BIO |
Jim Verburg is a citizen of Canada and The Netherlands. He was born in 1977 in Belleville Ontario, and currently divides his time between Montreal and Toronto. His artistic practice is mainly concerned with the complexities of relationships. Working with photography, video, text, installation, and print to explore his love of modernist aesthetics, emotional matters, and the interpersonal. His second film For a Relationship won the 2008 Jury Prize for the Best Canadian Short Film‚ at the Inside Out Film Festival in Toronto. The work was also nominated for the Iris Prize in the UK. He has held residencies at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in Montreal, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto and the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta. In the spring of 2009 he had a solo exhibition/installation at Widmer and Theodoridis Contemporary in Zurich, and was featured by the gallery at the HOT ART Fair 2009 in Basel Switzerland. Recent exhibitions include: Portrait Study, an installation at the New Stage of the National Theatre in Prague, Domestic Queens at the FOFA Gallery in Montreal, So Many Letdowns Before We Get Up at Platform Gallery Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts in Winnipeg, and the C Magazine group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) in Toronto. Verburg's solo show One and Two is currently a part of Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal. The exhibit just won the Dazibao Prize. Please see the News section for the most recent information. |
ARTIST'S STATEMENT |
My practice has been predominately concerned with exploring the intricacies, dualities and the celebration of relationships. My approach is rooted in an intimate and personal narrative, with an exploration of these themes as common and universal. I am interested in the subtle links and connections between people, experience, emotion, and personal reality, as well as situating images in a time and context - whether in the context of love, sexuality, friendship, family relationships, a conversation, or the larger context of homosexual imagery. I aim to present a normalized, minimal, even mundane, portrayal of complex emotional ideas through representing and revealing the subtleties and layers of human experience. While photography is my primary medium, I also work with moving imagery, text, installation, and print to explore my fascination of modernist aesthetics, emotional matters, and the interpersonal. When I was young I fell in love with light, after falling in love with light, I fell in love with love. My early focus on portraiture was (in a way) a compulsion to document the new intimacy I was experiencing. Having been in a long term romantic relationship for seven years, I continue to be fascinated and confused by it - although not compelled to take daily photographs of my relationship as I once was, it remains the primary inspiration of my practice. I'm also interested in the complex relationships present in families, specifically my conservative religious family - suppressed sexuality, hidden truths, and everything else that seems to go with this. How our personal relationships affect our political, spiritual or religious leanings is fascinating to me. Working with these topics without being overly emotional, emotionally manipulative, or unnecessarily sentimental is of great importance to me. I believe that emotional matters can be normalized and explored in a way that is a natural and as necessary as eating. Recently, I've made a move towards exploring these ideas in minimal, non representational ways - turning away from conventional portraiture to relationships, people and ideas being represented through shape, colour, placement and form. |
PRESS |
REVIEWS, ARTICLES, AND CATALOGUE TEXTS: The most potent works provided attractive alternatives to the prolific auto-portraiture of our digitally enhanced era and instead engaged in considered representations of subjective landscapes (Jesper Just, Luis Jacob, Jim Verburg). Less appealing interpretations of the theme were displays of self-documentation in which the conceptual appeal was obscured by heavy-handed solipsism (Christina Nunez, Claire Savoie). Tess Edmonson, Review, Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal, Various Locations, Canadian Art, Winter 2012, p 134 — …Turning around, I am absorbed by Jim Verburg's motion sequence composed of two years of still photographs. Many images are of banal family gatherings and getaways to the cottage, interspersed with some particularly intimate sexual moments, overlaid with a staccato-like clicking and a soft-spoken monologue. "A can't share anything real and you can't talk talk about anything real" and "I am everything you fear about yourself" are two powerful confessions in the voiceover, which are not uncommon sentiments within the dynamics of any relationships. For a Relationship (2007) is thus a haunting and eloquent document of the artist's own attempt to come to terms with his relationship with a closeted family member. Due to its rawness, this work transcends the specific to become a critique of the difficulty of communicating very personal feelings and the consequential failed relationships because of this common human flaw. Mary Reid, Review "Haven't We Been Here Before?" Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, Winnipeg, June 9- July 23, 2011, C Magazine 112, International Contemporary Art, Winter 201, p 54-55, ISSN 1480-5472 — To plunge into the heart of this tacit rapture, to open it, to expose it and understand its texture is the project that Jim Verburg has set for himself. Here again, the young artist began closer to home, observing the unspoken elements in his relationship with his parents. As the narrator of For a Relationship (2007), he divulges a family member's repressed sexuality while the frenzied animation of thousands of photographs make explicit his own daily reality with his lovers. In Family Album Number One (2009), his mother confides to him that she is the illegitimate offspring of a secret liaison while a palimpsest of images from the family archive parades past. The parallel between the the video and audio tracks in these two works is bot merely incidental but represents the concurrent paths of idealized life and lived experience. By expressing the gap between them, the spoken work acknowledges the taboo borne by the image and diffuses its power. These confessions thus become models of a liberated space between two people in which the truth of what is can be spoken at any moment, a truth without which, the artist tells his father, "nothing is real". Inspired by his current love relationship and increasingly occupied by the influence of our emotional lives on our public lives, Verburg continues to model the infinite subtleties of relational space. In the exhibition One and Two (2011), circles (found in nature, produced by the lens, traced, imprinted, superimposed, animated) take over for human subjects and compose a set of theory constantly relativized by the unstable factors of position, movement, framing, focus and perspective. All the more so in that the artist (who delegated his self-portrait to a growing tree that gives access to his heart) squares the equation by introducing this essential factor; "I forget you're trying to interpret all this as well." Anne-Marie Ninacs, Waiting to See, Lucidity, Inward Views, Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal Catalogue, p 64-71, 199, 269 and 331, Edited by Anne-Marie Ninacs, ISBN 978-2-9808020-3-4 — Jim Verburg's Untitled (where we're at) presents two geometric circles formed by narrow bands of black vinyl: the first circle is adhered to the vitrine glass, and the second to the gallery wall behind. The result is a pair of shapes that change position relative to one another depending on the perspective of the viewer. While not a portrait in the conventional sense, Verburg's piece gives a set of variable perspectives on the nature of relations between two persons and is suggestive of romantic or erotic relations between humans, or at the very least, the physical intersection of two bodies. Like the navigational technique of parallax, where the trajectory or location of an object (or subject) seems to change according to the observer's position, Verburg's piece suggests the shifting arrangement of two people in a relationship. It also shows the shifting perspective of the viewer in evaluating that relationship. While the piece does not literally represent any architecture or activity of the domestic sphere, it does convincingly evoke the situation of sharing a domestic space with another person. It uses a small architectural space - the FOFA vitrine - to parallel the close space of a domestic environment. Untitled (where we're at) uses modernist geometric aesthetics to offer a poetic view on the way that individuals do or do not relate, do or do not align. Mark Clintberg, from The Domestic Queens Project, Exhibition Catalogue, Pages 20-23, FOFA Gallery, Concordia University Montreal QC, ISBN 978-0-9868715-0-4 — If Domestic Queens functions, in a sense, as a home for a series of homes, then I take Jim Verburg's Untitled (where we're at) (2010) as my point of access. Here, a series of vinyl strips form two large distinct circles, one affixed to the gallery vitrine's window and one on the wall behind. Produced over a had a century after Robert Rauschenberg's employment of like forms, notably, the number 8, composed of two circles, which art historian Jonathan D. Katz reads as a "visualization of the conjunction of identical forms, seemingly another oblique pictorialization of the attraction of same to same" Verburg's circles tug and blend into each other, mimicking the tensions and harmonies of interpersonal relationships and the dissimilarities that are born out of likeness. Erin Silver, Review, "The Domestic Queens Project (Domestic Queens:Jim Verburg, Jason Henderickson, Zachari Logan, Ryan Conrad, Liam Michaud, And REB (Richard E. Bump). and 27 x Doug: Larry Glawson) C Magazine III, International Contemporary Art, Autumn 2011, p 39-41, ISSN 1480-5472 — ...A case study will assist in testing these waters: the artwork of Jim Verburg, a young Canadian artist working in Montreal and Toronto. Verburg's photographic practice offers a daily account of his romantic dealings, and relationships with friends and family. For a Relationship (2007) is a video made of still photographs the artist has taken over the course of two years; tranquil landscapes, family portraits, erotic assignations, and domestic activities merge to form an archive of two years' lived experience. As I have discussed elsewhere, Verburg's project is diaristic. A voice-over encapsulates the artist's values and also his desire to express his values and sense of interpersonal turmoil to an unknown subject, His hopeful attempts at communication with this individual are riddled with expectations, and are continually foiled. Verburg's video might generate feelings of either sympathy or dispute in the viewer, but since the piece is formulated for public presentation, its status as a genuine emotional performance is compellingly suspect. If we feel for this work, if we manage, in a way, to care not just for its subject, but also for the tenderness and respect that it presents, and for the artwork itself as an object, is our judgment clouded-or enabled? Are we duped by the artist's ability to deposit a performed emotion in the work? The uncertainty that results is abrasive for the viewer. The uncertainty produced by out possible presentiments of the artist's fakery are part of the lure and potency of photographs of this kind. The abrasion I describe above is part of the viewer's pleasure when confronting a work that begs them to feel. It is a proposition. Any emotion born from the question the work asks cannot be divorced from it's aesthetic content. Though when I confront my position as a writer, I can't help but wish that they could be divided; getting too close to work of this kind can easily result in heartbreak. Mark Clinberg, Frottage: Love affairs in Photography (Part 2), Blackflash Magazine, Art, Photography, New Media, Summer 2010, p 14-15, ISSN 0826-3922 |