For a number of years, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery has been proudly working with the Oshawa Senior Citizen Centre and Oshawa Public Libraries to present the Annual Seniors Juried Exhibition.
This year’s theme, “My Oshawa”, is intended to showcase artists’ newest work, touching on unique perspectives, memories and reflections on this city and its inhabitants.
The three winners:
Ken Norris, Bronze
Marion Beharrell, Silver
Angela Hennessey, Gold
This father/son exhibition features two generations of artists and juxtaposes traditional and digital painting. Oshawa painter Joseph Catalano explores the Canadian landscape through colour and form, filtered through a Modernist lens. His son, Matthew Catalano, works exclusively in digital mediums using a tablet and stylus. He takes a purely abstract approach utilizing a series of symbols and motifs.
Arbor Nimbus translates in Latin to “tree cloud”. The tree represents the landscape grounded in tradition and individuality, while the cloud symbolizes atmosphere and continuum. The work by these two artists intends to compliment and challenge each other while expanding and challenging the very notion of painting.
In partnership with the Motor City Boxing Club, the RMG has invited regional artists to produce new works inspired by the sport of boxing. Selected artists were invited to visit the Motor City Boxing Club (Oshawa), observe athletes in training, work in situ at the club and produce new work based on their observations.
It was an accidental visit to the Venice Biennial in 2001 that stirred Karolina Baker to make art. She studied sculpture, time based media and modern art at York University and holds a bachelor degree in Canadian Studies and Political Science from Carleton University. Karolina is an interdisciplinary artist who works in various media: installation, photography, printmaking, video, and written word. Karolina is thrilled to uncover patterns and minuscule experiences and elevate them to noticeability. Karolina is motivated by artists Janet Cardiff, Douglas Coupland and Vera Frenkel.
Dani Crosby Illustrator, Fine Artist, and Art Instructor. With a body of work ranging from observational studies to imagined interpretive conceptual projects Dani works to capture personality and develop thoughtful narratives in her diverse fine art work. As an Illustrator Dani brings a highly organized, consistent, and punctual working style to her clients. Her goal is to visually captivate and emotionally involve her audience. Dani’s main areas of focus as a visual artist have been: fine art, editorial, art for albums, merchandise, images for web and devices, posters, logos and icons.
Dani is always looking forward to exploring new subject matter, experiencing with new media, challenging concepts, meeting new clients, nurturing on-going professional relationships, taking on new commissions, and creative adventures in general. Graduate of the Sheridan College BA Illustration Program, Dani believes visual art is powerful enough to change anything from a person’s perception of a brand to a person’s perception of the world at large.
Joaquin Manay is an emerging artist/beatboxer/performer, having graduated in April of 2013 from the Honours Visual Arts Program at Brock University. Manay moved from Uruguay to Canada in 2003. Manay’s paintings continually draw from remembrances of thought and emotion to evoke uneasy feelings in his audience. The artist draws inspiration from his constant surroundings, illustrations and master paintings – especially expressionist and surrealist works. Manay creates subtleties with his imagery that allow for works to relate to one another on formal and conceptual levels. He has worked as an Artist/Instructor with organizations such as The Station Gallery, Unity Charity, Turn-Around-Project and the Art Gallery of Ontario. He currently lives Oshawa.
Philip Nuttall is a young artist from Whitby, Ontario. He studied Sculpture at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and has worked in various aspects with his art, including local theatre and magic. He works with various mediums in both painting and sculpture, and is a member of the Kingsway Boxing Club.
Home To Home is an exhibition which is the result of two, day-long art-making workshops for New Canadians led by Durham College Fine Arts students in partnership with the RMG and Community Development Council of Durham. The over-aching theme of this project is the experience of migration, and how people in Durham Region have recently migrated to the area. The goal for the project was to explore how art can be a catalyst for a more welcoming and inclusive Durham.
During these art-making sessions participants created three main components which will make up the work in the exhibition.
Participants were invited to create a 3-d representation of what “home” means to them. Using blank white houses (Milk cartons) participants filled the space with imagery from their original home, some representing their actual house, while others explored the scenery and symbolism. For display, these homes will be assembled into an installation, where the homes will be displayed in large open suitcases.
A second component was a personal mapping activity where participants would draw on a map, each stop of their journey to Durham Region. These maps explore the complex and often long experience of migration and immigration. These maps will be assembled into one large collective map in the exhibition, complete with each participants’ unique migration route.
The third component was a drawing activity where participants were invited to depict what home means to them now. These drawings will be assembled into a large wall mosaic, which represents the collective community of New Canadians making home in Durham region.
We are born into this world a blank canvas, so large one could paint the entire universe onto it. This is your potential. Over time, various influences would like to take the brush out of your hand. Our families, our cultures, our society, or religions, and our education paint our souls. All of these brush strokes are valid, but it is up to you to decide what becomes a part of the under painting, and what you want your final masterpiece to look and feel like. So many of us allow our paintings to become what others would like to see. What is easy for them to look at is a painting that does not challenge the audience to reflect on their own works.
Here I say that the greatest pieces of art ever created were the ones that made some people uncomfortable; the ones that caused the audience to search for ways to relate.
I have a painted soul, and each of my sins, mistakes, and lessons add colour and brilliance to my experience. It is through these colours that I have learned to love.
I encourage everyone to wear colours proudly, and add to them as you see fit. The most incredible art often happens by mistake. As do the most incredible experiences in this life.
Join me for my experimental art residency and exhibit, where you can be there with me while I create, you can influence my art and be influenced by it. I will be examining the teachings of many ancient religions in order to disassemble the creation that is humanity, for the purpose of examining its elements. The audience is left with the choice of what elements they would like to keep, incorporate or paint over in their own work of art, that beautiful moment we call life. This will be a fully interactive creative platform, and you are all invited.
My tornado series began over two years ago as an expression of grief and vertigo when my marriage, home and workplace were pulled out from under me:
“Weather is such a powerful metaphor for human emotion. And that writhing weather monster, the tornado, is a particularly apt way of describing the trauma, the fury, the intensity of loss. It’s hard not to take a tornado personally: it gets to the point by narrowing down and strikes a specific spot. It comes out of the blue. We don’t know what hit us. We are caught in a whirlwind of emotion. Everything is up in the air. There is no emergency plan for these twists of fate.
To put a positive spin on it, a tornado (that snaking shape-shifter) is just energy. It makes a long-winded metaphor that lasts and lasts because it wrecks and then absorbs whatever it touches down on. What starts out as an emblem of emotional devastation contorts into an expression of fury and then is reborn as a metaphor for unstoppable creativity, play, and passion. Like the flowering cross, can it become a cornucopia? Blooming tornados! Elijah goes to heaven, Dorothy goes to Oz, one thing for certain is we are pulled out of our orbit and dropped in a different place, undone.”
The metaphor recently took a surprising twist and turned into my cat, “Twister” this past winter. Drawing him made no sense to me until I added colour to his tabby stripes and I realized he was a sleeping tornado, twisted in on himself, muscles ready to cause havoc. He was a tornado personified but also the answer to my stormy dilemma: a tornado symbolizes homelessness and a cat signifies home.
And then again there was a change in the air. Cats no longer sleeping but catapulted. The cat falls head-first fighting against the gravity of the situation but if it twists a certain way, it will land on its feet. The evolution of a metaphor appears to have been inevitable in hindsight but delightfully unexpected in real time.
Jackson Pollock is most famous for his enormous dripped paintings. These works were so outrageous in their time that they changed the course of modern art, opening up whole worlds of possibility, profoundly influencing a generation of painters including the Painters Eleven – so well represented in the RMG. Unfortunately for Pollock, his burst of genius was also his undoing and he struggled to find a way out, retreating to all black, partly figurative pieces in his last year of productivity.
I have taken up the technical challenge of painting with dripping paint to produce a biographical study of “Jack the Dripper”. Where Pollock used oil based enamels and lacquers, I’ve used acrylic house paint. Where Pollock added glass and sand and nails and cigarette butts, I have in some cases mixed the paint with ground stone to produce stucco. Where Pollock’s work is gestural and energetic, the demands of realism call for more precise and controlled dripping. I call it “inaction painting”- waiting for the drip to fall.
While the cast of supporting characters may need introduction to the uninitiated, I believe it comes through loud and clear that Pollock was a seriously flawed individual.
Eric Rosser is a Whitby based, self-taught painter, house painter, carpenter, musician/songwriter, performer, cook and bon vivant. His brush technique and colour mixing skills continue to be honed by his colour-field work for residential clients, but his greater love is painting pictures. In recent years he has produced a series of shows. Each has been radically different than the one preceding it; from a meditation on waves to an irreverent exploration of Picasso, from birds-eye views of New York to the life and times of Jackson Pollock, painted realistically, in drips. The journey continues as he is now learning fresco. Check out his website at www.ericrosser.com
Join us in celebrating the work of Durham College Fine Arts Graduate Class of 2015!
Students are our community’s future! With fresh new ideas and open minds, their voices matter, so let us hear what they have to say. What inspires them, what moves them, and what is important to them, are the core pillars in which we have created the exhibition.
In collaboration with the Durham College Fine arts program and The RMG’s newest initiative Gallery A, Speak Up! is an exhibition of local high school students showcasing the future of art in our community.
Follow the project journal for updates at speakuposhawa.tumblr.com
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