Installation Shots for Gareth Bate and Sandra Gregson

Loop Gallery June 25, 2011

This was the scene at loop Gallery last weekend during the opening receptions for Gareth Bate and Sandra Gregson. The gallery is open on Canada Day and also this weekend. All photos are by Patricia Njovu.

Gareth Bate in conversation

Visitors examining Gareth Bate's work

Close up of Gareth Bate's work

Sandra Gregson and friends

Visitors examining Sandra Gregson's work

 

Update from Elizabeth Babyn in Saskatoon

Elizabeth Babyn's Studio in Saskatoon

Elizabeth Babyn writes:
I recently relocated from Caledon, Ontario to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  After months of move preparations, I am so happy to finally be back at work painting in my new condo loft studio on 23rd and 2nd Street in Saskatoon!


Some of you may recall that my last Loop exhibit in September dealt with sacred geometry and sacred spaces; as a result of this prior investigation, I am looking forward to continuing where I left off.   However, as I develop these new works I will place more emphasis on Fibonacci numbers in nature.

Willow Studio in Saskatoon

Just steps away from my current studio, I discovered a lovely interior decorating and design shop!  How convenient! The store is called Willow Studio and is located at 148 2nd Avenue North, Saskatoon.  If you live in the area or plan to visit Saskatoon, make this one of your destinations as you investigate the creative interior decorating possibilities that Willow Studio offers!

Gareth Bate and Sandra Gregson at loop Gallery

loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Gareth Bate entitled Floating World, and Sandra Gregson entitled the year my dog died.

Gareth Bate, Floating World: Tsunami 1, acrylic on wood, 4 x 4 feet, 2011

Sandra Gregson, Ulysses (detail), shredded pages of book, thread, book cover, 21 x 45 x 62 cm, 2010
(photo credit: Toni Hafkenscheid)

Gareth Bate’s Floating World is a response to the Japanese tsunami. These paintings are a kind of Vanitas - scenes of great beauty suddenly engulfed by devastation. The tsunami represents total sublime horror. It spreads through entire cities and farmlands, demolishing and consuming everything in its path. Indiscriminate and inescapable. Gareth’s recent work explores our ultimate scale in the universe, and an existential terror of our final insignificance. Floating World represents the Earth itself, fragile and barely staying afloat. These paintings could be seen as bleak, but it is impossible for an artwork to be nihilistic. Making art is inherently about creating meaning out of life.

Gareth Bate’s practice includes painting, photography, installation, performance, video and set design. He graduated from the adult program at Central Tech, and OCAD where he won the 401 Richmond Career-Launcher Prize, a free studio for a year. He represented emerging artists in the Toronto Star’s series “Artists in Real Life: The Up and Comers”. Recently Gareth organized the 401 Richmond Artists Open Studio and launched Gareth Bate Art Projects a new studio/exhibition venue at 401 Richmond, Toronto. Upcoming shows include "Fleshed Out" for Nuit Blanche an installation dance performance called David Pressault Danse, and Gareth's curated group show "Studio Detritus: Art Artifacts" featuring remarkable objects from artists’ studios.

Sandra Gregson’s the year my dog died includes sculptures and a video projection. Overwhelmed by the never ending accumulation of pay statements, house bills, photographs, credit card and ATM receipts, Sandra, after shredding documents to eliminate personal data, began sewing them into sculptural forms. These works consider how accumulation defines us. Other works, one made from a shredded novel, another from a shredded dictionary, refer to the accumulative nature of language and culture. Impermanence is deliberated in the process of shredding and making: undoing and redoing.

Sandra Gregson works with drawing, sculpture and video, often combining these media. Her work is about noticing everyday things, and events, in a playful, subtle, critical way, and with an intent of linking art and life. She studied at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (BFA) and at York University (MFA). Her videos and artwork have been shown throughout Canada and internationally, including the Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade; champ libre, Montreal; Ontario Crafts Council Gallery, Toronto; Nuit Blanche at the Gladstone Hotel, Toronto.

Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday, June 25th from 2-5 pm.

The show will run until July 17, 2011.

Sandra Gregson at the Parkdale Film + Video Showcase

Still image from vers(ing) by Sandra Gregson and Barbara Steinberg

Loop member Sandra Gregson made a video with Barbara Steinberg called vers(ing) that will be shown  on Friday, June 24 at the 13th Annual Parkdale Film + Video Showcase. 

Vers, moving toward something, around a certain time.

Versing to express in verse.

Conversing to talk informally with another or others; exchange views, opinions by talking.

vers(ing) opens in a coffee shop. People, sit, enter and exit. A conversation is heard. The video continues, traveling through the streets of a city, to a park, to other coffee shops, other places. No particular destination is reached, but as we travel, fragments of text are read, conversations are heard, settings, people and objects are noticed. 

vers(ing) presents a moving toward that is transitory and offers a poetic contemplation of how life, meaning, and film are intertwined and constructed.

“I believe I’ve never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed them together more than once, as everyone does.” Javier Marias, Dark Back of Time

running time is 9:56
vers(ing) is distributed by www.vtape.org

The Showcase runs from June 22 to 26. For more information see www.parkdaleshowcase.ca.

Lorene Bourgeois at Harbourfront Centre

Blitz Child I by Lorene Bourgeois

Loop member Lorène Bourgeois exhibit of her work Vestiaire/Cloakroom opened  at the Harbourfront Centre, project room on the weekend and will run until September 25, 2011.

Vestiaire /Cloakroom presents a series of large-scale drawings and a video, based upon the subject of clothing and its relation to the human body and head.

"Recently, I have been exploring the territory of head and face protection, including gas masks and military helmets. I am interested not only in the social and utilitarian functions of these artifacts, but also in their qualities as physical objects - the way they frame or envelop the body, and the way they disclose or conceal the human form.

"Isolated from their original context, these objects seem to oscillate between functionality and theatricality, between absurdity and threat. It is this tension, the moment when the function of clothing slips into something less recognizable, that I wish to investigate."
Harbourfront Centre
235 Queens Quay West
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5J 2G8
(416) 973 4000

Charles Hackbarth at loop Gallery

This is the last weekend to see Charles Hackbarth show THIS is how the BEAST enters the EARTH at loop Gallery.  

Charles Hackbarth’s new body of work continues the investigation of psycho-geography, deep mapping, and, ultimately, the impossibility of mapping, which began with Geographic Tongue: my ghost likes to travel.  

Hackbarth is interested in how one captures 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. The personal, universal and cosmic rolled together like mystical sushi.

This is the second installment of paintings that eschew the rectangle for organic shapes. Some of the work is on wood (plywood or masonite) while others are on loose unstretched canvas. Painting (abstract and figurative), drawing, collage and found objects create layers, some fixed, some temporarily affixed with push pins. While some elements remain constant, others shift, change. These paintings create the territory, the landscape into which the BEAST roams.

Charles Hackbarth Gallery Installation Shot
by Ingrid Mida 2011

In Hackbarth’s last show, through the working process, a number of ghosts began to visit his work by way of small portraits. This time around, Beasts are emerging. Some created from tree roots, others drawn, still others lurk just beyond the veil of manifestation. THIS is how the BEAST enters the EARTH.

Charles Hackbarth is a 49 year old, 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.

Charles Hackbarth Installation Shot by Ingrid Mida 2011

Gallery hours this weekend are Friday and Saturday noon to 5 pm and Sunday 1 to 4 pm.

Libby Hague at the AGO

Libby Hague: Sympathetic Connections at the AGO

Loop member Libby Hague's has a new installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) that opened yesterday.  Libby Hague: Sympathetic Connections is on view until September 11 and is part of the AGO’s Toronto Now series of rotating contemporary projects by Toronto artists.

The installation transforms woodblock prints into paper sculptures that connect across the walls, ceiling, and external windows of the AGO’s Young Gallery. Sympathetic Connections combines representational and abstract forms in a room-spanning three-dimensional installation. Colourful sculptural forms crafted from Japanese paper fill the gallery, dangling from walls and cascading down from the ceiling, while a wall-mounted print of a nuclear power plant looms in the periphery, an image inspired in part by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan earlier this year.

“Libby Hague’s playful, yet foreboding narratives give physical form to fictional worlds that simultaneously mirror and manipulate reality,” says Michelle Jacques, the AGO’s acting curator of Canadian art. “Sympathetic Connections provides a timely exploration of our problematic relationship with the natural environment, invoking universal themes of responsibility and dependency, vulnerability and rescue, and risk and luck.”

To see more of Libby's work, visit her website at www.libbyhague.com.

Installation Shots from Tanya Cunnington and Charles Hackbarth at Loop

If you haven't made it to loop Gallery yet to see the work of Tanya Cunnington and Charles Hackbarth make time this weekend to see this dynamic exhibition. Here are some installation shots from the gallery.

Charles Hackbarth at loop 2011

Tanya Cunnington at loop 2011

Loop gallery is open Friday and Saturday noon to 5 pm and also Sunday noon to 4 pm.

Photo credit: Ingrid Mida

Tanya Cunnington at loop

Now on display at loop Gallery is an exhibition by loop member Tanya Cunnington  entitled The Awkward Phases of my Adolescence.  

Tanya Cunnington's work is created from personal nostalgia.  This particular body of work deals with the artist's childhood and adolescence.  It was inspired by a group of old family photos given to Cunnington by her Nana, and by the photo albums that the artist compiled while in high school. Combining imagery and abstraction through paint and collage is a technique that Cunnington has returned to after a long foray into pure abstraction.  Through collage she can attach personal items to her work, whether it is a quick meaningless note jotted down by a friend that was somehow kept, or an old bed sheet from her childhood.  Not only does she enjoy the fragile and impermanent nature of these items, but she often purposely leaves text legible to act as a form of documentation, and as a tool to perpetuate the ongoing passage of time, and time past.  Each painting is very much about the moment in which it was created, which in itself becomes very nostalgic for Cunnington.  Ultimately the artist hopes to encourage a sense of longing within viewers as well.
 
Born in Kirkland Lake Ontario, Tanya Cunnington now lives and works in Toronto. In 2001, Tanya received her Associates Degree from the Ontario College of Art and Design, with a Major in Drawing and Painting, and was the recipient of the Eric Freifeld Award for Excellence in Figurative Art. She was also selected to take part in the Florence off-campus studies program in her third year. Tanya has since exhibited in several group Exhibitions, both in Toronto and in the surrounding areas. She just recently held her third Exhibition at Loop Gallery in Toronto where she is currently a member.  Her work has been included in Magenta Foundation’s publication of Carte Blanche Volume II-Painting, and reviewed in Canadian Art Magazine.

For more information about the artist and her work, visit her website here.

Kelly Cade at the Washi Summit

Kelly Cade

loop member Kelly Cade is participating in the Washi Summit which begins on June 3, 2011.  Hosted by the Japanese Paper Place, the event celebrates the art of fine Japanese paper. This year the focus is on the contemporary applications of washi off the wall such as on screens, wallpaper, furniture coverings, placemats, cushions, clothing. On June 3, there is a special gala presentation with Linda Lundstrom and Lei Li called "Washi Off the Wall". For more information, visit the Washi Summit website at www.washisummit.com.