Sarnia art gallery's new mural has an expiry date
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A mural created for visitors being welcomed back to the Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery isn’t long for this world.
A trio of Toronto-based artists with Latin American roots have been creating the mural over five days at the public art gallery in downtown Sarnia, in time for it to reopen Friday to gallery members and Saturday to the public after being closed since March by pandemic restrictions.
Erik Jerezano, Nahum Flores and Ilyana Martinez make up the Z’otz Collective, which has been working out of a Toronto studio for more than 16 years on drawings, paintings, collages, sculptures and site-specific installations.
The mural created this week on walls in one of the gallery’s exhibition spaces on the third floor is part of a show for the reopening called Ode to the Inside Out Questions, which also includes other work by the collective.
“We do work in collaboration,” Jerezano said. “Six hands do all the pieces.”
That includes “ephemeral” murals such as the one they began creating Monday in Sarnia, he said.
“When the exhibition is over, they wash it down and paint it over and it’s gone.”
Members of the Toronto-based Z’otz Collective, from left, Erik Jerezano, Llyana Martinez and Nahum Flores, are shown at the Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery in Sarnia.
The collective also creates murals, often as commissions, that last longer, Jerezano said. “Not forever, but longer,” he added.
Jerezano said the ephemeral concept gives the three artists more freedom.
“You’re not worried the thing it going to last forever and has to please someone, or has to look a certain way,” he said.
“In this case, it’s complete freedom” because the work has an “expiry date,” he added.
The show at the Sarnia gallery runs until March.
“It gives us pleasure and freedom to respond spontaneously,” Flores said.
“So much of the beauty of working together is the exchange we have while we’re making the piece,” Martinez said.
Jerezano said the three artists, thought their collaboration, “respond to each other’s marks and forms, and we work without any preconceived ideas.”
“It’s more like a dialogue, a conversation but we’re not chasing any final results,” he said.
The gallery has been documenting the collective’s work creating the mural with a camera set up in the room where the artist are working and plans to produce a 20-minute video presentation.
For the reopening, the gallery is also presenting an exhibition from its permanent collection, Group of Seven: Their Visions Revisited 100 years later.
The gallery’s new hours are Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Thursday from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. It will be closed Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
Admission is free, but the gallery is using “timed-ticket entry,” with visitors booking appointments online at jnaag.ca, wearing face masks and following social distancing and direction markings on the floor. Visitors are also being asked to reschedule if they are feeling unwell.
“I’m so thrilled to welcome people back,” said curator-supervisor Sonya Blazek, “and I’m just so happy to be able to open with such an incredible exhibition.”
The Sarnia Observer
by Paul Morden
October 1, 2020
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