Oooh Canada! by Chris Simonite

Artist Bio : Chris Simonite is an artist from Winnipeg who spends most of his time making paintings (and occasionally animations/videos/performances) based on pop culture, conspiracy theories and environmental concerns with a Cubist inspired bent he calls Cubo-Weirdism.

He has three degrees (BA, BFA, MFA, if you must know) and has shown his art in four countries on Earth. He is also a member of the legendary (in their own minds) Frost Shield Kerfuffle Collective.

Chris Simonite has a musical/comedy/performance art alter ego, a faux Cowpunk Star called Stan Dickie, who was the subject of his MFA thesis. He’s pretty sure the University of Ottawa never forgave him for it.

Artist Statement: Imagine if a realist oil painter met Picasso, had a run-in with George Condo and their brains melded. In my work I combine traditional portraiture with geometric or distorted shapes in abstract or undefined settings, often reminiscent of Cubism as well as mid period Picasso. Some areas are fully rendered while others are left flat and monochromatic. The subject matter ranges from characters, or personalities from Popular Culture to animals in abstract or unsettling landscapes and to bizarre imagined faces as well as political figures. 

While my paintings are influenced by the aesthetics of the above mentioned artists (among others), conceptually they are informed by Artificial Realism and Psychological Cubism, both inventions of Condo. I’m specifically inspired by a quote that I read in a book of Condo’s work that summed up artificial realism as the: “capacity to treat imaginary objects as if they were real, and real objects as if they were imagined.” In my estimation it is common for people to see film and television as almost more real than their own lives, while at the same time they see politicians and even endangered species as abstractions outside their own reality.

With the work I have created for the Oooh Canada! exhibition, I wanted to show the ongoing environmental damage that humans have caused from the perspective of the wildlife that is so often affected by our negligence and selfishness. I was inspired by the concept of wildlife cameras that often catch animals in their habitats, sometimes looking directly at the cameras. So often, if one anthropomorphizes the animals it almost seems as though they are looking as as if to say: “what are you doing to my home?”