BIBLIOGRAPHY click the  icon to open articles as .pdfs in a new window* *free adobe acrobat reader needed.	Group Hug at Angell David Jager, NOW Magazine, December 7, 2006  Future Cities Catherine Osborne, Design Lines Toronto. Fall 2006, pages 42-43 Kristine Moran: Dissolution Plan at Angell Gallery Randy Gladman, Canadian Art, Vol. 22, No. 3, Fall 2005 Kristine Moran at the Angell Gallery Gary Michael Dault, Globe and Mail, Saturday May 7, 2005, Page R10 Kristine Moran, Angell Gallery Randy Gladman, Artforum.com, May 4, 2005  Accidentor Too Robert Enright, Border Crossings, Issue No. 91, page 14  Profile of Kristine Moran Jessica Goldman, Sketch, Fall 2004, pages 18, 19  More than meets the eye in artist's alternate world Gary Michael Dault, Globe and Mail, Gallery Going, Saturday June 5, 2004  Kristine Moran solo show flies - Paintings evoke past and future. Peter Goddard, Toronto Star, Visual Arts, Thursday, June 3, 2004  Weirdly, These Crashes Hardly Seem Threatening Catherine Osborne, The National Post, Saturday, May 22, 2004  Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog. Monday, March 22, 2004. Group hug at Angell David Jager, Now Magazine, December 7th 2006 Exhibition puts Jamie Angell's excellent curating instincts on display. ANGEL 10: TOP 10 at Angell Gallery (890 Queen West), to December 23. Rating: NNNN Jamie Angell celebrates 10 years at his Queen West gallery with an exhibit of 10 of his best artists. Angell is a collector who goes with his gut, so you'll be hard pressed to find any overarching aesthetic or agenda among these works. They range from lo-fi Art Brut to high-end photographic conceptualism. Whatever their chosen vernacular, every artist here has a voice. Kim Dorland opens the show with a muscular painting of a green elk crossing through traffic. There's a new sure-footedness in the way he sculpts and renders forms. With its sizzling sense of colour, this is strong work from an already formidable young painter hitting his stride. A Jakub Dolejs piece sits on the opposite wall posing an elegant and subdued visual paradox: it's a photograph of a set painted by Dolejs, lit by a single stage light. Next to it hang indescribable figures painted by Kineko Ivic . In Still All Alone, a glum tree-trunk-headed creature with spider legs wears the painting's title on its chest. Outsider art comes to mind, and yet there's something engagingly clever and warm behind the outlandishness. Nick and Shiela Pye map out the permutations of marriage and relationship in a cool, almost academic conceptual photo in which they swing toward each other on ropes in front of a constructed set. Against the surreal clarity that surrounds them, they appear weightless. Geoffrey Pugen pushes the photographic edge even further in Fat Cat, a modified print featuring a cat-headed man wearing urban hipster duds who sits in an armchair holding an owl and flanked by a large ceramic bulldog. Its deadpan weirdness and comic attention to detail somehow manage to justify it. Coop-Housing Cultural Remix, a complex and multi-layered painting by Jason Gringler , deserves a room of its own. This very large and ambitious deconstruction of urban landscape in Gringler's distinctive style of bold lines and geometric permutations nearly devours the entire back room. Kristine Moran's compact and intricately fractured cityscape is another arresting painting musing on modern urban space, hovering somewhere between utopian dream and nightmare. Two of the artists here were RBC Canadian Painting Competition regional finalists over the last five years, a fact that underlines Angell's intuitive knack for finding and cultivating relevant and exciting contemporary work. Future Cities Catherine Osborne, DesignLines Toronto, Fall 2006, p.42-43 The same year Kristine Moran completed her fourth year at the Ontario College of Art and Design, her solo exhibition at Angell gallery on Queen West received the kind of glowing reviews artists with twice her experience would kill for. Her abstract paintings of fast cars spinning out of control were read as a perfect synthesis of pop culture's obsessions with speed, crash-and-burn blockbusters and PlayStations, all congealed into colourful images that were remarkably advanced in subject and technique. But too much too fast can be hard on a young artist who is still figuring out the meaning of her work, "I was getting pigeonholed as the car crash girl", says Moran, reflecting on the show two years later. The attention gave her a sense of confidence as well as a desire to pull back and take stock. Moran has spent the past 12 months studying at Hunter college in New York City, where she has been honing her skills. And she has moved on to a broader topic: paintings that are rooted in idealized cities, the kind of Babylons once imagined by architects of the 1960's. Her latest paintings take aspiration from building concepts by such groups as the Situationists and Archigram, dreamt up cities in the 21st century, when, it was assumed, we'd have a lot more time for lounging around in pod houses. Moran describes her utopian paintings as open-ended experiments, not unlike how architects she borrows from viewed their designs. In one, titled Beachfront property-owners anxious over new regulations, she depicts a haphazard pile of futuristic homes stacked one on tope of the other. "The painting is about taking all these self-made homes and building a community", she says. "What would happen if there was this new form of urban planning that was essentially a free-for-all, where anyone could go and build whatever they wanted." It's idealistic, she admits, but adds, "You have to wonder how people would interact with each other if there wasn't any urban planning". Compared to Toronto, a city that's built on a grid and that claims Don Mills as the first planned community in North America, Moran's dreamscapes are a striking contrast. In her worlds, houses shaped like Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes float around clover-shaped highway ramps, and cars glide past structures reminiscent of Moshe Safdie's Habitat. They are vivid reminders that architecture is limited only by the imagination. Kristine Moran: Dissolution Plan at Angell Gallery Randy Gladman, Canadian Art, Vol. 22, No. 3, Fall 2005 In her second solo exhibition, Kristine Moran sharpens the focus in her sci-fi paintings, zeroing in on the ideas of utopian theorists from the 20th century—Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses, Constant Nieuwenhuys and Buckminster Fuller—to present inner-city landscapes from an imagined alternative present. While still sprinkled with her signature airborne vehicles and extravagant explosions, these works ponder idealistic urban environments and the social interactions of their inhabitants. Like all science-fiction tales about supposedly perfect societies (think of Spielberg’s blindingly bright future in Minority Report), Moran’s narratives inevitably present harsh dystopias. The geodesic dome serves as a motif in the exhibition, providing perfect shelter for the chosen few and symbolizing the ultimate failure of the utopian ideal to encompass those left outside its walls. In Blind Sided, the dome is seen from a top-down, aerial view, the same godlike perspective that the original designers of these idealized cities held when drawing up their blueprints. While those designers saw only plans for a perfect future, we see the chaos that now dominates the fictional metropolitan communities, not lucky enough to be included under the utopic domes. In Next In Line, perhaps the strongest work in the exhibition, we witness a military helicopter patrolling over a tangle of traffic-snarled multi-lane freeways. As its searchlights scan the ground, we are left with the distinct feeling that some kind of tragedy has struck the city. The image is reminiscent of the weeks after 9/11, when military choppers and fighter jets patrolled the skies above Manhattan. The vertigo-inspiring aerial perspective and sickly green-blue Matrix-like hue of these top-down works leave viewers with a clear sense of impending doom or fresh disaster. Moran’s representations of buildings and vehicles are frequently wonky and skewed, their angles and flatness childlike in their clumsy, sketchy quality. The manner in which the artist delineates three-dimensional space in these complex landscapes is awkward and sometimes confusing. But it is exactly this looseness that makes her works so interesting. Combining glossy enamels and alkyds on board with a thick impasto handling of high-keyed paint, the artist captures the intense energy and action depicted in her narratives. The harried, improvised quality of her work injects the pieces with an intelligent and vibrant freshness. Kristine Moran at the Angell Gallery Gary Michael Dault, Globe and Mail, Saturday May 7, 2005, Page R10 Only two years out of school (OCAD), and painter Kristine Moran is painting with the verve and passion of someone who's been at it forever. She has a great subject: urbanism and visionary architecture and design. Building forcefully on last year's explorations in "speed-driven techno-culture," Moran's new paintings -- chromatically dazzling and almost off-puttingly au courant in their screaming palette of wild, hard, citrus-plastic, acid-edged oranges, bottle-greens and Barbie pinks -- embody the mercurial, utopian ideas of non-building Dutch architectural theorist Constant Nieuwenhuis (better known as simply Constant), the artist-architect best remembered, probably, for the epic plans for his New Babylon and for his founding, with French philosopher Guy Debord, of the anarchic Situationists, who loomed large in Parisian thought in the 1950s and 60s. She also references, in her work, the inventions of the avant-garde Archigram group, and certain kinds of buoyant urban thinking from Yona Friedman and Buckminster Fuller, most of which involves elevated cities, cities on stilts, cities lifted, propped and hung in the air, cities up above the ruckus of traffic and the pedestrian requirements of the populace. The keynote to all thus is motion, and Moran's paintings pulse and whirl with it. Maplike, gridlike at base, with gusts of lightninglike drawing (often in an electric white) crackling through the field, and with coagulations of bottled-up pigment jammed on the canvas like gridlock, the paintings heave and whirr and incarnate a world that is perhaps more fun to speculate about than to live in. One thing is for sure, these paintings feel genuinely new, and that is a remarkable, enviable thing. Kristine Moran, May 05 2005 - May 28 2005 Angell Gallery, Toronto Randy Gladman, Artforum.com May 04 2005 Kristine Moran had a mad crush on Luke Skywalker when she was a child, and she has painted science fiction landscapes—filled with flying cars, high-speed disasters and Jetsons-inspired architecture—ever since. Displaying her admirably loose handling of vibrant oils, acrylics, and alkyd resins, Moran's new show continues the exploration of ultra-urban speed-driven futuristic landscapes that began with her critically acclaimed solo debut last year at the same gallery. Though still inspired by future-noir films like Blade Runner and Minority Report, she has turned her attention backwards, enhancing her narratives with the visionary ideas of mid-twentieth century utopian theorists such as Constant Nieuwenhuys, Archigram, and R. Buckminster Fuller. The new paintings attempt to show the state that idealistic theoretical cities of the past would be in today had they actually been built fifty years ago. Predictably, Moran's vision is one of widespread dystopia. Competing groups, each armed with its own ideology, fight over scarce resources. Checkpoints provide inadequate protection for the wealthy, whose gated communities are tucked away in giant geodesic domes on the edge of downtown slums. Moran's is an alternate future in which the cold utilitarian functionality of Robert Moses battles the moderating intelligence of Jane Jacobs's new urbanism over the soul of the American city. Accidentor Too Robert Enright, Border Crossings, Issue No. 91, page 14 Kristine Moran draws on the immediate world around her as inspiration for the chaotic beauty of her car crash paintings. "It's something I feel living in the city," she says from her Toronto studio, "how hectic it is, the sensory overload." She also lifts ideas from action and sci-fi movies. - The Fifth Element is a favourite - from Japanese anime, videogame Websites and from the most reliable source for anyone on the lookout for disaster, the daily news. "I'm attracted to the choreographed violence in the media and to the intense colour, surround sound and fast-moving images of action movies. It becomes pure aesthetics and it takes away any emotional connection we might have to the actual tragedy. That melodramatic action is what I am trying to portray in my paintings." What Moran ends up with is a compelling combination of painterly and virtual space for her disasters-in-process. It's as if an architect and an urban planner got together to butt visual heads in an environment designed by Inke Essenhigh. Moran did study landscape architecture at Ryerson along the way and admits to being influenced by Moshie Safdie's Habitat designs from Expo '67, an event that happened well before she was born. The time she is after is a time that no one lives in. "I'm looking for a line and design that will give the work a futuristic appeal. A painting like Automated Uncertainty has a Star Wars feel to it. I'm always trying for something that is really artificial." As a result, her backgrounds assume a distinctive digital style. "I want it to look like this is a future that exists in the realm of the computer and not the natural landscape as we know it." What is familiar in her work are the painterly flourishes. Moran already displays skills beyond her age and experience (she received the Painting and Drawing Medal in 2004 from the Ontario College of Art and Design). She may be after the artificial, but she is as likely to move from a thinly drawn pen and ink line to a gorgeously thick impasto, and most often in the same painting. "When it comes to doing the paintings, I don't stop myself from using one technique or another. I just go with my instincts." Her instincts were helped by her vocation. To help pay the cost of going to art school, Moran became a flight attendant with Air Canada (she is currently on a leave of absence). She would use her layovers in London, Munich, Los Angeles and New York as research opportunities to see whatever was on exhibition in the public and commercial galleries. "I scanned the cities to find out what was happening." If you scan her paintings you can see that some of what goes on is traceable to artists as different as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Julie Mehertu, although Moran has managed to absorb her influences and already looks like herself. What emerges from her beautiful disasters are wrecks of paintings that, while you may not want to be in, you most certainly want to look at, over and over again. Profile of Kristine Moran Jessica Goldman, Sketch, Fall 2004, pages 18, 19 "Painting is what comes naturally to me. I've always wanted to be an artist; I just never thought it was possible to be successful at it"--Kristine Moran, Fall 2004 She may be humble, but Kristine Moran has a lot to be proud about. Moran graduated from OCAD in 2003 with a total of eight awards including the prestigious OCAD medal for Drawing & Painting, and quickly found herself enjoying success born of talent, a positive attitude and hard work. Moran's paintings have been described as futuristic car crashes brought to life by a mixture of techniques such as pen and ink to thick impasto. In talking about her own work Moran says, "They are about chaotic city living in a time when speed, technology and the media have created the surreal world for us. An imagined futuristic world of flying cars and floating structures where things tend to go terribly wrong." There is nothing chaotic about the critical acclaim her work has received: "one of the stronger debuts in years... veterans would kill to show off this kind of confidence" --Toronto Star "strong paintings for a painter just out of art school" --National Post "a remarkably assured exhibition for so newly-minted a painter and agreeable hot in it's youthful pictorial urgencies" --The Globe and Mail "Moran already displays skills beyond her age and experience" --Border Crossing Moran came to OCAD after studying landscape architecture at Ryerson. "Painting is what comes naturally to me," says Moran. "I came to OCAD because I realized that painting was all I wanted to do and I wanted a program that was studio-based in a school that gave me close access to the Toronto art community." Right off the bat, Moran immersed herself in the Drawing & Painting program and quickly learned the rules and procedures governing artistic practice and responded with risk-taking originality. "There was nothing she wasn't prepared to fail at first, then to pick up from and reformulate," said OCAD professor Michèle White who was one of the first people to spot Moran's budding talent. By the time she graduated, everyone at OCAD was just as enthused with Moran's work. At the 2004 graduation ceremony, Moran was awarded the Governor General's Academic Medal, Ontario College of Art & Design Medal, 410 Richmond Career-Launcher Prize, Drawing & Painting Medalist Scholarship, M.W.O. Forsyth Scholarship, Gallery 76 Award, Nora E. Vaughan Award and the M. Joan Chalmers Scholarship. The professional art community wasn't far behind. Moran's dealer, Jamie Angell, signed her up after seeing her first exhibition and she went on to sell out her first solo show at Angell Gallery in May of 2004. As far as Moran is concerned, what she wants for her future is exactly the same as what she wanted when she started this journey. "If I could paint full-time for the rest of my life I would be very, very happy." When it comes to Moran and painting--there are a lot of people who feel the very same way. Kristine Moran graduated with a BFA from OCAD's Drawing & Painting program in 2004. More than meets the eye in artist's alternate world Gary Michael Dault, Globe and Mail, Gallery Going, Saturday June 5, 2004, page R16 Moran, who recently swept up a hatful of awards as a student at the Ontario College of Art and Design, has now waded into the mainstream with this diverting exhibition called Trip Wire, involving "representations of media-inspired urban angst through the context of futuristic disasters." Well, we've all heard way too much about urban angst, but at least Moran, with her J.G. Ballard/David Kronenberg-fuelled sensibility has managed to give matters an inventive new turn: Moran's flaming car crashes take place as violent, localized explosions of oil pigment set coolly against vast, smooth, handsomely gridded enameled fields (in intriguingly selected industrial hues)--the grids acting as graphic compressions of everything from high-rise buildings to hints of freeway geometry. It's a remarkably assured exhibition for so newly-minted a painter and agreeably hot in its youthful, pictorial urgencies. Palette knife hits ground with a roar Kristine Moran solo show flies - Paintings evoke past and future Peter Goddard, Toronto Star, Visual Arts, Thursday, June 3, 2004 To hear Jaime Angell tell it, Kristine Moran could not be happier to get her own studio space at 401 Richmond St. starting in July, one of the rewards of receiving the 2004 Painting and Drawing medal at the Ontario College of Art & Design. "Now she can paint all the time," says Angell. Eventually Moran can even quit her day job as a flight attendant for Air Canada to concentrate entirely on her art. "That's all she wants to do," he adds. Now, Angell has a vested interest in Moran buckling down to work, with his gallery showing "Trip Wire," Moran's debut solo exhibition. From the number of little red sold stickers already affixed to pieces on the wall, he has a hit on his hands. Actually, we don't need the little red stickers. Moran's lavishly painted muscle cars crashing and burning across a design universe represent one of the stronger debuts in years. Veteran artists would kill to show off this kind of confidence. Heavy chunks of paint (impasto) hint at improvisation -- work done fast, freely and fearlessly, muscle car action for the hand. "I'm totally into impasto," she says. "I'm using a palette knife for those cars that are exploding." But the looseness is deceptive. The cool sheen of her hard enamel backgrounds pins down these roaring cars in stop-action, like the dark blue sky-without-end in Unhinged (2004). The cars are classic media-manipulated bursts of power and destruction, the kind you find in old print ads for cars or in a vintage Arnold Schwarzenegger film like Total Recall. But violence isn't the issue here. The control of the violence is. The various design elements Moran brings into play, the grid-like structures or jags of yellow or white cutting paintings in half, perhaps speak to the three-year course she took in landscape architecture at Ryerson University. Just as likely, their source can be found in the computer-designed artificial universes in the modern techno-flick or borrowed from Moshe Safdie's mid-1960s design for Montreal's Habitat apartment complex. To hear Moran tell it, her Air Canada gig is not such a bad thing. Like many other attendants, she's learned to fit a second career into her life. The travel is a plus, too. "I get to see all the great galleries in the world," the 30-year-old artist tells me. She goes on to list the other perks that come with the job, like the work benefits and passes, "where you jump on a plane and go see a show," she adds. "Flying can be physically tiring. But not mentally." But her reaction to flying goes deeper. She thinks her flight experience connects directly to her painting, surrounded as she is by high tech designed to give a good old-fashioned sense of comfort and security to the passenger. "The faster things change, the speedier things get, the more we're going to hold on to things from the past," she says. "However futuristic a new building may be, it will probably be beside another one that's older." But for all the tough talk and hard edges in Moran's show, there's a softness here coming from a kind of nostalgia for the hot action aspects of yore. In "Trip Wire," '70s-'80s' content -- the Pontiac Firebirds and other hot cars Moran's dad loved so much -- is played out a '90s digital-like context. No wonder the paintings are so seductive and saleable. The inviting sense of never having seen stuff like this before in fact comes from having seen stuff like this before, it's just not been replayed in your imagination in this way. Playing with future-nostalgia didn't start with Moran. As the recent "Art Deco 1910-1935" show at the Royal Ontario Museum indicated, we connect much better with a period that shares our modern go-go values than with one that doesn't. Conversely, if you wrap the future in the past -- as George Lucas showed us with Star Wars -- it goes down a whole lot easier, particularly with those most likely to be scared of it in the first place. But Moran's trip back to the future has a lot more to do with painting than with image-manipulation, even though she talks elsewhere about her fascination with violence while wanting to keep some psychological distance from it. The car-referencing blasts of colour coming off the surface -- yes, sometimes the paint is that thick -- would seem to be Moran getting the feel for a blast of another sort, where her own creativity lets loose of its past and goes where it wants to go. When she really does put the pedal to the metal -- and "Trip Wire" is not quite there yet -- this auspicious debut will come to seem all the more important. Trip Wire - Weirdly, These Crashes Hardly Seem Threatening Catherine Osborne, The National Post, Saturday, May 22, 2004 Girls, it seems, just want to drive fast cars. And smash them up in a blaze of smoke and fire. Kristine Moran, whose disaster paintings depict flying cars spinning out of control, or careening into the windows of skyscrapers or exploding into turbo fireballs, have been popping up over the past year along with the Queen West strip and with lots of whispered approval. Trip Wire at Angell Gallery is her first solo. There are eight super-charged paintings in the exhibition, all easy on the eyes in a cartoon animation sort of way. But Moran's skillfully combines high-end design colouring (lifted right from the internet) as her resource for glossy enamel background shades, and thick oil painting that been smeared on expertly with the palette knife. Weirdly, there is nothing sinister about Moran's futuristic car accidents (plus one train derailment and a dent-free Lamborghini). They have a Bruce Willis action movie zip to them, and the architectural environments they cruise through are courtesy of the great futurist architecture of our time including Moshe Safdie's Habitat and Delugan Meissl's Haus Ray I. Moran's been a part-time airline stewardess for the past eight years while a student at OCAD (she graduate's this month). But she swears there no direct connection between flying the airways and car crashing other than her fascination for speed and what urban theorist Paul Virilio's has called "dromology," or the idea that science and technology evolution only happens when there's an accident that needs fixing. Strong paintings for a painter just out of art school. --CO Kristine Moran @ Sis Boom Bah (Toronto) Tyler Green's modern and contemporary art blog. Monday, March 22, 2004. If one of Cecily Brown's paintings were involved in a car crash, the kind of car crash that spun it into a Julie Mehretu-like cycle of energy, it would come to rest as a Kristine Moran painting. This is both compliment and encouragement. Moran is young, just about to be out of art school (the Ontario College of Art and Design) and she's working her way through her favorite painters, learning how to synthesize their visuals and their technique in a way that emerges as a Kristine Moran painting. She's not there yet, but a series of paintings at Toronto's Sis Boom Bah Gallery show that Moran knows what she wants a Moran painting to be and that she is on her way. Moran's paintings are about speed: both going fast and what happens when fast-moving objects suddenly stop moving. Moran represents speed by building planar, architectural landscapes and then using fast, straight lines (Mehretu!) or flat but thick application of paint to create the feel of fast. Crashes are represented by orgies of built-up, splattered, squeezed, shmooshed paint (Cecily!). These oil-and-enamel-on-panel paintings make you smile: they're easy to read and they're fun to re-read. Cecily and Mehretu aren't the only influences here. Moran's paintings read a little bit like what would happen if the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote had cars and were driving through Tron. In that way they remind me of so much recent drawing, where artists place their characters or narrative on white paper, completely devoid of context or background. (Ubiquitous and overrated Canadian Marcel Dzama's work is the best example of this.) With the exception of those Tron-like 3-D architectural spaces, Moran paints her speed scenes on bright backgrounds of a single color. I wonder if Tron, the early 80's videogame, is a subconscious influence on many artists in their upper 20's and early 30's. In Tron, the focus of the game was on the action created by the player -- early video game computing was primitive and slow and providing active backgrounds would have consumed too much computing power. (Same with Asteroids, for example. The Whitney Biennial installation by Cory Arcangel is a more simplistic and less engaging example of video game influences.) Much of the energy in Moran's paintings comes from the entertaining way in which she's mixed Cecily's brushstrokes with the flatness of cartoons and videogames. I'm looking forward to watching her grow as a painter.