Reception: RMG Friday, June 1, 7-10PM
Artist Talk: May 26, 1-3PM

The installation Primavera in Sospeso (Spring on Hold) reexamines Botticelli’s Primavera, an iconic image that is often romanticized and commercialized, deconstructing and re-framing the late-Renaissance masterpiece and its ubiquitous postcard format within the artists’ personal perspectives.

Using materials often found in both Jennie Suddick and Anna Rose’s practices (including paper, plastic, wool, and synthetic hair), the two artists explode the familiar image. Connotations of beauty and ease are remixed to highlight the undercurrent of decadence and violence, present both in the allegory of potrayed in Botticelli’s work as well as in the contemporary culture’s constant exploitation and decontextualization of images. An initial sense of familiarity with the subject and the materials is destabilized, woven into an immersive environment to be navigated by the viewer.

While the two artists constructed the elements of this project remotely, beginning the process of unraveling and expanding the subject matter within the specific contexts of their different environments, the work will ultimately be built in conversation with the location over the residency period.

Primavera in Sospeso (Spring on Hold) was exhibited first at Come Up to My Room at the Gladstone Hotel, where it won the Design Offsite Festival Juror’s Choice Award (granted by Andrew Sardone, Editorial Director, Globe Style at The Globe and Mail).

Artist Bios

Anna Rose has lived and worked in Florence, Italy since 2004. She received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Her work spans photography, video, costume and installation with a sensibility towards the relationship between body and environment, entering into conversation with historical, psychological, and cultural mythologies of place.

Jennie Suddick is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Toronto. She has exhibited in Canada, U.S.A., Europe and Asia. She earned her MFA from York University and holds both a BFA and Advanced Visual Studies Certificate from OCAD University. Her work deals with identity, place and meditated relationships to nature.

‘Where are the stars that show us to our love
inevitable’1

Where do we begin when it is considered radical for us to desire/love, to be joyful, in the first place. When we rarely engage our tender selves in public discourse, see our loving in popular media, or our ancestries honoured.
Thus, we look to the vastness of the night sky. We look within and towards each other.
This is where we begin.

Photographers Soko Negash and Leyla Jeyte document intimacy and loving between the lines in diasporic communities. Both explore themes of de-colonial love, loving as resistance, and radical intimacies in their work.

Jeyte’s photographic portrait series, Love – A Black Woman’s Definition (2016-18) features Black women spanning across the world from Nairobi to Los Angeles. Her portraits are accompanied by excerpts from each of the women photographed, imagining and reclaiming their love/life narratives in their own words. While traveling, living, and working in different countries, Jeyte began to ask the women she was photographing to define what love means to them.

Negash’s series of photographs, Have You Eaten? (2018) chronicles Chinese mothers and daughters expressing themselves and their love on their own terms in response to racialized stereotypes. This series is accompanied by an audio sculptural installation Have You Eaten? Phone Home (2018). Recreating furnishing and decor from her grandmother’s home, Negash has created a domestic setting to interact with audio excerpts from interviews with the mother-daughter pairs from the series.

‘How do we come to be here next to each other’2

The ways we love are deeply nuanced and as wondrous as the star formations that illuminate the darkness.

-Safia Siad, 2018

1 & 2 Poem for My Love (2005).

Artist Bios:

Soko Negash is a Toronto-born visual artist of Chinese-Eritrean descent. Her creativity is explored primarily through the realms of fashion design, documentary film production, and most recently, photography. She is inspired by the underbelly of a place, unspoken (mis)understandings, ancestral knowledge and trauma, and the messy parts of cultural identity.

Leyla Jeyte is a Somali born Toronto based photographer. Her artistic journey began in Cuba where she was inspired by the vibrancy and kindness of its people. Since then, Leyla has lived and worked in various countries including Colombia, Sweeden, and Kenya. She uses documentary photography and in-depth visual storytelling to portray the lives of women of colour with a focus on themes that capture authenticity, intimacy, healing, and love.

Safia Siad is an artist and curator. Born in Montreal, she is the daughter of a Somali father and Irish-French-Canadian mother. Themes of dislocation, love, exile and hope permeate her work. Having spent the last four years at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, she is forging on a path that will allow her to work with and curate for women artists. She currently resides in Toronto.

Fear and disease go hand in hand.

News media and technology often spread hysteria and fear around disease. As fear swells, it plays various roles in how a disease is perceived and understood. While inciting fear can may cause precautions, it also divides the healthy from the unhealthy, those who are willing to help from those who are not, and often fact from fiction.

The work in Public Notice deal with disease and illness and its impact historically and racially, look at loss and misunderstanding, and contrast scientific facts to fiction. While fear often trumps empathy and understanding, the works in this exhibition refuse to let fear have the last word.

Opening reception: Friday, November 2, 7-10pm

In Anishnaabemowin, inaabiwin means “movement of light” and is used to describe lightning.

Indigenous peoples embody a relational approach to understanding and interacting with the world which allows them to engage more deeply through complex relationships with themselves and the natural world. Through colonization, this way of being and knowing has been compromised.

The artists in this exhibition use their varied art practices to reclaim these ways of being and knowing, hoping to restore compromised connections and encourage audiences to follow. As we seek to understand our place in the world, relearning these relations is essential, and will help us navigate today’s challenges and thrive on the lands we call home.

Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers will be encouraged to think about and feel their own relations and how they connect to larger worldviews. This project will be guided by Indigenous voices through researched texts, as well as through conversations and visits with respected knowledge keepers.

Inaabiwin is also a metaphor for the work of the artists presented in this exhibition, who have remarkably profound and active practices that each evoke a strong visceral response.

Art Gallery of Mississauga: July 4th – September 22, 2019
Ottawa Art Gallery: October, 2019 – January, 2020
Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery: February 7 – May 3, 2020

We are grateful for the additional support provided by the Ontario Arts Council for this exhibition.

Click here to view the publication online.

In an otherwise empty gallery space, six reflective panels are positioned in a ring, facing inward, catching one another in their reflection, creating channels of infinite regress. A dancing figure in the form of a spiraling flurry of silk appears within a reflective frame, disrupting the mirrored image, and moves from one panel to another, seemingly crossing the space that spans between each. As the figure traverses the circumference of the ring it appears infinitely in the cross reflection, where viewers and the dancer appear to share the same physical space.

The movement of the dancer is reminiscent of Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dance of the 19th century. Fuller was a choreographer, costume designer, dancer, and an inventive stage designer published in Scientific American. Credited as a pioneer of modern dance, she used her voluminous robes as a performative sculptural object, radically positioning dance within a conceptual realm. The choreographed movement of the dancer’s robes in this installation, create metamorphic and ephemeral sculptural structures that pass through shifting tones and colours. A trail of mercurial forms emerge from the silk robes, tracing its movements, vivid, and fleeting, the structures grow as tendrils that delineate her path and diminish in her wake. Viewers are invited to explore these structures as augmented reality, using viewing devices provided by the gallery.

Performed by Katie Ewald

Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery: January 12 – March 3, 2019
Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery: June 20 – September 15, 2019
Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery: October 4 – January 5, 2020
Kelowna Art Gallery: Spring 2020
Dunlop Art Gallery: Fall 2020

Opening reception: Friday, June 1, 7-10pm. Click here to register for a free bus from Toronto.
Catalogue launch: Saturday, June 9, 2-4pm. Click here to register for a free bus from Toronto.

What happens when surfaces glitter, gleam, sparkle, and shine? In Glimmers of the Radiant Real, radiance, that quality of projected light we associate so often with the marvelous and the modern, is subverted by the relationship between the quality of a surface and what it covers, reflects, or contains. Surface is the point of contact for the body, it’s skin and texture and touch. The glistening, shining surfaces of works by Katie Bethune-Leamen, the Broadbent Sisters, Daniel Griffin Hunt, Sanaz Mazinani, Sandy Plotnikoff, Mary Pratt, Cole Swanson, Catherine Telford-Keogh, and Xiaojing Yan manipulate the viewer’s perception of dimension through reflections and refractions, thereby un-forming the object and making the familiar strange.

The artists and works featured in the exhibition use a variety of materials to generate these surface effects, from glass to gold, foil, plastic, and pearls. Each material has its own qualities of shine and reflection, and each combination of qualities reacts with a work’s source and subject to yield a different effect: gilded insect wings sketch a house’s morbid geography, material treatments upend expectations of form and colour, and dollar-store detritus, sunk in resin, seems to glow behind glass. For the viewer, the result is a combination of material familiarity and perceptual distortion.

In video, sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation, these works invite us to transform as they do, through interactions with surfaces that dazzle, using light to obscure or fracture the images and clarity we expect. They answer a craving for radiance, a desire to be like them, shining and seemingly limitless. They offer the promise of the object made new, but even if they speak in the same material language of the glittering and the precious, the modern, and the transcendent, they speak its opposite, too, a language of obscurity and disappearance, complicating the shining and ideal. They layer the surface substances that gloss the world we know, offering glimmers of a radiant reality where light becomes, not truth illuminated, but something else.

Fore more information, please visit glimmersoftheradiantreal.ca

Curated by: Ruth Jones and Sam Mogelonsky

Art Gallery of Peterborough: October 6, 2018 – January 6, 2019
McIntosh Gallery: January 17 – March 16, 2019

Opening reception: September 7 at 7pm

Are you an apartment dweller? Do you ever wish the outside of your apartment said as much about you as the inside? Hunderwasser, the Austrian painter, suggested that residents of urban spaces should be able to paint, as far as they could reach, the outside of their apartment walls.

During his residency earlier this year, Jeff Mann worked with Oshawa Housing Residents and Eastdale C.V.I. students to create over 100 small drawings based on Hundertwasser’s idea that
occupants of buildings should be able to paint the exterior wall of their apartment as far as they can reach.

Jeff Mann, who was resident artist at ArtLab from Jan 24- March 4 2018.

 

The first public appearance of what would become Painters Eleven occurred when seven of the artists showed their work at the Simpson’s department store in Toronto in October, 1953. The concept of an exhibition of abstract art and home furnishing was the idea of William Ronald, a commercial artist working at Simpson’s and his colleague, Carry Cardell. It was during a publicity shoot for this exhibition that the seven suggested that they add more to their number and become a formal group of abstract painters. Their first meeting as a group would be held at the Thickson’s Point cottage (on the Oshawa/Whitby border) of Alexandra Luke. Painters Eleven would be in existence from 1953-60 as a vehicle to promote the members’ individual work and the role of abstraction in Canadian art.

Canadian abstraction followed the wave of abstraction that began to appear in the United States, particularly New York City, after World War II. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline were seminal figures within this modern, revolutionary movement that looked to surrealism for inspiration.

While the Oshawa Art Gallery was founded above a store on Simcoe Street in downtown Oshawa in 1967, it would become, in 1969, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery with the donation of thirty-seven works from the collection of Alexandra Luke and a generous donation towards the construction of the first gallery by her husband Ewart McLaughlin. The RMG was named after Ewart’s grandfather, Robert. Luke’s donation included work by all of the members of Painters Eleven and helped to establish, in 1970, the RMG’s unique focus on collecting and exhibiting the work of Ontario’s first group of abstract painters.

Since 1967, the RMG’s collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints by members of Painters Eleven has grown to over 500 works. Numerous exhibitions have been organized including the 1979 exhibition Painters Eleven in Retrospect, as well as solo exhibitions of individual members. The collection also includes an extensive archives with exhibition reviews, interviews and photographs.

Opening and artist talk: Sunday, February 11th, 1-3pm

Oshawa based artist, Grant Cole is drawn to the formality of everyday life depicted in the Thomas Bouckley Collection of historical photographs. The Bouckley Collection is a visual history of Oshawa that focuses on significant events, people and place. While Cole’s work typically explores his own personal successes and failures, his subjects in his latest work, inspired by the collection, are depicted with what identifies their success, whether an object, uniform, skill, or profession. While the purpose of photography at the turn of the 20th century was for documentation purposes, to Cole’s modern lens, the subjects chose how they wanted to be portrayed and remembered, whether through fashion, poses, or objects. These things are then presented in reduced detail and finished in a high gloss, which highlights their perceived importance.

The work, XXX simply depicts a gold carriage. The carriage is meaningful in Cole’s work for various reasons: it symbolizes order and wealth, and it was, as he notes, “a path to enlightenment for Oshawa.” For the city, carriages have a long and important history. In its heyday, Oshawa’s McLaughlin Carriage Company was the largest carriage manufacturer in the British Empire. The industry helped put Oshawa on the map, and Cole believes it was a “means for Oshawa to understand itself.” The carriage, therefore, is an emblem for the city’s success.

Cole does not want to be perceived as criticizing the idea of purposely presenting one’s self in a particular way. Despite the falseness and at times exhausting effort involved with how we want to be perceived, there are many things we highlight about ourselves worth “parading”: accomplishments, successes, skills, interests, etc. The things we put on parade about ourselves is a way of proclaiming our identity and place. As Cole says, “as long as your successes are real, flaunt them!” As an artist presenting artworks in an exhibition, Cole is himself claiming his own identity and place in Oshawa.