Angie Quick "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes"

ANGIE QUICK

“SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES”

INTRODUCTION BY JOEL FAFLAK

“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” Gallery Installation View

ANGIE QUICK “SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES”

January 4 - February 24, 2024 Introduction by Joel Faflak

“QUICK DESIRE”

Joel Faflak

A

ngie Quick’s current show at the Gibson Gallery takes its name from

Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” written for their 1933 musical, Roberta. Made perhaps most famous by The Platters’ 1959 #1 hit, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” has become part of our emotional vernacular: just as smoke makes us tear up, romance and love break our hearts. At least when they don’t work out. Taking lines from the song as titles for her most recent paintings, Quick stretches the metaphor across the show’s broad and voluptuous canvasses.

If that last statement strikes you as the lamest of clichés, that’s partly Quick’s point. In all of her work love and romance have always been banal conduits for our emotions. That’s also how smoke gets in our eyes. We blow smoke in our faces -- and up our asses -- when we try to hide behind the symbols and platitudes that try to make sense of what is at once utterly visceral and beyond our capacity to understand: the vicissitudes of drive and desire.

The eroticism and carnality of sex and bodies -- such potent, fluid, and never stable notations in Quick’s work -- are, as Freud reminds us, the very place where our sexualities and identities take shape. Without them, we’re nothing. But with them we’re also lost to ourselves and to one another. It’s that inscrutable place where we touch and don’t touch one another that Quick harnesses so arrestingly in these paintings.

So, take your pick: respectable declarations of affection, expressions of a sublime yearning, blatant displays of genitalia and their effusions, or the

splayed embodiments of any of these. What’s the difference? Is there a difference? In Quick’s mercurial and quixotic vocabulary, desires and identities are at once revealed and concealed. It’s as if to say that the smoke that gets in our eyes, whatever form it takes, is not only unavoidable but essential to figuring and figuring out how we come to be human, but also not a little inhuman. These are canvasses that at once arrest our gaze and hide themselves and their meaning from our grasp. They register where we repeatedly find and lose ourselves as humans. Call them smokescreens of our desire.

Search through the revelations and camouflages, secrets and secretions that layer these pieces, with varying levels of depth and superficiality, and see where you might trace your own desire.

If you can find it.

Something here inside cannot be denied Oil on Canvas 2023 76 x 76 in.

Details of Something here inside cannot be denied, Oil on Canvas, 2023, 76 x 76 in.

Yet, today, my love has flown away Oil on Canvas 2023 76 x 76 in.

Details of Yet, today, my love has flown away, Oil on Canvas, 2023, 76 x 76 in.

Left - Gallery Installation View Right - Detail of Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, when your heart’s on fire, Oil on Canvas, 2023, 76 x 76 in.

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, when your heart’s on fire Oil on Canvas 2023 76 x 76 in.

“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” Gallery Installation View

“SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES” Lyrics: Otto Harbach & Jerome Kern

T

hey asked me how I knew my true love was true Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, I, of course replied “Something here inside cannot be denied” (Do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do, whoa) They said, “Someday, you’ll find all who love are blind Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, when your heart’s on fire You must realize smoke gets in your eyes” So, I chaffed them, and I gaily laughed To think they could doubt my love Yet, today, my love has flown away I am without my love (without my love) Now, laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, so I smile and say “When a lovely flame dies Smoke gets in your eyes” (smoke gets in your eyes) Smoke gets in your eyes

Now, laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide Oil on Canvas 2023 76 x 67 in.

Details of Now, laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide, Oil on Canvas, 2023, 76 x 67 in.

They said, Someday, you’ll find all who love are blind Oil on Canvas 2023 76 x 67 in.

Details of They said, Someday, you’ll find all who love are blind, Oil on Canvas, 2023, 76 x 67 in.

Right - Gallery Installation View Left - Detail of Do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do, whoa, Oil on Canvas, 2023, 60 x 48 in

Do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do, whoa Oil on Canvas 2023 60 x 48 in.

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, I, of course replied Oil on Canvas 2023 48 x 48 in.

Details of Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, I, of course replied, Oil on Canvas, 2023, 48 x 48 in.

To think they could doubt my love Oil on Canvas 2023 60 x 48 in.

Right - Gallery Installation View Left - Detail of To think they could doubt my love, Oil on Canvas, 2023, 60 x 48 in.

Angie Quick in her London, ON studio

ANGIE QUICK

Biography

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ngie Quick (b. 1989) is an emerging artist based in London, Ontario.

Her practice encompasses painting as well as performance and explores tenderness and intimacy both historically and contemporaneously.

In February 2023, Museum London featured Quick’s work in a solo exhibition “make me less evil”. Recent solo exhibitions also include “The Moonlight Made Me Do It” at the McIntosh Gallery in 2021 and “when i die i will have loved everything”, curated by Matthew Ryan Smith, Glenhyrst Gallery, Brantford, ON in 2019.

Recipient of multiple grants, Quick was short-listed for Tracey Emin Artist Residency in 2022.

Her artwork is in the permanent collections of Museum London and the McIntosh Gallery at Western University as well as private collections across Canada.

This is her 2nd solo exhibition at the Michael Gibson Gallery.

ANGIE QUICK “SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES” Online catalogue of an exhibition held at Michael Gibson Gallery January 4 - February 24, 2024

The gallery would like to thank Joel Faflak for his thoughtful and insightful introduction.

Joel Faflak is the Robert and Ruth Lumsden Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University and faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. His publishing and teaching interests are British Romantic literature, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and film musicals. He’s received the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Association Teaching Award and the Edward G. Pleva Award for Teaching Excellence as well as the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature and the Governor General’s Medal for Research Excellence.

For Angie Quick’s complete Curriculum Vitae and images of available paintings please visit www.gibsongallery.com

Front Cover Image: “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, when you heart’s on fire”, Oil on Canvas, 2023, 76 x 76 in.

Back Cover Image: Detail of “Now, laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide”. Oil on Canvas, 2023, 76 x 67 in.

Design Michael Gibson Gallery Artwork Images © Angie Quick

www.gibsongallery.com