Collage artworks by a perennial instructor at the Gibsons School of the Arts — now exhibited in his first solo show on the Sunshine Coast — probe questions of national identity through texture, shape and colour.
The artworks of Tico Kerr’s Motion Pictures exhibition were unveiled during a public reception at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery on Aug. 23. Kerr, a Vancouver-based artist, has taught at annual summer workshops offered by the Gibsons School of the Arts in 2022 and 2023. (The school’s 2025 lineup of eight sessions concluded this week with a four-day course by Jan Poynter on the hidden secrets of watercolours.) He is scheduled to return as an instructor next summer.
Kerr’s neo-cubist abstracts, separated from audiences by a plexiglass barrier, shift their appearance with every change in a viewer’s perspective. The pale creams and blues of Under a Cubist Sky offers a direct tribute to the supernal influence of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. In The Fire Next Time, incarnadine papers tinted by acrylics and acetate gel blaze within its frame (the title is a tribute to James Baldwin’s 1963 essay in which he paraphrases a portentous slave song: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”). The polychromatic Speaking in Tongues channels glossolalia into streaks of primary colours, conversing and complementing with pentecostal exuberance.
“My approach to this whole work,” explained Kerr, “is very much about asking myself the question: how do I make work that has a soul when we’re living in a time of such extraordinary stress and negativity and misinformation. How do we maintain our balance, our equilibrium as artists?”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kerr reconsidered his relationship with plexiglass. He had always used the material to mix his paints, coating layer on layer. In Motion Pictures, it becomes both substrate and boundary. The works were created over the span of six years, beginning during a residency Kerr completed at Princeton University. After the death of legendary B.C. artists Doris and Jack Shadbolt, Kerr inherited many of their books and papers. He explored ways to incorporate their influence and ephemera into collage.
“I really believe that we are walking collages,” he said, “bits and pieces of environmental issues, political issues, community and familial. They’re always changing, and it’s a moving target that we’re kind of existing in. My approach to my work has always been to describe the psychological and emotional landscape of our contemporary moment.”
Kerr’s career has also encompassed moving pictures in their most literal form: he served as art director for the documentary film Undetectable and in 2018 created set designs for the Kay Meek Arts Centre production of Marion Bridge.
Beyond his dextrous manipulation of cubist forms, Kerr’s show in Gibsons reveals a fascination with existential questions of Canadian sovereignty. Needing a last-minute addendum to the series, he revisited and inserted his monumental diptych Canada As An Idea. “I don’t want it to be illustrative,” he observed. “I don’t want to be having flags and all that, but for me there are enough references that speak about the subliminal, invisible language that we think about when we think about our country.” The paired canvases abut each other, two solitudes in physical contact — yet vertically offset by a minute degree.
“I think that my job is to be a record keeper,” Kerr added. “I’m really interested in the things around me. For the longest time I was doing landscapes in Vancouver at a time when buildings were being torn down and thrown up. I’m just trying to keep up with the issues and trying to be as honest and mindful as I can be.”
Tico Kerr’s Motion Pictures remains on display at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery until Sept. 14. On Sept. 9, he will conduct a workshop on how chance and accidents can contribute to abstract compositions. Registration is required via gpag.ca.
