THIS is how the BEAST enters the EARTH

THIS is how the BEAST enters the EARTH. Soft as morning light, liquid as our dreaming eyes. Subcutaneous, hunchbacked and beautiful, tunneling through our longing, burrowing beneath EARTH. Our tongues as transmitters, our memory as shovels.

Without MAPS we use Dead Reckoning. We devise a process that is haphazard and chaotic. Shambala in shambles. What started as an attempt to map life's multidimensional unfolding has given way ... to a process of unmapping. Let's get lost. Let's picnic in the tombs. Let's strip the wires from the firmaments and play in the dark. Stars swim through our blood.

Each piece of art has its own trajectory of despair and joy.

Charles Hackbarth and Tanya Cunnington at loop

May 28 - June 19, 2011
Reception: Saturday, May 28th, 2-5 pm

loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Tanya Cunnington entitled The Awkward Phases of my Adolescence and Charles Hackbarth entitled THIS is how the BEAST enters the EARTH.

Tanya Cunnington's work is created from personal nostalgia.  Ultimately she hopes to encourage a sense of longing within her viewers as well.  The Awkward Phases of my Adolescence, Tanya's upcoming exhibition at loop is comprised of self-portraits and mixed media paintings depicting representational and non-representational moments from the artists past.

Born in Kirkland Lake Ontario, Tanya Cunnington now lives and works in Toronto. In 2001, Tanya received her Associates Degree from OCAD, and was the recipient of the Eric Freifeld Award for Excellence in Figurative Art. She took part in the Florence off-campus studies program. Tanya has since exhibited in several group Exhibitions, both in Toronto and in the surrounding areas. Her work has been included in Magenta Foundation’s publication of Carte Blanche Volume II-Painting, and reviewed in Canadian Art Magazine.

Charles Hackbarth’s new body of work THIS is how the BEAST enters the EARTH continues the investigation of psycho-geography, deep mapping, and, ultimately, the impossibility of mapping. How does one capture the multi-dimensional unfolding of life, its layers, the process of adding and subtracting, memories buried beneath deeper layers of memories, geography, history, biology, the body merging with the earth, merging with the sky, merging with the paint?

Charles Hackbarth is a Toronto-based artist, sound sculptor and writer. Hackbarth studied at Ottawa School of Art and OCAD. He has been exhibiting publicly since 1985. His paintings hang in a number of private collections.

Please join the artists in celebrating their opening receptions at loop on Saturday, May 28th from 2 pm until 5 pm.  

Monumenta 2011 at the Grand Palais in Paris

Anish Kapoor at the Grand Palais in Paris 2011

There was a moment of blackness and disorientation when I stepped inside inside Monumenta, a sculpture installation by Anish Kapoor at the Grand Palais. The air is warm and heavy and there is an eery reddish glow. It is sort of like a return to the womb, which is not surprising given that the work of sculptor Anish Kapoor often references the body and our deepest memories.

Monumenta 2011

From the outside, but still within the confines of the Grand Palais, this enormous membrane takes on another countenance all together. Filling the cavernous spaces of the Grand Palais, I couldn't help but feel awe and wonder at the enormous scale of this bulbous sculpture which fills the entire 13,500 square metres of the interior.

Monumenta 2011 

Anish Kapoor said this about his creation "My ambition is to create a space within the space that responds to the height and luminosity of the Nave at the Grand Palais." It was a singular ambition, rendered with awe-inducing grandeur.

Monumenta 2011

All photos by Ingrid Mida, copyright 2011.

Anish Kapoor
Grand Palais, Paris, France
May 11 until June 23, 2011

For more information, visit www.monumenta.com

Profile of Larry Eisenstein by the Globe and Mail's R.M. Vaughan

Larry Eisenstein

R.M. Vaughan, columnist for the Globe and Mail newspaper, wrote a half page profile/review of loop member Larry Eisenstein's current show Doodactic. In the review, R.M. Vaughan uses descriptors like "spectacularly intimate", "reality-defying ability", "awe-inducing". (I don't think I've ever read a more glowing review from R.M. Vaughan.) To read the complete review, click here.

Loop Gallery is open this weekend from 12-5 pm. On Sunday, there is a Question and Answer session with artists Larry Eisenstein and Eric Farache that will begin at 2 pm.

Q&A with Eric Farache and Larry Eisenstein at loop

Question & Answer Session:  Larry Eisenstein and Eric Farache
Facilitated by David Jager and Mark Laliberte
Sunday, May 22, 2011
2-4 PM at loop
 
LARRY EISENSTEIN is a visual artist obsessed with making marks. He is compulsively driven to exploit line in his work. Eisenstein lives and works in Toronto where he is a sometimes teacher, art director, illustrator and writer.

ERIC FARACHE was born in 1971. He received a MFA from the University of Leeds, is an Alumni of OCAD, and lives and works in Toronto. Trained in classical painting techniques, he has been working in photography for the past 10 years. Eric works in elaborate sketchbooks as part of his artist practice, he has recently returned to painting larger works.  Visit his website at www.ericfarache.com, or his blog at http://vagabondchic.blogspot.com/.

MARK LALIBERTE is a visual artist, writer, designer and curator with an MFA from the University of Guelph.  He has exhibited and performed extensively in galleries across Canada and the USA, and currently resides in Toronto, where he is the managing editor and designer of Carousel. In early 2010, BRICKBRICKBRICK, a full-length book of visual poems, was released with BookThug. Later in the year, GREY SUPREME 1, a print-based "project platform" initiated by the artist as a way to collect his short-form experiments with image, text and hybrid literary forms, debuted with Koyama Press. http://www.marklaliberte.com  |  http://www.greysupreme.com

DAVID JAGER has been a regular Art writer for NOW magazine for the last seven years. He has also contributed articles and reviews to Canadian Art, including extensive cover profiles on Vancouver painter Ben Reeves and Video artist Kelly Richardson. He has also translated and edited works for the International Journal of Phenomenogical Psychology, and recently edited and translated a new work of cultural history by Professor Van Den Berg on the Two Laws of Thermodynamics. He is currently working on a book of philosophical essays by his father, Professor Bernd Jager, who is professor emiritus of Psychology at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

Gallery Mentioned in T.O. DO this week in National Post

Howdy!

Just a brief mention but all the same, our Loop gallery show was mentioned in the National Post on the 14th.

I also like that I am in the same list as Joan Rivers(!), click here to get the article.

Photos from loop: Eric Farache and Larry Eisenstein

loop reopens Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 12 noon for the second week of the exhibitions of work by Eric Farache and Larry Eisenstein.

Photo credit: Patricia Njovu,  2011

Art Show is open!

I struggled to get the show ready in time, but here is a little image of the back of Loop Gallery while i was putting pictures up on 3 different walls at once to see what looked best together.

These watercolours are painted on a natural white 300lb Fabriano paper which has a beautiful texture and colour to it, the pieces radiate next to the cool walls of this white cube gallery.

Larry and I will be at the gallery on Sundays if you would like to chat with us, I think we will be drawing while we are there...bring a sketchbook and join us.

Eric Farache

Larry Eisenstein at loop

Larry Eisenstein

loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by loop member Larry Eisenstein entitled Doodactic.

Larry Eisenstein quotes Philip Guston,
"...I think that every real painter wants to be, and his greatest desire is to be a realist, in the sense that you want to make concrete, with your material, with your matter, with your form, how you feel.
...if you eliminated the word abstract, made it illegal, like a penalty, you know, to use the word abstract, nonobjective, nonfigurative, then you'd have to really...talk about how different they are. Or else not talk about them but feel the difference."
The Chicago Panel, 1958
"I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart."
Statement in Nature in Abstraction, 1958
The resistance of forms against losing their identities, with, however, their desire to partake of each other, leads finally to a showdown, as they shed their minor relations and confront each other more nakedly. It is almost a state of inertia-these forms, having lived, possess a past, and their poise in the visible present on the picture plane must contain the promise of change. Painting then, for me, is a kind of nagging honesty with no escape from the repetitious tug of war at this intersection.
Statement in New American Painting, 1957-58/1959

Eisenstein is a visual artist obsessed with making marks. He is compulsively driven to exploit line in his work. Eisenstein lives and works in Toronto where he is a sometimes teacher, art director, illustrator and writer.

Larry Eisenstein's work will be at loop until May 22, 2011.

Alexander McQueen: An Artist that used Fashion as his Medium

Photo by Salvo Sundsbo/Art+Commerce
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

A retrospective of Alexander McQueen's work will open on May 4, 2011 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This exhibition called Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty highlights the enormous contribution of McQueen to both fashion and art and is presented as a contemporary art installation in which fashion is the medium. Read my review of the show at Fashion Projects www.fashionprojects.org or click here. The exhibition runs until July 31, 2011.