Join us in celebrating the work of Durham College Fine Arts Graduate Class of 2015!

Art Lab Residency Project Description

This residency is devoted to the production of artworks belonging to a new series entitled The land of Id. Since my practice focuses mainly on drawing, the first few weeks will be spent creating large-scale oil paintings on canvas. Painting is an activity that forces me to think and react differently from drawing, therefore it will be interesting to see what this exercise will produce. Later on there will also be some experimentation with mechanical flip-book animations which will be included in the exhibition The land of Id following my residency.
Artist Statement for The land of Id

In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the Id refers to the component of our psyche responsible for our most primitive impulses and drives. It is an egocentric, all-consuming urge to satisfy our immediate needs and desires without any consideration for possible consequences or repercussions.

I feel that such theory perfectly describes our contemporary attitude toward our surroundings. Continuing my discourse on human behaviour, The land of Id focuses on humanity’s relationship with the natural environment offering two alternative yet equally interesting points of view. If on one hand it confronts us with the disastrous results of our ill-conceived rapport with nature, on the other it offers some levity and food for thought. The land of Id becomes a topsy-turvy world filled with tension and instability, where everything appears possible yet nothing is what it seems. Through symbolisms and satire, The Land of Id eventually alerts us about the dangerous effects of our exploitative behaviours.

At completion, this collection of works will contain large-scale paintings, drawings on paper and small installations.

 

Biography:

Toni Hamel holds a BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Lecce (Italy), a post-graduate Certificate in Computer Graphics from Sheridan College in Oakville (Ontario, Canada), and the Golden Key Award from the University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada) where she attended the Specialist Programme in Psychology.

After a successful career as an Interactive Media developer and University of Toronto instructor, since 2007 Hamel has focused exclusively on her art practice. Her work has been exhibited at galleries across Ontario, including Latcham Gallery (Stouffville), John B. Aird Gallery (Toronto), Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Station Gallery (Whitby) and the Art Gallery of Peterborough, and internationally at the Truman Brewery Gallery 25 in London, England, and the ExpoArte in Milan, Italy among others. Hamel is the recipient of many awards and three Ontario Arts Council grants. Her work is held in private and public collections in Canada, the US and Europe. For more information, please visit tonihamel.net

 

Plants feed people and animals, clean the air and provide homes, but due to processed foods and urban environments, most people live at a physical and psychological distance from nature. The diversity of plants is becoming endangered by genetic modification and by limited selection of seed strains. Ruth Greenlaw scrutinizes plants as complex life forms and finds subject matter to draw and paint. The life of a plant may begin from a seed, bulb, root or leaf, and change form as it grows and matures. Before it dies it has produced the means by which it can live again. Ruth’s drawings reveal the grittiness of soil-covered roots. Dormant plants covered with ice become abstract landscapes. By layering translucent papers she tells the life story of common plants from seed to withered leaves. Whether she is drawing petals withering on a stem, seeds as they drop from a plant, or roots writhing in the earth, Ruth Greenlaw makes a visual statement that plants matter.

Ruth Greenlaw

Ruth was born and grew up in rural Ontario but she has lived in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and China, as well. She earned a BA (Hon.) in Visual Art from Western University and has taken courses in art and language from UBC, Georgian College, NSCAD, BC School of Eastern Culture among others. She has taught courses in Watercolour, Chinese Art History and English as a Foreign Language in various universities and has worked as an art docent in elementary schools. Ruth has won awards in numerous juried shows and has had solo shows in St. Francis Xavier University Art Gallery, Antigonish, NS, and in the Art Gallery of Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences and the Community Gallery of Station Gallery, both in Whitby, ON. Preferred media include etching, watercolour, pastel and drawing.

The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses—behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.  – Muhammad Ali

A word from one of the most widely quoted and eloquent boxers in the history of the sport seems appropriate. For Ali, boxing was a metaphor for life: battles won and lost in the ring, belief in self, living life to its fullest. So too, the artists whose work is represented in this exhibition see boxing as metaphors for male violence, self-acceptance, and community.

When Oshawa was named host of the boxing events for the 2015 PanAm Games, it was natural for the RMG to coordinate an exhibition around the theme of boxing, a sport that is commonly referred to as The Sweet Science (a term coined by the British journalist and sportswriter Pierce Egan in the early 1800s). Boxing has attracted artists since the Mesopotamian era, and despite its brutal nature—or perhaps because of it—has inspired, by way of its dramatic movement, power, and grace, responses through literature, art and drama. In her book about the cultural history of boxing, Kasia Boddy writes about the long established concepts that accompany it, including “ideas about courage and honour, ritual and spectatorship, beauty and the grotesque.” Bill Ford, a trainer at Oshawa’s Motor City Boxing Club, and who, at 69 has been both inside the ring and ringside as a boxer or trainer for the better part of three decades, explains that boxing isn’t about fighting or hitting, but a lifestyle that allows those who train diligently to become different people.

A less than full knowledge of boxing does not prevent an appreciation of the work of those who represent it with paint, bronze, graphite, or photography. This exhibition spans over 100 years of the depiction of boxing—including boxing as a form of exercise in WWI, to cubist depictions of pugilists, a contemporary video of a boxer beating herself, and a fantasy painting of a caped boxer.

We are grateful for funding from The Department of Canadian Heritage, Museums Assistance Program in support of Boxing: The Sweet Science.

Awards:

Gold Award
Maureen Lowry, “Weathered Walls  1 & 2” (Imaginative Abstract Category)

Silver Award
Daniel Wedderburn, “Untapped” (People Category)

Bronze Award
George Marlow, “On the Ganges at Varanasi” (Landscape Category)

 

People Category
Thomas Given, “Young Lad with Bowler Hat”

Landscape Category
Peter Ronald, “Once Upon a Winter’s Day”

Wildlife Category
Thomas Given, “Cat and Dragonfly”

Still Life Category
Angela Hennessey, “September Still Life”

Derivative Abstract Category
Jacqueline Kennedy, “Interlude”

Imaginative Abstract Category
Maureen Lowry, “Weathered Walls 1 & 2”

Sculpture Category
Ilija Blanusa, “Going Fast”

Please visit oshawaartassociation.com for more information.

In 2013, the RMG invited Toronto and Prince Edward County-based collector Terri Lipman to share works by women artists from her vast collection. The exhibition, a riot of colour, form, texture, and subjects struck a chord with our audience and we were keen to revisit Terri’s eclectic and inspiring collection. This offering focusses on work by male artists.

There is a distinct difference between buying art and collecting art. Inevitably, collecting brings with it emotional responses, memories, connections. The latter is certainly the case for Terri Lipman.

Her collection was inspired by that of her parents’ and she has fond memories of her mother taking her to galleries and antique shops as a child. Thus began a passion for collecting historical art. But Lipman found that collecting the art of living artists was ultimately more fulfilling; she began to visit artists’ studios and make the links between the historic work in her collection and what she saw in contemporary practices.

Terri Lipman expresses her thoughts on the work in her collection:

There is a thread that links the old with the new. These artists have a reverence, knowledge and respect for their Canadian modernist predecessors not to mention their incredible skill and technique. They carry the torch but have a fresh approach and vision—a clear and strong sense of their place.

Meeting and forming relationships with artists led to introductions to others and their work—indeed, she credits artists as her mentors whose generosity have made her the collector that she is today.

As with the work of women artists, Lipman continues to be inspired by evidence of the “hand”—texture, form and colour. Her collection forms a continuum between the old and new as her vision continues to evolve.

Contemporary Artists:

• Jay Isaac
• Roberto Rosenman
• Adrian Williams
• David Doig
• Andreas Drenters
• Noel Middleton
• Jeffrey Harrison
• Morley Shayuk
• Eli Langer
• Simon Muscat
• Andre Ethier
• Robert Webster
• Scott Mcdermid
• Jerome Couelle
• John Anderson
• Jon Todd
• Scott Griffin

Historical Artists:

• William Ronald
• Rolph Scarlett
• Joseph Sydney Hallam
• Gordon Mckinnley Webber
• Ants Vomm
• Bertram Brooker
• Paavo Airola
• Louis Archambault
• William John Bertram Newcombe
• Armand Flint
• Sydney Hollinger Watson
• Frederick Horseman Varley
• Fritz Brandtner
• Norman Elder
• Phillip Surrey
• Barker Fairley
• Thomas Garland Greene
• Roger-Francois Thepot
• Hart Massey
• Dik Zander
• International Historical Artists:
• Man Ray
• Marcel Duchamp
• Ben Nicholson
• James Thurber
• Lucien Weill

Governor General’s award-winning artist David Rokeby has been at the forefront of interactive media art for over two decades. Throughout that time, his piece Very Nervous System (1986-2004) has been central to the development of his remarkable interdisciplinary creative practice.

First developed in the mid 1980s, when interactive art, sound art, and computer-based art were in their infancy, Very Nervous System uses video surveillance technology, synthesizers, a sound system, computers, and image-processing software designed by Rokeby to translate movement into music and/or sound. This section of the gallery may appear to be empty, but as you move through the space, your movements are monitored by a ceiling-mounted video camera. The video signal is routed to a hidden computer where the image processor converts your movements into sounds that are played back into the space through the sound system, creating a biofeedback loop between your body and the machine.

Through an intuitive process of improvisation, kinetic experimentation and creative play, you can use your body to sculpt the sound, opening a critical space to reflect on the inherent tensions and contradictions between the extreme logic of the computer binary code that underpins the piece and the intuitive, improvisatory gestures that activate it. The piece also inverts the traditional relationship between movement/dance and sound/music: instead of the body responding to music, the movements of the body actually produce the sounds and orchestrate the piece. The work thus functions as what Rokeby has called a “transforming mirror,” both reflecting and refracting our actions in space and time as well as our embodied sense of self.

Very Nervous System has undergone several transformations over its twenty-five year history. Advances in video technology and image processing capabilities have made the work much more sensitive. Where earlier versions of the work responded best to large, dramatic gestures, the current version presented here responds to minute movements, creating a heightened sense of intimacy between the viewer and the work. The sonic dimension of the piece has changed too. In its early incarnations, the sound was more traditionally musical in nature, using different synthesizer patches to allude to a variety of musical traditions.

In recent years, these explicitly musical sounds have been largely replaced by more intimate sounds that do not signify particular musical or cultural traditions to the same extent – the sound of paper crinkling or the unrolling of duct tape, for example. Many of these sounds have a decidedly tactile quality, further complicating the interplay of gestural discourses involved in the work and further heightening the intimacy of the experience. You are encouraged to search for hidden sounds within the space, exploring the tactile, sculptural qualities of the sound.

 

A puppet is defined as an inanimate figure whose physical acts are controlled by another. Puppets are used to entertain, educate, instill social values or be politically subversive. Ancient civilizations were crafting figures with moveable parts four to five thousand years ago in the Indus Valley and Egypt and the earliest recorded puppet performance was held some 600 years before Tutankhamen. In Canada, long before the arrival of Europeans, Aboriginal cultures were using figures in ritual presentations. The Haida, Kw akw ak’aw akw and the Tsimshian cultures on the West Coast produced particularly complex articulated figures for ceremonial and entertainment purposes. Although in contemporary culture puppets are often associated with their makers/masters: most famously, Edgar Bergen, Jim Hanson and Ronnie Burkett this exhibition takes as its focus the actual puppet and the messages it delivers. Various contemporary artists whose work with puppets deal with themes of fear/manipulation/irony/humour/good and evil are featured in Puppet Act: Manipulating the Voice. The work included ranges from performative, installation, painting, sculpture, and photography.

Known to instill delight in children, puppets can also impart fear and anxiety in adults and many of the works in this exhibition leave the viewer in a state of unease. In fact, there are words for this particular form of distress: Automatonophobia, “the fear of anything that falsely represents a sentient being”, or Pupaphobia, “the fear of puppets.”

Historic Marionettes from the Peterborough Puppet Guild set the stage, and actual ventriloquist dummies are also shown in Spring Hurlbut’s work, while those of Catherine Heard and Diana Lopez Soto veer towards the subversive. A drawing by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun speaks to cultural and environmental degradation, while Tim Whiten addresses states of reality in his glass sculpture. Suzy Lake’s photographs are documents to a performance where she became the manipulated being with all of its levels of social and feminist meaning.

Taken together, the work in this exhibition strives through the inanimate, to ignite discussions that help reflect who we, the animate, are.

Read the Publication!

Lora Moore-Kakaletris’ haunting photograph Andreas was chosen as the 2014 recipient of the CIBC Wood Gundy Emerging Photography Award for Best Overall Submission during the RMG’s annual fundraiser, RMG Exposed. The black and white photograph shows a boy either reaching up or shielding himself from something above. The subject is centered in what may or may not be water; the dark, aqueous substance adds to the images’ evocative nature. The purpose of the Emerging Photography Award is to raise awareness of contemporary photographers and each year an exhibition is held during the month of May to link with the Scotiabank CONTACT Photographic Festival.

Drawn to water for its calming qualities and inspired by the mystery and momentary escape from reality that submerging oneself in water allows, Lora Moore-Kakaletris’ Water series began in her backyard pool. Her first underwater image was taken with her camera wrapped in a ziplock bag. It is during the quiet times submerged under water and momentarily hidden from the chaos and noise of family life, that figures and shapes begin to appear to Moore-Kakaletris. Often photographing children at play, layers of reality previously hidden from sight come to life, creating feelings of familiarity and comfort. These black and white images are intended to offer the viewer a glimpse into the realities and fragments of life often hidden from view below the surface. Yet they also reference the past: it is not difficult to imagine Shakespeare’s Ophelia in works such as Zoe, Chiara orKiana. Indeed, the inherent drama in the works is intentional as Moore-Kakaletris makes use of black and white photography in order to eliminate possible background distractions forcing the viewer to concentrate on the subjects.

Oakville resident, Lora Moore-Kakaletris has won numerous awards for her photography including winning images for the Oakville Camera Club, the CPS Juried Photography exhibition, and the National Association of Professional Child Photographers. Water is her first solo exhibition.