Chisholm Gallery

Schallie, Gerry

Canadian Contemporary

As an artist, I am drawn to subjects possessing layered histories and the challenge of portraying the unseen in a visual medium. Interpretive yet visually faithful, my images imply storied pasts, conveying an accumulation of time as opposed to recording a mere increment.

To view a Complete Gallery of Gerry Schallié’s work, please click here.

Using photography as the groundwork of my images, I employ methods founded in both the wet and digital darkroom as means of artistic expression. Stylistically spanning pointillism to virtually grainless lithprints, the majority of my work falls under the guise of (or possesses elements of) Pictorialism, photography’s equivalent to Impressionism in the world of painting. In spite of a formal photographic background, many of my key influences originate outside the realm of photography, such as the highly detailed lithographs of Central American exploration by 19th Century architect Frederick Catherwood and Emily Carr’s iconic paintings of coastal Indian settlements. As with these two examples, I find the most powerful art to be an alchemy of subject and artistic vision. If there were a recurrent theme unifying these seemingly disparate works, it would be the underlying anthropological subtexts and the narrative qualities engendered.

Born in Vancouver, Canada, 1955. Received an Associate of Arts Diploma (Graphic & Communication Arts) from Douglas College, British Columbia in 1975.

About pan paxil (pàn pà·shîl)

A survey of derelict Mayan ruins, this series of pastoral images is of the Pictorialist genre, a photographic equivalent to painting’s Impressionist movement. Decaying architectural remnants are juxtaposed against diverse and often lush tapestries of native flora, further enhanced by the spectral sensitivity of infrared film. This typology has been dubbed pan paxil, an oblique reference to the “broken place” of a K’iche’ Maya creation myth in which a lightning strike mixes corn, earth and water giving birth to the earliest humans. Centuries later, essayist and poet laureate Octavio Paz observed “Maya history is by nature at once hallucinatory and circular,” echoing that these ancient cities have indeed come full circle. The stone platform central in Storm Over El Rey is without doubt now a broken place, its history little more than a mirage. While rooted in the photographic process, this series of images is mentored in Nineteenth Century printmaking, specifically the iconic renderings of early Central American exploration by English architect and artist Frederick Catherwood. The majority, if not all, of these images are to some extent tonally “false” when judged in conventional photographic terms. In place of tonal fidelity is a rendering founded in incident, one that mimics human visualization and memory. As with Catherwood’s works, subject and surroundings are inextricably linked, resulting in images that convey ambience beyond the sum of their visual components. This body of work has been produced from 1991 to current with added travel and works planned in the future. Each image has been printed and hand processed by the artist.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

April 2004, otherworld: kings, temples & subjects of stone, Maple Ridge Art Gallery, Maple Ridge, BC
November 2001 – January 2002, Eighteen Photographs, Third Avenue Gallery, Vancouver, BC
November 1998, pan paxil/Before Christopher Columbus, Third Avenue Gallery, Vancouver, BC
January 1997, pan paxil (revised), Benham Studio Gallery, Seattle, Washington
May – June 1995, pan paxil (revised), Gateway Gallery, Richmond, BC
October – November 1994, Camuhibal (Our Place in the Shadows), Picasso Gallery, Vancouver, BC
October 1993, pan paxil, Exposure Gallery, Vancouver, BC

Group Exhibitions

April 2007, Matador, Canvas, Vancouver, British Columbia
December 2002, Seasonal Exhibit, Third Avenue Gallery, Vancouver, BC
May 2000, Gallery Artist Exhibition (nudes), Third Avenue Gallery, Vancouver, BC
December 1998, Seasonal Exhibit, Third Avenue Gallery, Vancouver, BC
November 1996, Full Frame III ‘96, Pendulum Gallery(HSBC), Vancouver, BC
August 1996, Photographer as Artist/Artist as Photographer (two artist exhibit), Teck
Gallery, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC
May – October 1996, Journey into Mexican History Through Art, Vancouver Museum
April 1996, Unseen Light, Exposure Gallery, Vancouver, BC
May 1995,VAPA exhibit, Pendulum Gallery (HSBC), Vancouver, BC
March – June 1994, Beauregard Collections, Vancouver, BC
December 1993, Personal Favorites, Exposure Gallery, Vancouver, BC
June 1993,Summer Salon, Exposure Gallery, Vancouver, BC
August 1992, Art of Nature, Exposure Gallery, Vancouver, BC

Planned Solo Exhibitions

Early 2009, Casa Catherwood, Merida, Mexico

National Reviews: Godly Growth and Mystery by Robin Laurence, BORDER CROSSINGS (Summer 1995)
Awards: Grand Prize, Picturing the Past (1995), Archaeological Institute of America/ARCHAEOLOGY Magazine
Edition Prints: San Francisco de Asís Church (New Mexico) pigment print series in collaboration with Fidelis Printmaking (December 2007)

Works in Progress

Recent black & white images of Northwest First Nations villages and abandoned settlements (Haida, Gitxsan, Kwakawaka’wakw)
Museo lithprint series in cooperation with The British Museum and Museo Nacional de Antropologia (Mexico)
San Francisco de Asís Church series of archival pigment prints.