Pipe Dreams of Madame Récamier
The Koffler Gallery Off-Site presents the first solo exhibition in Toronto of Saskatchewan-based artist Clint Neufeld, comprising recent sculptural works and light-box vinyl drawings.
Starting from personal recollections, Neufeld mines his regional prairie past and relationships with male figures in his life, articulating an investigation of masculine/feminine dichotomy and notions of beauty, labour, and materiality.
For the past few years, Neufeld has been working with mechanical equipment and tools, casting them in delicately painted ceramic, porcelain or wax and staging them on domestic furniture and parlor accoutrements. The fanciful car engines, transmissions, valves, and excavating buckets role-play as dandies and socialites, transposed to materials and settings traditionally associated with fine dinnerware and tea parties. Divested of their functionality and steely power, the fundamental nature of these utilitarian devices shifts as they become strange objects of beauty meant for contemplation.
Engines hold a significant place in the collective memory of our car-centric society, evoking inherited perceptions of masculinity. By altering their materiality, Neufeld subverts their masculine character and the inherent connotations they hold as meaningful cultural objects. Furthermore, the mechanical parts the artist selects predominantly date from the 1950s and 60s, a time when nothing was yet digitally controlled and everything could be fixed with the right knowledge and a few tools. Triggering private associations, the sculptures allow for a moment of unlikely intimacy, becoming vessels of memory connecting personal and collective histories.
Clint Neufeld: Pipe Dreams of Madame Récamier is generously supported by Tamara and Gary Fine & Tippet-Richardson
Clint Neufeld was born and raised in small town Saskatchewan and currently lives and works on an acreage near the town of Osler, SK. Prior to pursuing a career in art, Neufeld spent three years with the Canadian military, which included a deployment to the former Yugoslavia in 1994. After a failed attempt pursuing a career as a firefighter, Neufeld began his BFA at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg and finished at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. In 2006 he completed his MFA at Concordia University in Montreal. Since then, his works have been shown in public galleries across the country and have been acquired into several public collections. Currently, Neufeldís work is featured in the groundbreaking exhibition, Oh, Canada, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. He is represented by Darrell Bell Gallery, Saskatoon.
