June 27, 2024 - December 20, 2024
The Past is Before You
How can exploring a family archive transform our understanding of the collective present?
The Past Is Before You explores this question by considering how memories can be examined, reimagined and even uplifted, shedding new light on the artist’s personal history.
An exercise in catharsis, Arnie Lipsey’s paintings forgo linear time, choosing instead to collapse the past, present, and future. Each work begins with an archival family photograph, and branches out into thematic explorations of war, survival, immigration, family life, as well as leisure. Lipsey’s paintings depict everyday Jewish life in Eastern Europe and Montreal from his family’s vantage point, highlighting stories transmitted across generations that are simultaneously loving, comforting, humorous, and haunting.
Evoking the spirit of magical realism, Lipsey’s dreamlike compositions lie somewhere along the boundaries of fantasy and reality: saturated hues replace the black-and-white source material, and figures are posed in the midst of often-surreal and multi-temporal settings. By filling in the blanks of family lore, it feels logical that Lipsey’s compositions lean into the absurd and surreal. Lipsey’s paintings call into question the potential of art as a tool to grasp ancestral memories that are not entirely our own.
To some – and especially among those Jewish families who experienced displacement and have a limited historical record – the family photo album is a private, even sacred, object. In vivid colour, The Past Is Before You demonstrates alternative methods and new possibilities for preserving the family archive.
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Arnie Lispey
Look Out
Acrylic on canvas
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Arnie Lipsey
In the Garden
Acrylic on canvas
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Arnie Lispey
Person to Person
Acrylic on canvas
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Arnie Lipsey
The Pastry Chef
Acrylic on canvas
My work explores an interior landscape, excavating imagery for meaning, and attempting to understand the present by examining the past. My paintings use portraiture, narrative, psychoanalytic dream imagery, and free association to examine questions of identity, family history, and the relationship between the personal and the universal. My work uses archival family photographs as a point of departure for this inquiry into the psychological patterns that under-gird family mythologies. Issues of war, survival, immigration and second-generation trauma are also explored. Echoes still remain of a childhood spent in the culturally bifurcated world of Jewish Montreal.
I re-imagine black-and-white source material as full-colour imagery, heightening visual impact while bringing the past into the present. Through this layered exploration of family dynamics and biography, the viewer may initially see these images as benign or nostalgic, only to have their sense of comfort upended by surreal elements that are sometimes humorous, sometimes foreboding. The viewer is invited to witness the emotional specificity of someone else’s family, and then relate it to the mythologies of their own. My paintings are suffused with magic realism, and are further influenced by neoclassicism, commercial advertising, storybook art, and a design sense borne of my career in animation.
The son of European-Jewish immigrants, Arnie Lipsey was born and raised in Montreal, and is a graduate of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design where he majored in Film Animation. After working for a period in the nascent Israeli animation industry, he relocated to Toronto in 1978 where he had a decades-long career in animation for film and television. Working in the classical mode (as director, animator, designer, and storyboard artist) using pencil and paper, he later made a successful transition to digital technologies. Arnie augmented his commercial work with independent filmmaking, producing two animated shorts that have been screened internationally. In 2018, he returned to his early artistic discipline: painting. He has exhibited and won awards in juried exhibitions and curated group shows in Ontario and Florida, and participated as an arts grants juror in St. Petersburg.
ARTIST
Arnie Lipsey
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Alyssa Stokvis-Hauer
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Austin Henderson
CURATORS
Alyssa Stokvis-Hauer
Austin Henderson
Taryn Fleishchmann
TRANSLATION
Benoit Pelletier
CONTRACTOR
Kayl Doble, Paint MTL
Shopdogs MTL
PRINTING
MFBB Lettrage Photolab
Papetrie Zoubris
