Author: artoronto

October 27 ­– November 26, 2011
Artist talks: Thursday, October 27, 6-7 pm
Opening: Thursday, October 27, 7-9 pm
Open Studio Gallery
George Gilmour Members Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 104
Toronto ON,  M5V 3A8
T/F: 416-504-8238
E-mail: sara@openstudio.on.ca
W: http://www.openstudio.on.ca

2010-11 Scholarship/Fellowship Exhibitions

Each year, Open Studio awards three scholarships/fellowships,
providing artists working in print media with both professional support and
access to studio facilities to create new work during a one-year period. All
three artists will give illustrated talks about their work and the progress
of their projects over the year on Thursday, October 27 at 6 pm at Open
Studio, followed by an opening reception. As London, ON-based artist, writer and academic Patrick Mahon points out the common thread between these three exhibitions is that all three artists are engaged in complex practices of making art generated in response to living/thinking experiences, which ultimately point to the artists themselves.

Derived from true stories documenting recent encounters with lightning, Tara Cooper’s “Weather Girls Field Guide to Lightning” (Open Studio Gallery) depicts a myriad of subject matter from meteorological equipment, weather patterns and cloud formations to the quotidian ‹ a light bulb, a metal chair, a bottle of Jack Daniels and a lottery ticket.

Combining print with film and sculpture, the exhibition conflates the impersonal language of the statistic with the impact of the personal experience, a place where both the weather and the viewer share the role of witness, impartial bystanders to the events of everyday.

Open Studio thanks The Catherine and Maxwell Meighen Foundation and the
Donald O¹Born Family for their kind support of the 2010-11
Scholarship/Fellowship Program

October 27 ­– November 26, 2011
Artist talks: Thursday, October 27, 6-7 pm
Opening: Thursday, October 27, 7-9 pm
Open Studio Gallery
George Gilmour Members Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 104
Toronto ON,  M5V 3A8
T/F: 416-504-8238
E-mail: sara@openstudio.on.ca
W: http://www.openstudio.on.ca

2010-11 Scholarship/Fellowship Exhibitions

Each year, Open Studio awards three scholarships/fellowships,
providing artists working in print media with both professional support and
access to studio facilities to create new work during a one-year period. All
three artists will give illustrated talks about their work and the progress
of their projects over the year on Thursday, October 27 at 6 pm at Open
Studio, followed by an opening reception. As London, ON-based artist, writer and academic Patrick Mahon points out the common thread between these three exhibitions is that all three artists are engaged in complex practices of making art generated in response to living/thinking experiences, which ultimately point to the artists themselves.

Flora Shum’s “RLPA2011THF”, an acronym for The Rules of Life ­ Project A: To Have Face, 2011 (George Gilmour Members Gallery), explores identity and the need to save face and conceal personal weakness. The work reflects the artist’s compulsion to dissect and analyze identity. While science allows us to split something open and magnify it to find answers which are understood as facts, in matters of identity, we are left to explore the confusion of boundaries we are given, the expectations of others and of oneself, the scramble to always advance and the desperation of finding a sense of belonging.

This series of etchings explores the possibilities, blurring the boundaries, creating new bodies, new bones, new organs, new tissues, new cells, inserting information into nuclei.  The idea is to create, alter, clone and construct new super-cyborgs ‹ technology fixing what technology created.

Open Studio thanks The Catherine and Maxwell Meighen Foundation and the
Donald O¹Born Family for their kind support of the 2010-11
Scholarship/Fellowship Program.

October 27 ­ – November 26, 2011
Artist talks: Thursday, October 27, 6-7 pm
Opening: Thursday, October 27, 7-9 pm
Open Studio Gallery Print Sales Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 104
Toronto ON,  M5V 3A8
T/F: 416-504-8238
E-mail: sara@openstudio.on.ca
W: http://www.openstudio.on.ca

2010-11 Scholarship/Fellowship Exhibitions

Each year, Open Studio awards three scholarships/fellowships,
providing artists working in print media with both professional support and
access to studio facilities to create new work during a one-year period. All
three artists will give illustrated talks about their work and the progress
of their projects over the year on Thursday, October 27 at 6 pm at Open
Studio, followed by an opening reception. As London, ON-based artist, writer and academic Patrick Mahon points out the common thread between these three exhibitions is that all three artists are engaged in complex practices of making art generated in response to living/thinking experiences, which ultimately point to the artists themselves.

Lauren Nurse’s “There’s always room on the broom” (Print Sales Gallery)
synthesizes the artist’s interests in the modern separation and opposition
between culture and nature, and in locating the mythological/uncanny in
evocations of the  wild. Cultural perceptions of nature have always held a
certain amount of anxiety, and have spawned numerous myths, legends and
fables. These narratives expose culture’s uneasy relationship with the
natural world.  In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, Nurse considers the mythic as a symbolic expression of the cultural unease that pervades a society and shapes its collective behavior. Her work has revolved around the idea of collisions between nature and culture passing comment on some of the ways in which we see nature as existing outside of culture and society, yet simultaneously influencing the ways in which we live.

Open Studio thanks The Catherine and Maxwell Meighen Foundation and the
Donald O¹Born Family for their kind support of the 2010-11
Scholarship/Fellowship Program.

Open Studio gratefully acknowledges the support of The City of Toronto
through the Toronto Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council. Open Studio also acknowledges the generous support ofits members and numerous foundations, corporations and individuals.

November 1 – 13, 2011  
Opening:Friday, November 4, 7-9pm 
COBALT GALLERY 
870 A Kingston Rd
Toronto, ON
T: 416-568-2477
cobaltgallery@sympatico.ca  
 Hours: Wed – Sat 11 -6 pm.

Brent Boechler, Mirror

November 5 -19, 2011
Opening: Saturday, November 5, 2-4 pm
BAU-XI GALLERY
340 Dundas St. West
Toronto, Ontario M5T 1G5
T: 416.977.0600
E: toronto@bau-xi.com
www.bau-xiphoto.com

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to be holding a two-artist exhibition, which will feature new work from abstract painter Brent Boechler, and sculptor Paul Vexler.

Vexler’s delicate knotted wood sculptures have evolved from his understanding of geometry in the natural world, and his technical practice as a woodworker.

Boechler creates luminescent paintings using layers of colour on wood panels. His work aims to free the eye from its continual attempt to recognize, and acts as an invitation to allow an unobstructed gaze.

Both artists skillfully exemplify structural beauty, abstract forms, and restrained elegance in their respective media.

Rita Letendre, ‘Adieu Sésame’, 1955, oil on board, 24″ × 32″

October 15 – November 4, 2011
Opening: Saturday, October 15, 10-6 pm
GALLERY GEVIK
12 Hazelton Ave
Toronto, ON M5R 2E2
T: 416.968.0901
Hours: Tues – Sat 10-6
E-mail: info@gevik.com
www.gevik.com

The exhibition is a collection of artworks by French Canadian artists.

Featuring works by:

Paul Vanier Beaulieu,

Léon Bellefleur,

Pierre Gauvreau,

Jéan-Paul Jérôme,

Henry Wanton-Jones,

Rita Letendre, 

Serge Lemoyne.

October 31 – November 6, 2011
Opening: Thursday, November 3, 6 – 9pm
Artscape Triangle Gallery
38 Abell st, Toronto
(just south of Queen Street West)
Hours: Mon- Sun 11 – 6 pm

 Artists:
Michelle Haines
Corrie Jackson
Amy Jenine
Katika Marczell
Jenny Pham
Cailleah Scott-Grimes
Vjosana Shkurti
Polina Teif

re:encounter surveys the abyss of time’s passing and how the complete is never resolved. The group exhibition investigates impermanence through the potential found in revisiting finished ideas, in writing alternative narratives and in furnishing a place for the past. The temporality in each artist’s work underlines a need to mark the transitory or more importantly to mark one’s presence. We challenge perceptions of the past, allow viewers to influence and retell, play with the tension between deception and actuality, fiction and fact, and harness ghostly bodies that once existed, exist momentarily or never existed at all.

October 28 – November 27, 2011
Opening October 27, 6 -9 pm
PENTIMENTO FINE ART GALLERY
1164 Queen Street East
Toronto, Ontario M4M 1L4
T: 416-406-6772
Email: rockinrolland@sympatico.ca
Hours: Wed – Sunday 12 – 6  pm

The new series entitled “Colossus” is based around the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the oil on canvas images are all portraits of women.  As Troy states, “I am a painter of women’s stories and each painting in this series is a character that surfaces for me in the lines of her poetry.  Each is a distinctly different character, but the through-line is that these are all women who have built a passionate choreography out of dancing with their demons.  Another interesting element of these characters is the conflict of identity.  They are the persona of a delicate young blonde woman in simple settings but wrestling with a savage intellect riddled with complex dark ruminations at a time when young women were supposed to be demure and uncomplicated.  They are at once expanding and in the process of imploding.”

In an August 2010 review, R.M. Vaughan of The Globe and Mail stated that “Troy Brooks’s gender-questionable, powdery oil paintings of pin-thin (and pinch-faced) “ladies”, are malicious matrons who appear to have walked out of an Edward Gorey illustration after raiding Johnny Depp’s Alice in Wonderland costume rack.”

Troy Brooks inspiration may be the writing of Sylvia Path but his talent lies in the way he is able to work the fine details using watercolour brushes within the oil on canvas.

Boys’ Change Room Nelson High School

November 5-19, 2011
Opening: Saturday, November 5, 2-4 pm
BAU-XI PHOTO
324 Dundas St. West
Toronto, Ontario M5T 1G5
T: 416.977.0400
E: info@bau-xiphoto.com
www.bau-xiphoto.com
Hours: Mon-Sat 10-5:30, Sun 11-5:30

Born in Grimsby, Chris Shepherd started off his artistic career as a painter, and turned to photography as a means to familiarize himself with Toronto, a city he initially felt very separate from. It was this process of exploration that piqued Shepherd’s interest in urban landscapes and led to a long-running fascination with the often passed-over or under-appreciated tableaus of metropolitan life. The serenity and reserved nature of Shepherds photographs are a sharp juxtaposition with the locations they are depicting. Shepherd captures fleeting moments in time, whether a brief moment of tranquility in the perpetual cycle of arrivals and departures on the Toronto Subway system, or the period of time between tenants in commercial buildings. 

In his new series, Shepherd has turned his lens on the school system, showing gyms, classrooms, lockers and science labs, many of which have not changed in appearance for generations.

Mondo Cane Kama Sutra (installation view) 1984, acrylic on canvas. 10 canvases, 245 x 305 cm each. Image courtesy the Estate of General Idea; © Pierre Antoine, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC, 2011.

ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO
July 30, 2011–January 1, 2012

“Haute Culture” is a preeminent opus of the collective General Idea that features approximately 300 pieces of artwork, consisting of paintings, magazines, sculptures and video.  Being an extremely unconventional trio, General Idea’s artwork reflects this by the materials and sometimes colours used which often vary from loud neon shades to whites and blues all intricately corresponding to various themes presented.

One piece that highly stands out, however, is the Mondo Cane Kama Sutra, 1984. This features a running theme of three poodles each on ten panels, carrying out various sexual positions. What makes this piece so remarkable is the neon colour of the poodles presented on the canvases and the scale of the panels, creating a gigantic eye-capturing façade. The fact that this artwork brings out a taboo in human society, homosexuality, makes the artwork all the more appealing in light of its daring attempt to depict an often misunderstood subject. The lines used in this piece are undoubtedly straight and perhaps unyielding and this may be a subtle allusion to the rigidness and ‘straightness’ of society in the 1980’s  juxtaposing the general theme of the artwork.

Haafiz Karim