Drive
A Duo Exhibition with Michel Saint Hilaire and Mandy van Leeuwen
April 14 – April 29, 2023
Calling all classic car aficionados, dreamscape lovers, and surrealist enthusiasts! Woodlands Gallery presents, Drive, a duo-exhibition featuring paintings from Manitoba artists, Michel Saint Hilaire and Mandy van Leeuwen. Propelled by their close friendship and frequent mural collaborations, they combine their contrasting painting styles, delving into the concept of the car, our affinity for it, and its impact on our surroundings.
Gestural lines carve through Saint Hilaire’s paintings, suggesting sprawling prairie highways and abstracted city skyscrapers. Swift brushstrokes and thin sheets of colour intersect his translucent roads and buildings, questioning their permanence and warping our sense of time. Memories of road trips and traffic jams commingle with an appreciation of the classic car, its apparition appearing briefly in several of Saint Hilaire’s works as it hits the road running on a futuristic landscape.
With Surrealistic flair, van Leeuwen’s paintings jump from canvas to disembodied car parts, as she celebrates the highs of Summer along pock-marked Manitoba highways. Through a nostalgic lens that edges on the post-apocalyptic, she explores ‘the car’ as retro artifact in the dusk of the gasoline era. Like all vintage diehards, the tactility of the object is as thrilling as its history, as van Leeuwen takes to painting directly on classic car doors and hoods. The family car shrinks down under her hand, confined beneath crisp, plastic packaging, while she ignites our uninhibited imaginations with upturned cars and an ice cream truck gone rogue.
Put the pedal to the metal and discover limitless possibilities in Michel Saint Hilaire and Mandy van Leeuwen’s duo-exhibition, Drive, as they pay homage to the car and our insatiable need for speed. Please join us Friday, April 14th from 6pm to 9pm for the opening reception.
Read more about Drive in Style Manitoba – Spring 2023
