A Review of Loop Member Sandra Smirle's Show at WARC by R.M. Vaughan

R.M. Vaughan of the Globe and Mail wrote a review of Loop member Sandra Smirle's show at WARC. The article was published on Saturday, November 27, 2010 and can be read in its entirety here.

Sandra Smirle at the WARC Gallery

An extract of the article is included below: 

Sandra Smirle at Women’s Art Resource Centre Gallery
Until Nov. 27, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 122, Toronto; www.warc.net

Today (Saturday, November 27, 2010) is your last chance to catch Sandra Smirle’s haunting shadow puppetry at Women’s Art Resource Centre.

Using table-sized, laser-cut circles of Plexiglas, thick creamy paper cut by hand and a huge 10-foot by 14-foot sheet of Tyvek (an industrial polyethylene that resembles canvas), Smirle crafts topographical cut-out maps of random street corners. She then projects lights through the maps, creating a dancing interplay between the lit surfaces and their crisp shadows.

Mapping, Smirle’s wispy shadows argue, is an inexact science – one as susceptible to the vagaries of perception as any other decoding process. To wit, Smirle culls her maps from imagery gathered by satellites, a system that sells itself as indisputable. But by metaphorically and literally putting the technology under the spotlight, she turns these allegedly infallible geographies into fluttering, ethereal speculations, questions their reliability.

No space is wholly knowable, no matter how many angels we can now count on the heads of pins.

Holiday Small Works Salon

For the first time in Loop's history, there will be a Holiday Small Works Salon featuring the work of Loop members and invited guest artists. The party begins on Friday, December 17. Chose art for your holiday gifts and support local artists. Hope to see you there.

Kelly Cade and Sheryl Dudley at Loop Gallery

loop Gallery is proud to present solo exhibitions by member artists Kelly Cade: Hover and Sheryl Dudley: le jardin de cygnes. 

The works presented in Hover represent Kelly Cade's ongoing curiosity with the blurring between form and environment, an ambiguity which she explores through the process of painting, itself.

Sheryl Dudley’s new series of time-based photo works, le jardin des cygnes, document random human interactions as they move across an ambiguous ‘stage’. Gestures suspended in light appear both innocent and menacing. The works ultimately question the mechanics of representation, perception and truth.

Kelly Cade is a Toronto based artist and graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design who has exhibited in both solo and group shows. Her work can be found in private and public collections throughout Canada, the United States and the U.K.

Sheryl Dudley’s paintings and photographs have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Canada. Her work can be found in many private collections on both sides of the border.

November 20 – December 12, 2010

Reception: Saturday, November 20, 2010, 2-5 PM

Interview with Jennifer Matotek on Urbane Magazine

Trevor Blumas of Urbane Magazine interviewed Jennifer Matotek about Loop Gallery as part of his profile of curators from galleries in the area of  Ossington and Dundas Street West. Read the online article here.

Art Shows-ongoing

I found the time to make it to the AGO, in truth, we went to Frank the restaurant, the snacks are great, the mixed drinks are too sweet for me.

Anyways, speaking of art, we stuck around long enough to check out the Julian Schnabel retrospective, a superstar of art, according to the AGO.

Really interesting to see the work, still after all these years I don't really get the broken plate paintings, I hope never do in a way.

Having said that, the painting that really touched me was the black velvet painting of Andy Warhol. Interestingly, this painting and the ones around it were in an intimate space not the volumes of air and concrete the AGO committed to this New York Big Mouth who has all but referred to himself as a modern incarnation of Picasso. For all that loud clothes and his bravado, there is something exceptionally touching in this piece he must of saw in Warhol, whose by his own accounts was fairly vacuous, so this painting dialogue between big mouth and superficial is something much greater than the sum of their parts.

here is an article from the Globe and Mail, see what they have to say


Maybe I am a sucker for velvet paintings ever since we had a red bull fighter in our dining room that my Dad painted.

Here is that painting, in the basement with an illustration on top of it from a series of photo/paintings of mine from 2006.



Julian Schnabel: Art and Film

continues until January 2, 2011, take your honey and have some fries and booze at FRANK.

Candida Girling at loop

Marcovaldo: Where The Sidewalk Ends is the title of Candida Girling's exhibition at loop Gallery.

Candida Girling 

In her installation at loop, Candida Girling provides us with a view of city life, in which the quest for a calm, natural space to cope with the hardship quotidian aspect of life is paramount. She has drawn inspiration for this exhibition from Marco Valdo, a book of short stories written by Italo Calvino.

Marcovaldo is a labourer who revels in nature wherever he can find it: in the cracks of the sidewalk, in a clump of mushrooms by the side of the road or in a babbling fountain. In Candida Girling’s mixed-media prints we find Marcovaldo on a park bench, which is for him a portal into the bucolic refuge of his imagination.

These excerpts from Marco Valdo by Italo Calvino served as inspiration for Candida Girling's work:
“This Marcovaldo possessed an eye ill-suited to city life: billboards, traffic lights, shop windows, neon signs, postes, no matter how carefully devised to catch the attention, never arrested his gaze, which might have been running over the desert sands. Instead, he would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a
feather trapped by a roof-tile; there was no horsefly on a horses back, no worm-hole in a plank, or a fig-peel squashed on the sidewalk that Marcovaldo didn’t remark and ponder over, discovering the changes of season, the yearnings of his heart, and the woes of his existence.”


“In one corner of the square, under a dome of horse chestnuts, there was a remote, half-hidden bench. And Marcovaldo picked it as his own. On those summer nights, in the room where five of them slept, when he couldn’t get to sleep, he would dream of the bench as a vagabond dreams of a bed in a palace. “


“And yet, once, a flight of autumn woodcock appeared in a street’s slice of sky.
And the only one to notice was Marcovaldo, who always walked with his nose in
the air.
….And as he proceeded, his eyes on the birds, he found himself at an
intersection, the light red, in the midst of the automobiles …
Can’t you ever get lights straight, asked his foreman.”

Artist Profile of Ingrid Mida

Loop member Ingrid Mida has posted a profile on Fashion is my muse! Click on the link here to read more.

Yael Brotman at loop

Teacher's House by Yael Brotman c2010

This is the second week of the print-based exhibition at loop Gallery by multimedia artist Yael Brotman entitled Mnemonic Stoop. This exhibition is presented as part of Open Studio's PRINTOPOLIS: International Symposium on Printmaking.

Relying on both the precision and imprecision of memory, and, referencing Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, Yael Brotman documents the houses in which she has lived. Brotman repurposes scraps of etched Kurotani paper into two- and three-dimensional works that examine the tonality of intimacy and the psychological elasticity of an image, reconstructing architectural details which sag with mnemonic import.

Gallery hours at loop this week are 1 pm to 5 pm on Wednesday through Saturday and 1 pm to 4 pm on Sunday.


As well, Yael will be participating in a group exhibition of small scale paintings/drawings at Lessedra Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria December 15 – February 15, 2011.

Staying in the loop

The TIAF is over and it is back to regular programming on the loop blog.

Here is what loop members are up to.

Spot On by Sandra Smirle

SPOT ON, a mixed media installation by loop member Sandra Smirle, opened at WARC Gallery on Saturday, October 30. In her show, she explores ways of perceiving place by using "randomly selected locations, translated form aerial maps into large-scale cut drawings" on paper, plexiglass and tyvek. These drawings are hung out from the wall creating a "shifting interplay of light and shadow" that informs what the viewer sees and how the work is interpreted. WARC Gallery is located in 401 Richmond and the show continues until November 27, 2010.

During a recent question and answer session with loop members Candida Girling and Yael Brotman which was moderated by William Huffman, Larry Eisenstein had his sketchbook out. He posted his drawings on Artpost. Click here for the link.

Yael and William by Larry Eisenstein 2010

Jennifer Matotek was interviewed about loop gallery for an upcoming issue of Urbane Magazine. Stay tuned for the link.

Last Chance to see loop at Art Toronto 2010

Today is the closing day of Art Toronto 2010 (Toronto International Art Fair).   Hours today are 12-6 pm.

Warbler I by JJ Lee
Encaustic on canvas, 16 inch diameter
$900

The Dream Series: Maroc by Eric Farache
Chromeographic print facemounted onto Plexiglass and aluminum, 70x14
$3500