominate and the overall impact is one of harmony and balance.
The Black and White Plexus works function in a slightly different way than the colour ones. Kerr has said they are inspired by the feeling of reading newspapers; Kerr gets the analog version of The New York Times daily and the material graphic design of the paper underlays these paintings. It’s all there in Black and White, and we try to make sense of the information that is in front of us.
The B&W Plexi pieces conflate this idea of seeking out truth in the (news)paper with seeking out truth in a work of art – they are both blurred by layers of obfuscation and interference. In the B&W works we are keenly aware of what is front and what is behind; swashes of paint mixing and layered over each other or with detailed background layers. These are abstract works that have supercharged the expressionist gesture.
The horizontal collage pieces on Plexiglass are essentially monochromatic; transitional pieces between the collages that Kerr has developed over the past few years, and the painted works of Plexus. Utilizing paper segments cut from copies of Jack Shadbolt drawings attached to stacked Plexiglass sheets along with hand drawn and painted segments, they give literal depth to the works, being conceptually connected to wall reliefs.
They function as parallel investigations of space within the Plexus series, directly derived from his work in stage design, with solid elements that are set out in a way that allows the viewer to engage in the entire visual field contained in the work, relating to each other through pattern, texture and shape rather than colour and transparency. His involvement in theatre, and his experiences of designing for the stage, have allowed Kerr to apply ideas developed in his studio practice to real world, three dimensional spaces, albeit ones in which the point of view and position of the audience is physically controlled.
Today, after nearly three decades of being an artist, Kerr is driven and confident, each new body of work surprisingly, but logically, developing out of the works before. Kerr’s mastery of fitting things together, understanding intuitively what works and what doesn’t, has come through focused development of his artistic sensibility, long hours in the studio, and honing the skills and techniques needed to bring these works into being.
It’s fair to say that he has reached a rich late-middle period in his career, marked by the assimilation of a lifetime of experiences both inside and outside the art world, laying the groundwork for the last decades’ extensive experimentation of visual ideas and subject matter.
He has become fearless.
Chris Keatley, January 2021
The Plexus works would be considered merely successful abstract works if produced on canvas, but with the expressionist marks set out over multiple layers, the paintings become a hybrid of painting, relief and sculpture, providing complexity and contradiction to works that use clear sheets of Plexiglass as both material and metaphor.
A man-made and intrinsically modern material, Plexiglass has a long history. Invented in Germany during the last century. Chemist Otto Röhm came up with the idea in 1901 but it took him another 30 years to figure out what to do with it. Low-cost and versatile, plastics immediately drew the attention of artists with a penchant for exploring new materials and techniques to develop revolutionary means of expression.
Plexiglass is a perfect expression of our contemporary moment – a modernist material repurposed for the age of the pandemic, a protective barrier that allows us to see but not physically connect. Cultural theorists note it foregrounds the visual sense at the expense of other senses such as touch, smell and sound.
Kerr focuses on the historical and contemporary cultural references of Plexiglass, informed by the properties of the material itself; particularly, its use as a transparent, yet solid surface on which to paint. He repurposes the Plexi sheet from a barrier to a window, one through which we connect to the action beyond, using a visually permeable surface to stack his imagery and radically activate colours, shapes and painterly actions.
These works all share the visual experience of looking through and into and in this way, they remind us of windows, aquariums, laboratory slides. They challenge us to locate the brush marks in space and to follow along with the rhythms and patterns of paint as they blend in and out, push forward and fall back. They contain literal depth rather than illusional depth and this pushes them into the realm of reliefs. Yet they are, pardon the pun, clearly paintings and it is the brush marks and colours that hold our attention.
Your eye continually pulls focus between the full image with all the layers combined and the individual strokes on each of the layers. It’s a bit like three-dimensional chess in the way your brain needs to fit things together into an image of two-dimensional space in order to understand how these works operate. While your brain is manipulating the conceptualization of the space, your eye is moving in and out of various depths of field, locating the brushstrokes in the space.
These layered paintings excite our visual sense through a reading of the individual marks in combination with the relationship of various colours in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional proximity. Blue, green, magenta, and orange dominate and the overall impact is one of harmony and balance.
The Black and White Plexus works function in a slightly different way than the colour ones. Kerr has said they are inspired by the feeling of reading newspapers; Kerr gets the analog version of The New York Times daily and the material graphic design of the paper underlays these paintings. It’s all there in Black and White, and we try to make sense of the information that is in front of us.
The B&W Plexi pieces conflate this idea of seeking out truth in the (news)paper with seeking out truth in a work of art – they are both blurred by layers of obfuscation and interference. In the B&W works we are keenly aware of what is front and what is behind; swashes of paint mixing and layered over each other or with detailed background layers. These are abstract works that have supercharged the expressionist gesture.
The horizontal collage pieces on Plexiglass are essentially monochromatic; transitional pieces between the collages that Kerr has developed over the past few years, and the painted works of Plexus. Utilizing paper segments cut from copies of Jack Shadbolt drawings attached to stacked Plexiglass sheets along with hand drawn and painted segments, they give literal depth to the works, being conceptually connected to wall reliefs.
They function as parallel investigations of space within the Plexus series, directly derived from his work in stage design, with solid elements that are set out in a way that allows the viewer to engage in the entire visual field contained in the work, relating to each other through pattern, texture and shape rather than colour and transparency. His involvement in theatre, and his experiences of designing for the stage, have allowed Kerr to apply ideas developed in his studio practice to real world, three dimensional spaces, albeit ones in which the point of view and position of the audience is physically controlled.
Today, after nearly three decades of being an artist, Kerr is driven and confident, each new body of work surprisingly, but logically, developing out of the works before. Kerr’s mastery of fitting things together, understanding intuitively what works and what doesn’t, has come through focused development of his artistic sensibility, long hours in the studio, and honing the skills and techniques needed to bring these works into being.
It’s fair to say that he has reached a rich late-middle period in his career, marked by the assimilation of a lifetime of experiences both inside and outside the art world, laying the groundwork for the last decades’ extensive experimentation of visual ideas and subject matter.
He has become fearless.
Chris Keatley, January 2021
Image credit: Alan Somerville
Within the painting process exist opportunities to both illuminate and to obfuscate.
"I’ve chosen to work on the modest medium of plexiglass at a time when it has taken on a new and important role as a transparent, protective barrier that can shield us from an insidious virus and, at the same time, isolates us from one another. It is also at this contemporary moment when we all are suffering under the omnipresent burden of distorted socio-political issues where transparency and truth can no longer be taken for granted."
These plexiglass works provide an opportunity to look closer and deeper, to explore networks in paint suspended mid-stroke and to challenge the authenticity of what we see. (Tiko Kerr)
Within the painting process exist opportunities to both illuminate and to obfuscate.
"I’ve chosen to work on the modest medium of plexiglass at a time when it has taken on a new and important role as a transparent, protective barrier that can shield us from an insidious virus and, at the same time, isolates us from one another. It is also at this contemporary moment when we all are suffering under the omnipresent burden of distorted socio-political issues where transparency and truth can no longer be taken for granted."
These plexiglass works provide an opportunity to look closer and deeper, to explore networks in paint suspended mid-stroke and to challenge the authenticity of what we see. (Tiko Kerr)
IN CONVERSATION | Tiko Kerr speaks about his new body of work on plexiglass presented in our current show "PLEXUS"
IN THE NEWS
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OTHER WORKS AVAILABLE
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TIKO KERR
He has been an advocate for many social causes ranging from health and children’s issues to education and housing. Tiko is a respected figure in our community and we thank him for sharing his thoughts on the COVID-19 situation. March 22, 2020 |
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