Herringer Kiss Gallery
Calgary AB – Apr 7-May 5, 2012

Curtis Cutshaw, Close Call (2012), digital print [Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary AB, Apr 7-May 5]

Curtis Cutshaw, Go (2012), digital print [Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary AB, Apr 7-May 5]

Curtis Cutshaw, North Branch (2012), digital print [Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary AB, Apr 7-May 5]

Curtis Cutshaw, Watermark (2012), digital print [Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary AB, Apr 7-May 5]

Curtis Cutshaw creates paintings that combine automatic drawing and digital manipulation. The vivid inkjet prints have an ethereal presence by virtue of their colour and composition. They gain an added sense of romance and mysticism from his “magical” practice of suspending felt pens and paper from dousing rods.

He writes: “Walking over the ground I find water deep below the surface. I search for feeling, a movement. When it is found, the pen moves creating the line… It is a delicate balance between nature and the hand.”

Cutshaw has created 15,000 drawings from the act of divination for The Dowsing Rod Collection. With pens on paper held beneath the rods, several layers of lines were recorded for each image. The drawings were then scanned into a computer, digitally reversed into negatives, colour enhanced and printed up to five feet in size. The push and pull of the divining rod causes changes in the pace and direction of the lines, while the many stops and starts punctuate the webs like polyps or buds on vines. He describes them as “large-scale double helices encrusted with salts” or “the skeletons of complex subaquatic creatures.”

Sponsored by the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Curtis Cutshaw was awarded an Illingworth Kerr Scholarship to attend the New York Loft Program in 1998. He subsequently earned a diploma in painting from the Alberta College of Art. In 1989 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Cutshaw currently works and lives in Calgary, Alberta.

www.herringer
kissgallery.com

Mia Johnson