Author: artoronto

Village

June 20 – July 14, 2012
Opening:  Friday, June 29, 6 – 9 p.m.
THE RED HEAD GALLERY
401 Richmond St. W., Suite 115
Toronto, ON, M5V 3A8
T:  416.504.5654
E: art@redheadgallery.org
www.redheadgallery.org
Hours: Wed–Sat 12–5 p.m

The Red Head Gallery presents Margie Kelk’s exhibition Nowhereness, a mixed media installation.  Margie Kelk’s current work is concerned with issues of pain, rootlessness, and alienation, in relation to online and offline social networking sites. Her ceramic heads – their faces distorted, filled with despair and sometimes hope – are placed among models of disassembled computer components; they become components themselves, victimized or in control. The dialog that emerges veers between ‘real,’ physical, and virtual ontologies; the pieces becomes sites of meditation. On one hand, for example, the elderly are swept aside in society’s continuing abandonment of individuals deemed useless; on the other, the elderly may be empowered by social networking. We’re living in a time of high-speed cultural change; Kelk’s work asks us to slow down and see what damage we may have caused, what promises may yet be fulfilled.  (Alan Sondheim)

Margie Kelk has been exhibiting her artwork in Canada since 2000. She was on the Board of the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts (Toronto, Ontario) for eight years, and was Chair for six of them. Since 2009 she has been an active member of The Red Head Gallery (Toronto), and she is now gallery Chair. Her China-based books and drawings were represented by the Headbones Gallery in 2006-7, and she was a member of Gallery 1313 in Toronto, from 2003 until 2007. She has been showing in Canada, the United States and Europe. She has received prizes for several of her works, and has been awarded grants by the Ontario Arts Council. Margie is a graduate of Wellesley College, The Johns Hopkins University (PhD.), and the Toronto School of Art degree program.

June 9, 2012
One-Day event: Saturday, June 9, 12-5 p.m.
WITHROW CLUBHOUSE GALLERY
725 Logan Ave.
Toronto, ON
M4K 3C6
T: 416-466-9829
E: central_connection@yahoo.ca

One-day group show featuring works by 16 artists from this longstanding collective. Brought together through weekly studio sessions painting from live models, members bring a wide range of backgrounds and interests to figure, landscape, still life and abstract themes.

Exhibiting artists include: Michael Warren-Darley, Marion Wilson,  L.E. Wakelin, Jenny Reid, Chris Phibbs, Masood Omer ,Rowena Moyes, Jude Marion, Nora MacPhail, Elizabeth MacInnis, Katherine Lipson, Jungle Ling, Irene Flint, Petro Dhimitry,  Dorothy Clayton, and John Bellinger.

Full information about the artists and examples of their work can be seen at www.centralconnection.ca.

June 2 – 29, 2012
Opening: Saturday, June 9, 2:30 – 4:30 p.m.
NORTH YORK CENTRAL LIBRARY
5120 Yonge Street,
Toronto, ON, M2N 5N9
T: 416-395-5535
E: lbriskin@yorku.ca
Hours: Mon-Fri 9-8:3o, Sat 9-5:00, Sun 1:30-5 p.m.

Found Image/Constructed Image: An Exhibit of Photographs

This exhibit highlights the difference between the found image such as the series Foot Prints and the constructed image. In Swamp Lilies, the play with colour creates an imagined landscape. In Ode to Julia Margaret Cameron, the juxtaposition of objects and reflections points to multi-layered realities.

Swamp Lilies: The series Swamp Lilies presents impressions of the swamps that line Ontario’s Highway 518. It offers a somewhat irreverent contemporization of Monet’s Water Lilies. The play with imagined colours is a reminder that the landscape is invented through our gaze.

Foot Prints: Not unlike portraits of faces, portraits of feet — Foot Prints —illuminate life histories, as do the shoes chosen for them. Feet captured in stillness or in movement reveal personalities, idiosyncrasies and emotional tapestries. They capture contemplations, conversations, and journeys, and are rich with suggestive narratives.

Ode to Julia Margaret Cameron: This series is based on a contemporary and layered reading of a 19th photograph “Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty” taken by Cameron in 1866. These photographs highlight the ambiguity in what we choose to see and underscore the intricacy and complexity of the everyday.

For more information, please visit http://www.yorku.ca/lbriskin/gallery/index.html.

June 7 – July 22, 2012
Opening: Saturday,  June 9,  4 – 8 p.m.
ROBERT KANANAJ GALLERY
1267 Bloor St. W.
Toronto, ON, M6H 1N7
T: 416.289.8855
E: info@robertkananajgallery.com
www.robertkananajgallery.com
Hours: Tues–Sat 11–6 p.m.

Clara Bacou
David Van Drunen
Matthew Green
Robert Kananaj
Szonja Vucsetics

This exciting collection of work by these artists of Robert Kananaj Gallery explores subject
matter that ranges from mortality, to the natural and the fantastical, to life and experience as
contemplation of wonder “in or out the box.”
Clara Bacou combines the innocence of the animal form, often with urgent and psychedelic
colours; a fusion of the natural and artificial that reflects the source of inspiration: the urban
buzz of Camden Town, London. David Van Drunen explores faith and confronts fears of
death with abstract narratives. Robert Kananaj and Matthew Green, in collaboration,
present an installation of mathematical and constructional complexity. Szonja Vucsetics’s
work is evocative of an overlapping of fantasy and reality, which provides a self-reflexive
experience of human life.

Dennis Duncan is a photo based conceptual artist, in which the foundation of his artwork stems from the pursuit of not what it is but what it can be.

“As an artist coming from a theatrical background my photography is rooted in illusion. My images are of a transparent world that reflects and interprets a hidden environment that becomes projected as reality. As in advertising the ordinary becomes extra ordinary. Reality transformed to hyper reality.” Dennis Duncan

Dennis Duncan
ATOMIC 1
Digital Print on Dibond
27 x 36 inches
$800

Val Sears is a Toronto based artist born in Oshawa Ontario. She is a resent graduate of OCAD with a Drawing and Painting major.

“I began painting at a young age since my mom was constantly painting away on the kitchen table. I have worked in various  mediums but am currently working towards a another series of paintings as I approach upcoming shows in the summer and fall.

My work is often involving the transitory landscape depicting everyday landmarks as they change or remain a constant. Landmarks are vital to our sense of place, our identity, and how we navigate our known environment. I develop my paintings through both memory and analog photo referencing.”  Val Sears

Val Sears
Old Empty Structure, 2012
oil on woden panel
16 x 20 inches
$600. Auction starts at $300

 Val Sears
Old Empty Structure in Passing, 2012
oil on woden panel
16 x 20 inches
$600. Auction starts at $300

“The photography explores the aesthetic quality of time-altered structures, now just mere fragments of what they once were.  Elements of time and weather have claimed these structures, eventually making them one of their own. In other pictures, it’s the apparatus that lies within these post-industrial structures. It directs our attention to not what’s there but what lies beneath, to the beyond and the eventual affect of aftermath.

These chosen sites evoke beauty in the spoilt, destruct, and vanishing – a composite of familiar environments we inhabit, the predilections and artifacts that physically and mentally occupy us.” Rosemary Beach

Rosemary Beach has participated in solo exhibitions and various group shows including CONTACT. Rosemary is an active member of Gallery 44. She is also a founding member of the Queen East Photography Collective (QEPC).  She holds a certificate in Still Photography Studies from Ryerson University.

Rosemary Beach
R.L. Hearn Power Generating Station, Toronto Portlands #1,
Photography
15 1/2 x 20 inches
unframed $400

Rosemary Beach
R.L. Hearn Power Generating Station, Toronto Portlands #2
Photography
20 X 13 inches
unframed $450

Rosemary Beach
R.C. Filtration Plant, Toronto East Beach
Photography printed on Artpaper
20 X 13 inches
unframed $450

Originally from Montreal, Blair has lived in Ottawa since 1973. He has held numerous solo exhibitions, mainly in Ottawa and Toronto, including a major mid-career survey at the Ottawa Art Gallery in 1989 and has been included in group shows across Canada and abroad. His most recent solo exhibition was On Some Faraway Beach at Toronto’s Fran Hill Gallery in 2010.

“Painting is a process of sustained improvisation—one thing leads to another. My work comes about as a result of a sensation, a gesture, an inkling, a partial concept, or whatever…and spontaneously and naturally expands from there.”  Blair Sharpe

Blair Sharpe
Beach Variation 4, 2011
watercolour & ink on handmade paper
6 1/4  x 8 1/4 inches
framed $500. Auctions starts at $400 (1 bid)

June 5 – June 24, 2012
Opening: Thursday, June 7, 7 – 9 p.m.
HANGMAN ART GALLERY
756 Queen Street East (east of Broadview Avenue)
Toronto, ON M4M 1H4
T:416-465-0302
E:hangmangallery@gmail.com
Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 12 – 5 p.m.

Hangman Art Gallery is proud to announce the Confessions Of A…, an art show exploring the meaning of diversity and pride through an individuals secret urges, fetishes and peculiarities.

This group of artists is a lightning rod to a public’s hidden thoughts and by expressing with their artistic bent, they stir the recesses in our minds to unlock the remote, secluded or secret place that is beneath the surface in all of us.

The need in seeing this show is to face your fears and learn more about one’s self.

June 7 – July 13, 2012
Opening: June 7, 6:30 p.m.
CANADIAN SCULPTURE CENTRE
500 Church Street
Toronto, ON M4Y 2C8
T: 647-435-5858
E: gallery@cansculpt.org
Hours: Tue–Fri 1 2– 6; Sat 11 – 4 p.m.

The Sculptors Society of Canada / Canadian Sculpture Centre cordially invite you to Opening Reception followed by Awards Presentation June 7, 6:30 p.m.

Jurors: Powell MacDougall,
Director, PM Gallery Ron Shuebrook,
Artist/Educator Edward Falkenberg,
Sculptor, RCA,OSA,SSC

Selected the following participants:
Cheryl Bender, Fanshawe College, London ON
Nicholas Crombach, OCADU, Toronto
Jeff Devine, OCADU
Marta Franco, OCADU
Elizabeth Hewson, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops BC
Marilena Isacescu, TAC, Central Technical School, Toronto
Hannah Johnson, Lakehead U, Thunderbay, ON
Alina Kalmina, OCADU
Kim Stanford, Toronto School of Art Nurielle Stern, Sheridan College

The Sculpture Society of Canada is a non-profit artist-run organization founded in 1928. Adhering to its educational mandate, the SSC continues to support and present young (BA/BFA/Certificate/Diploma) sculpture graduates and emerging sculptors annually.

The juried student show takes place in June; and the juried emerging sculptors show takes place in August of each year. Both have taken place since the SSC acquired an exhibition venue in the mid 90s.

For your reference – the Canadian Sculpture Centre is the only gallery in Canada dedicated to showcasing Canadian sculpture/sculptors. (It’s hard to believe but this is the only “sculpture gallery” in Canada!)