Highlights from March 2009 - August 2010

It has been a long while since we have updated.

This post will contain the highlights from exhibitions from March 2009 – September 22^nd 2010

Barbara Astma, Wonderland Series

September 9 2009 - February 13 2010

There are endless possibilities for narratives within found objects. Astman is fascinated with postcards acting as syntheses between personal memories and a constructed reality. In “On Photography,” Susan Sontag speaks of motives of collecting images from which stories flourish: “To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movie and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store”. Postcards represent a quintessential moment where photography becomes object.

Using digital techniques to position the postcards within negative space, Astman captures the feeling of flipping through stacks; harnessing a tension between motion and stillness. The body of work is about the relationship between the real and the artificial, and how experience can occur through artificial representation of the real.

The idea of collecting is significant, as a collection is a form of record in one’s life. As a child, postcards and encyclopedias made Astman realize there was a larger world outside of her neighborhood. She would stare at the postcard long enough to imagine herself being there, preferring the postcard version of reality. Astman is most interested in the postcards that represent a naive world void of worldly problems.

Pre-digital postcards present an intersection of photography, printmaking, drawing and painting with their heavily re-worked and refined imagery. Photographing these postcards re-enforces the multitude of reproductions that make up popular culture, and the complex and involved relationship contemporary culture has with the past.

Françoise Sullivan -
New Works, Song Series

April 21 2010 - August 10 2010

Mark-making is one of the most essential and elemental acts that an artist may do. The act of making the mark, in Françoise Sullivan’s hand, translates into works that are rich in the poetic gesture and rhythms that are an indispensable part of her vocabulary, regardless of the medium. Her repetitive marks read as the rhythm of breathing, like the trace of a heartbeat across a page, or footsteps across a landscape. In the 1940s, Sullivan was a founding member of the group of artists known as “les Automatistes”. This group consisted of artists from many disciplines: painting, dancing, theatre and set design, poetry, and so on. United by their interest in automatism, the “Automatistes”, far from being a little band of innovators from Québec, had a profound impact on the socio-cultural fabric of Canada, fundamentally shaping who we are now as Canadians.

Globe and Mail Review: David Urban

Untitled 3, 2009

"In instructive contrast to Tim Lee's presentation of himself for delectation, is this charming exhibition of new works on paper by Toronto-based painter David Urban.

Urban is one of those artists in love with painting.  These new paintings are small-format works that consist of numerous variations upon the subject of a four-sided, frame-like shape in juxtaposition to a pink or cream-coloured sphere (with one black spot in it, which lends it an inescapable eye-like feeling).

The frame and the "eyeball" float in a softly spray-painted oval (spray painting is, I think, new for Urban) and the rhapsodic colours of these three items (frame, eyeball, oval) jangled together makes for something akin to a spring bouquet in picture form.  Urban's sources are obviously and openly there in the paintings (Philip Guston, perhaps, and, more particularly, Hans Hofmann) and they are unashamedly old-fashioned in feeling.  Old-fashioned but delightful.  And curiously satisfying, now that they are off the cutting edge and closer to history."

-- Dault, Gary Michael.  "A Random Coupling of Poetry and Physics." The Globe and Mail.  18 Apr. 2009: R15.  

Iain Baxter& and Interviews

To coincide with Iain Baxter&'s exhibition of new works, and, at the Corkin Gallery, MAG has featured Iain on the cover of the November issue, with a feature article by editor Monika Burman. Pick it up for free at galleries around Toronto.

Listen to Iain Baxter& discuss his new projects, as well as his early conceptual work, with MAG's Julie Glick here: http://www.massartguide.com/audio/200811_iain_baxter_toronto_on.php

Ryoko Suzuki and Marc Séguin reviewed in current issue of BORDER CROSSINGS

...Suzuki cleverly turns a Japanese pop culture practice on its head and provides an interesting avenue into understanding the notion of manufactured desire in contemporary Japan. -- Carla Harms

Séguin's figuration broaches abstraction the way Jean-Paul Riopelle's abstraction always broached figuration ... Séguin paints the figure, but invokes and evokes registers of meaning that lie below, above or beyond the ground plane of representation. -- James D. Campbell

Iain Baxter&.update.

Iain Baxter& has exhibited several new projects this summer in a number of exhibitions, including two European biennales, the Fifth TECOMAH Art Biennale in Jouy-en-Josas, France and Les Ateliers de Rennes, Biennale d'art Contemporain in Rennes, France. At TECOMAH, a biennale that focuses on environmental issues, Baxter& was one of 10 international artists invited to create a site-specific piece in an outdoor park. Baxter&'s piece was a large ampersand, tilted on its side and camoflauged with grass. Read about it here: http://www.tecomah.fr/les-environnementales/les-artistes.asp

For Les Ateliers de Rennes, Baxter& worked with local school children and commercial sandwich company Daunat to create a series of installations based on the humble sandwich. The project, titled &WICHTIME, resulted in a humourous series of works that deconstruct the sandwich and re-insert it into unusual contexts. The sandwich becomes anything: a landscape, a bedroom, a piece of sports equipment, shoes. Find out more here: http://www.lesateliersderennes.fr/site/expositions_artistes.php?id=53&id_lieu=7&id_langue=2&PHPSESSID=216ff5fb3f042a64401a3f3342374013

Baxter& and the N.E. Thing Co., are the subject of a recent video discussion by Crown Point Press director Kathan Brown. In casual conversation with the viewer she discusses how artists often act as precursors to pop culture trends, even if the trends appear decades later. You can watch it here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8196280233303142094&hl=en

Baxter&'s exhibition Passing Through continues to tour museums and art galleries throughout Canada with a recent stop at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon. Passing Through contains early photographs and lightboxes from 1958 through to 1983. Revealing Baxter&'s ongoing interest in the everyday, these photographs also act as a unique document of North American culture in the last half of the 20th century.

For more information on Iain Baxter& please visit http://www.corkingallery.com/

Globe and Mail Review: Thaddeus Holownia

Now Magazine's Must see: Ryoko Suzuki