Wednesday, March 28, 2012

John Abrams and Sung Ja Kim Chisholm at Loop Gallery

loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members John Abrams entitled Entertaining Modernism, and Sung Ja Kim Chisholm entitled Transforming.

John Abrams, The Mountie and Mondrian, oil on canvas, 58 x 77 inches, 2011
Entertaining Modernism comprises a selection of new paintings and sculptures that emanate from John Abrams’ ongoing interest in concepts of the modern found in film, sculpture and painting.  Experimenting with narrative disjuncture by juxtaposing abstract forms that have over time taken on recognizable modernist symbolism, with the immediacy of painting he achieves great visual effects.

Abrams holds an MFA from York University and AOCA from the Ontario College of Art. His work is represented by Boltax Gallery, Shelter Island, New York. His paintings can be found in major public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Canada Council Art Bank and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, as well as numerous private collections in the United States.

Sung Ja Kim Chisholm, (Installation View) multiple works, 11 x 14 inches (ea.) 2008-2012
Sung Ya Kim Chisholm's exhibition of figurative drawings and mixed media abstracts presents visual conceptions of two fundamental aspects of the human condition. The first aspect is the gradual unfolding of a new life, captured through the depiction of a set of typical childhood experiences.  The second aspect is the alienation and spiritual hungers that are also part of human life, as depicted in the artist’s mixed media works, which convey longing for healthy, loving relationships.

Kim is a Toronto-based, Korean-Canadian artist whose works in both mixed media and drawing visually communicate a range of spiritual responses by individuals to the inevitability of suffering in our their lives. She is a long-time member of the loop Gallery and has had group and solo shows in galleries in both South Korea and Canada. She has also been retained for numerous portrait commissions. Kim is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design and she teaches art privately in her studio, as well as at a private school in Etobicoke.  She is married and both her husband and her son inspire her work and often serve as her models.  

Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday, March 31st from 2-5 pm.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Miner for a Heart, An Article by Yael Brotman


The following article was published in IMPRINT, Volume 47 Number 1 (2012), Print Council of Australia, North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and is reprinted here courtesy of Yael Brotman:

Miner for a Heart: An Open Studio Curatorial Project
 by Yael Brotman, Toronto-based artist and Lecturer, Visual and Performing Arts (Studio), University of Toronto Scarborough

Last September I traveled to Australia from Canada to install a group exhibition of Toronto print-based artists at Impact 7, the Multi-disciplinary Print Conference at Monash University in Melbourne.

Campbell south of Grant, Mnemonic Stoop series 2009-10, etching on Kurotani paper, BFK, foamcore, archival tape, 9½”H x 14”W x 16”D. Photography: Peter Legris
On meeting Australians – participants in the conference, presenters, and visitors to the exhibition – conversations often turned to comparisons of the social and political realities in our two countries. Much seemed surprisingly familiar. Besides our mutual and often contentious British heritage, with its voracious appetite for sending young colonials to become cannon fodder during World War I, we spoke of the treatment of Aboriginal communities, of the modest and restrained roles our countries play on the international stage, and of the politics of immigration and emigration.

The latter topic was a particularly galvanizing and engaging one because the exhibition that I curated, Miner for a Heart, examines aspects of the immigrant experience. Apart from the First Nations, Canada like Australia is a land of immigrants. Toronto, its largest city, has been a magnet for many people seeking asylum, looking for safety and to establish new lives.

Among those who arrived in mid to late twentieth-century Toronto, then just beginning to divest itself of the vestiges of a smug monoculture derived from colonial elitism, were individual artists of all sorts searching for a community of like-minded cultural workers with whom they could connect.

Open Studio, an artist-run printmaking centre, was its meeting place, a home, the ‘heart of gold’ (taken from Neil Young’s song) referenced by the title of the exhibition. Established in 1970 by American emigrés Richard Sewell, Barbara Hall and Don Holman, Open Studio has from its inception reflected the larger social expression of migration to Canada, and the lively, ethnically diverse Toronto of today.

The artists I chose for inclusion in the exhibition – Nadine Bariteau, Janet Cardiff, Libby Hague, Christopher Hutsul, Ed Pien, Richard Sewell, Penelope Stewart, Ho Tam, Jeannie Thib, and myself – all printed at Open Studio and are found in its archive. All parse the immigrant narrative: they have crossed borders, from rural towns to the big city, from other provinces, from other countries.

They were also chosen because their artistic visions are energetic, inventive and interdisciplinary. They explore the use of materiality. Conceptually, their focus in the work selected is framed by attention to the here and now. They observe and question details of life in their new home and the pursuit of endeavor, cultural identities, and communities.

Out of the multi-layered connectivity that exists among the artists and their work, a distinct narrative begins to emerge relating to migrant politics. Christopher Hutsul and Janet Cardiff each explore the streets and neighbourhoods of their new city with irreverence and humour, while Ed Pien contemporizes figures from Chinese myths to meditate on re-constructed personal realities. Jeannie Thib, in her piece Archive, explores the diverse cultural and historical sources of design through body decoration that implies tattoos and other markings of pride or shame that members of immigrating communities might arrive with.

In her print installation, My one and only life – so far, Libby Hague celebrates the cultural wealth that new communities bring to an evolving societal silhouette.  In it she examines her own life with its surprises, opportunities, and hurdles. Risk and luck parallel the universal experiences of successive waves of new arrivals to the city. In her installation, Hague focuses on the break from the everyday, the parade. On a public level, the parade calls attention to the rituals and celebrations of a community. It also marks time and the rhythm of a year. On a personal level, she perceives the parade as a schematic on an invisible graph charting the course of a life. It may be colourful and bright but there is an undercurrent of wariness and ambivalence about the arrival of the last float.

In the parade of artwork in this exhibition, Ho Tam expresses the most politically direct critique. Tam, originally from Hong Kong, comments on the friction between China’s past and present as well as on the search for identity in the diaspora. Fine China is a dual piece: a print on architectural blueprint paper and a video in which the blue and white vases of the print are viewed one at a time with the central image transformed by animation. Some of the animated images are funny, like those of Jackie Chan’s Kung Fu moves, while others, such as the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square, are more sombre. The blue and white porcelains reference the old silk routes and the historic influence Chinese art had on European design. In superimposing contemporary Chinese events and icons, Tam speaks of re-invention in both the private and global realms. Personally he examines the opportunity for self-actualization in the diaspora, while at the same time keeping an eye on China’s emergence as a superpower on the world stage.

Nadine Bariteau, originally a francophone Montrealer, investigates the anxiety and uncertainty that immigrants often experience. She recognizes that not speaking English, the dominant language in Toronto, contributes to a sense of isolation and fear. Bariteau’s process of image gathering includes randomly videotaping subway platforms. She regards Toronto’s underground transit system as a space where individuals from around the world make contact with each other and observe and are observed. But curious and friendly observation can have menacing aspects, as alluded to in the title Every Move You Make (from a song by Sting about stalking). The format of the piece — its blurry images, the shape of the curved wood upon which the images are printed, and the high corner/ceiling intersection where it is installed — all evoke surveillance.

Migration and politics are poetically intertwined in the work of Richard Sewell.
Sewell had immigrated in the late 1960s with many other young, spirited, educated Americans protesting the war in Vietnam. They quickly became enmeshed in the cultural life of cities across Canada. Anguish followed when they were not allowed back to visit their families and it left its mark on many. Sewell’s piece in the exhibition, La diversité menacée, offers a poignant exchange on migration, freedom, entrapment and protection. Three wonky cylindrical mesh birdcages with embedded printed birds and trees are suspended above the floor. An accompanying sound element incorporates bird songs with human voices, further underscoring the concept of migration and its imperatives.

Shifting metaphors, Penelope Stewart’s piece, La Grande Ruche, implicates insects. The oversized singular Victorian cloche shape in her drawing references a highly sophisticated, tightly organized social structure, where the individual is subsumed by the whole – the beehive. Conceptually, she considers the elasticity and accommodation of a utopian model for human society, and the implications regarding the absorption of an individual into the larger entity. Her piece, hand-rendered acrylic on Mitsumata tissue, mimics in its process both the determination of the worker bee, and the preparation of a drawing for the silkscreen mesh that will be transformed into the printing matrix.  

A universal immigrant’s desire for a physical home in a reconstituted community is explored in my own sculptural installation, Mnemonic Stoop. The trajectory of aspiration to acquisition is examined, as well as the relationship of personal to communal space. My experience of negotiating the latter derives from my birth on an Israeli kibbutz and migration from that social experiment to the novelty of a burgeoning Canadian suburb. Mnemonic Stoop consists of model-sized reimagined houses I have inhabited. The houses, made of etching on Kurotani paper are fragile and required protective foamcore cases for transit to Melbourne. The irony of protecting the structures that protect us so intrigued me that I incorporated the cases alongside the houses in the exhibition.

In this exhibition, my fellow artists and I mined our own histories to create conversations among the tropes, stories and cultures that engage our viewers. Canadian identity is slippery, constantly being redefined and debated: a new world flexible enough to give citizens and artists alike space to parse multiple identities and to examine who or what we want to express. This culture of participation has enriched Open Studio and Canadian society as a whole, promoting the sense of community needed to embrace the energized experimentation seen in Miner for a Heart.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Final Weekend to see the Exhibitions by Tara Cooper and Yael Brotman at loop Gallery

Campbell south of Grant, Mnemonic Stoop series, Mixed Media by Yael Brotman, Photography by Peter Legris
This is the last weekend to see Yael Brotman's and Tara Cooper's work at loop Gallery. There will be a Question & Answer session with the artists moderated by Rebecca Diederichs at 3 pm on Sunday, March 25th. The exhibition closes tomorrow at 4 pm.

If you missed the Globe & Mail review of the exhibition by R.M. Vaughan, the link is here.

Gallery hours this weekend are: Saturday 12 - 5 pm and Sunday 1 - 4 pm.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Yael Brotman at loop Gallery

Home and Away, 21" x 26", graphite, watercolour, chine colle (etching on Kurotani), 2012
Yael Brotman's exhibition entitled Shipping and Receiving is currently on at loop Gallery.

Shipping and Receiving showcases the continuation of a body work in which Brotman explores the reconstruction, from memory, of houses that she inhabited in two countries. In these new works, the permanence of a house with a basement that was referenced previously in Mnemonic Stoop has given way to the transitory nature of the mobile home. The model caravans and trailers constructed by Brotman are based on those her family rented to travel long distances across Canada and into the US, completing the summer migration from cities to provincial and national parks that is a quintessential Canadian experience.

Installed alongside the paper caravans are cases made of foamcore. Made in order to protect works in transit, the cases, which echo the shape of the caravans, become constructions of architectural interest. Drawings, exhibited with the caravans, speak of travel by trailer and by imagination.

Brotman’s exhibition history includes solo shows at Odd Gallery, Open Studio, Angell, and loop Gallery. She has been part of two- and three-person exhibitions at McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Eastern Edge Gallery, St. John’s, and Mount Saint Vincent University Gallery, Halifax. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, Purdue University, IN, University of Minnesota, MN, University of Colorado at Boulder, CO, and at the Jingdezhen Museum of Ceramics, Jingdezhen, China. Brotman has forthcoming exhibitions at Zweigstelle Berlin, the German Consulate in Toronto, The Rooms in St. John’s and the Douro printmaking biennale in Alijo, Portugal. She has been invited to undertake an artistic residency at the Áras Éanna Art Centre, Aran Islands, Ireland in the summer of 2012.

Her work is represented in public and corporate collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ernst and Young, the Toronto Stock Exchange, BMO group, the Universities of Alberta, Toronto, and Colorado at Boulder, and the Sanbao Museum in China.

Brotman teaches in the Studio Art Program at the University of Toronto, Scarborough campus.

Art critic R.M. Vaughan of the Globe and Mail newspaper wrote a very favourable review of Yael Brotman and Tara Cooper's show at loop. The link is here.

To see more of her work, visit Yael Brotman's website here. Learn more about Yael Brotman’s work during a Question and Answer Session at loop on Sunday, March 25, 2012 at 2PM.


Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Tara Cooper at loop



Tara Cooper's current exhibition entitled Weather Wise is now on at loop Gallery.

With forecasts we’re told to heed warnings—hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Tara Cooper’s Weather Wise assembles a compendium of weather lore and superstitions from cloud nines to fair weather friends to silver linings. It is the next chapter in her ongoing series/alter ego Weather Girl, a project that mixes an amateur’s enthusiasm for meteorology with found objects, video and print.



Beneath the rubric of Canadian Nature, Cooper’s observations combine fieldwork and footwork moving from the amateur ornithologist, to the idea of north, to her most recent study involving the language of weather—the statistical forecast versus the personal encounter. This interest in fieldwork has led Cooper to participate in many national and international artist residencies including: Kloster Bentlage in Rheine, Germany, Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California, Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, The Frans Masereel Center in Kasterlee Belgium and Malaspina in Vancouver.


Tara Cooper received her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2008, specializing in the disciplines of print, film and installation. She also holds a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Bachelor of Education from Queen’s University. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo.

Learn more about Tara Coopers’s work during a Question and Answer Session at loop on Sunday, March 25, 2012 at 2PM. To see more of her work, visit Tara's website at www.taracooper.com.

Monday, March 5, 2012

This Blue Dragon speaks in tongues

In watching Robert LePage's The Blue Dragon (the show has just closed at the Princess of Wales theatre) I was struck by the audience's reaction within the first few minutes of the play.

I knew nothing of the play and just went. I have not seen any of the previous Dragon Trilogy either. So, there I am, in the dark, the actors start talking to each other in a seamless Quebecois french or Joual and everyone starts laughing along not missing a beat. Sure, the way the stage has been designed, with a split double layer, it allows for surtitles to translate, but this audience was clearly bilingual. Ok, we are in Canada, no biggie. Then as the play is set in Shanghai China, the main character meets his lover and they start to converse in Mandarin. I'm reading the translations, but I am also starting to think this is amazing that people are willing nay excited to see a play that is split between three languages- I cannot see people in the States cueing up for this sort of thing, nor in France either. This may be a distinctly Canadian delicacy, whether that is relevant....I can't say.

As always with LePage, there is a distinctive look and feel and I liked how low tech much of it was. The main character, Pierre LaMontagne departs from his old friend at the train station, gets on a bike and pedals, the bike is pulled across the stage, you get a sense he is in the country side, he gets off his bike and a tiny model train comes on to the stage and crosses it, he is seeing his friend off.


This is a simple iPad sketch of the protagonist standing with his bike ( don't look too closely, I mangled the thing! But my excuse is this homemade bandage on my thumb, you would be amazed how that throws everything off!!)

The play has closed as I mentioned, but the local House of Anansi Press has released a graphic novel version of the play. The play is stark with three characters in a love triangle and no additional people to get in the way; the graphic novel, on the other hand, is set up like a narrative in the real world in a bar, an airport, etc.

I've caught an interview of LePage talking to Jian Ghomeshi of CBC's Q. LePage talks about embracing technology including digital interactive projections. We can see this in the Blue Dragon, with snow which moves with the actors, but I was captivated by a low tech solution to the steps of the set being blanketed in snow: a white sheet is pulled on a string across the set and blankets the steps.  It is the mixture of high and low tech which makes LePage's productions interesting.

You can catch that interview here

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Yael Brotman and Tara Cooper at loop

loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Yael Brotman entitled Shipping and Receiving, and Tara Cooper entitled Weather Wise.

Yael Brotman, 'Airstream', 17" L x 10" W x 7" D, etched Japanese paper, graphite, foamcore, wire, 2012.
Shipping and Receiving showcases the continuation of a body of work in which Yael Brotman explores the reconstruction, from memory, of houses that she inhabited in two countries. In these new works, the permanence of a house has given way to the transitory nature of the impermanent home. The model-sized caravans and trailers constructed by Brotman are based on those her family rented to travel long distances across Canada, completing the summer migration from cities to provincial and national parks that is a quintessential Canadian experience.

Most recently Brotman has exhibited at Monash University, Melbourne, AUS, Purdue University, University of Minnesota, and University of Colorado at Boulder. Forthcoming exhibitions include Zweigstelle Berlin, the German Consulate in Toronto, The Rooms in St. John’s and the Printmaking Biennial of Douro in Alijo, Portugal. She has been invited to undertake an artist residency at the Áras Éanna Art Centre, Aran Islands, Ireland this summer.

Tara Cooper, "Clear as Bell", screen print, 2012.
With forecasts we’re told to heed warnings—hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Tara Cooper’s Weather Wise assembles a compendium of weather lore and superstitions from cloud nines to fair weather friends to silver linings. It is the next chapter in her ongoing series/alter ego Weather Girl, a project that mixes an amateur’s enthusiasm for meteorology with found objects, video and print.

Beneath the rubric of Canadian Nature, Cooper’s observations combine fieldwork and footwork moving from the amateur ornithologist, to the idea of north, to her most recent study involving the language of weather—the statistical forecast versus the personal encounter. Cooper received her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2008, specializing in the disciplines of print, film and installation. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo.


Reception: Saturday, March 3, 2012, 2-5 PM 
Q&A Session, moderated by Rebecca Diederichs: Sunday, March 25, 2012, 3 PM