The Subject is Colour | Marcia Harris + Rhys Douglas Farrell

Concurrent exhibitions at Loch Gallery Calgary and Herringer Kiss Gallery

Opening receptions on Saturday, April 20th with artists in attendance:

Loch Gallery | 1 to 3pm

Herringer Kiss Gallery | 3 to 5pm
 

 

Herringer Kiss Gallery

101 – 1615 10 Ave SW Calgary, AB

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00am to 5:00pm

 

With thanks to local collector, Tony Hailu, whose passion and commitment to the arts in Calgary helped make these exhibitions happen.

 

The Subject is Colour

Written by Contributing Curator, Ryan Doherty

 

An exhibition bringing together Rhys Douglas Farrell and Marcia Harris may, at a glance, appear to be an unexpected pairing. The former is a minimalist builder of layer after layer of precise and eye-bending patterns, and the latter is a realist conjuring painterly evocations of familiar urban landmarks. Deeper reflection, however, unveils several shared characteristics, most notably their similarly emphatic and practised approach to employing colour.

 

Rhys Douglas Farrell’s work is steeped in colour. He draws upon a massive legacy of colourists and hard-edge painters from the de Stijl movement of Mondrian, early minimalists like Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, Op artists such as Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, and from Canada, Guido Molinari, Rita Letendre, and Calgary’s own, Harry Kiyooka. Masters of colour, pattern, and optical play, their works serve as critical points of departure for Farrell’s own practice, a growing collection of murals, panels, and sculptures pulsating with visceral combinations of coloured lines, dots, and geometric invention.

 

Farrell is similarly inspired by the principles posited by chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul (1839), who noted the mesmerizing effects of simultaneous contrast. This phenomenon is evident in Farrell’s sympathetic and studied application of colours, which, when juxtaposed, undergo a transformative shift, engaging the viewer in an optical dance. Farrell treads carefully here, balancing intense contrast with intuitive subtlety by experimenting with colours all over the wheel.

 

Credit, too, must be given to Josef Albers, whose landmark 1963 book, Interactions of Color, continues to prove invaluable to Farrell. Acutely aware of the slippery nature of colour, Albers writes on the first page, “In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is—as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”

 

Farrell’s nuanced explorations of colour and pattern become increasingly complex when they make the leap into three-dimensional space. His recent sculptures pare down isolated details of previous works that are cut out, blown up, folded, and curved into unassuming geometric forms. Consider his new work, Silent Stride. Circling the sculpture, the viewer can observe an unassuming ribbon striped with blue, pink, and grey tones in myriad variations that overlap and intersect. Any sense of the selected hues, tones, or tints as static is revealed as an illusion, the colours shifting in the play of light and shadow. Farrell’s seemingly rudimentary architectural forms present their complexity through deliberate attention, and if you are not yet bewildered, position multiple sculptures together and the interplay becomes almost kaleidoscopic.

 

Examining our relationship to architectural forms and their surfaces is of similar importance to Calgary painter Marcia Harris, as evidenced by her paintings of renowned, even notorious, buildings familiar within our urban landscapes. Her methodical application of colour balances theory and practice while emphasizing the potent impact of layering light and shadow. Here, Harris looks to her own pedigreed list of influences, which includes Impressionists from Manet to Morisot, and contemporary masters such as George Shaw, Adrian Ghenie, and David Hockney, all widely celebrated for their command of light.

 

For Harris, the act of painting is a playful yet deliberate endeavour, where she revels in the unpredictability of colour interactions and embraces the beauty of unresolved moments. Her choice of subject is largely motivated by colour, light, and shadow, and whether she is compelled by the distinctive ways they might harmonize or disrupt. Her process begins with unplanned and uninhibited underpainting, typically with generous strokes of mid-tone greens and oranges, but just as often spray painted in neon colours evoking graffiti. Harris then builds her compositions layer by layer, allowing each decision to inform the next in a continuous chain of creative evolution. Like Farrell, her choices derive from an unwavering faith in spontaneity and intuition, yet are informed by a theoretical grounding of colour, again through the likes of Albers, but also Yale scholar David Scott Kastan’s landmark 2018 book, On Color.

 

Harris is keenly aware that “overplanning leads to disappointment” and instead allows her works to emerge with energy and dynamism, even at the expense of clarity and resolution. She expresses this vitality through her distinct use of colour, light, surface, and composition, provoking an alternative perception of familiar urban spaces. Recently, Harris has pushed this condition further, leaving the unpeopled and stark “solitude of a building” and entering the interior spaces to observe its occupants. Among her newest paintings, super store features a typical day at the much beloved Luke’s Drug Mart and is a superlative example of a lively interior both in its painterly approach, palette, and composition, as well as its bubbling social atmosphere.

 

Brought together for this exhibition, The Subject is Colour underscores a shared fascination with viewer experience and the transformative power of colour in space—depicted or otherwise. Whether an optically hypnotic abstraction or an alluring depiction of the urban spaces we inhabit, both artists deftly navigate the intricate interplay of hues, tones, light, and shadow to produce works that stimulate and seduce.

 

View the online catalogue

 

Ryan Doherty is a curator, writer, administrator, and consultant with over 25 years of experience in arts and culture. He received his MA from the Centre for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York (2007) and his undergraduate degree at the University of Lethbridge (1997). He most recently worked at Contemporary Calgary as Chief Curator from 2019 to 2023, and at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG) as Director and Curator beginning in 2008. He has curated a wide range of solo and group exhibitions across the county and has contributed to numerous catalogues and public programs. He has participated on multiple national juries including the Sobey Art Award and the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Doherty is the co-founder of Dodo Studios, a consulting business specializing in strategic, innovative, and resilient planning.