Tuesday, July 23, 2013

World of Threads Festival interview with loop Gallery artist Kim Stanford




Loop member Kim Stanford is the newest interview for the World of Threads Festival's "Weekly Fibre Artist Interview" series. 



Gareth Bate, also a loop member and a curater for the World of Threads Festival has indicated their interview series has been relaunched and that they have completed the next few months of artist interviews. 

You can subscribe to the weekly interviews here: http://www.worldofthreadsfestival.com/contact.html


Wednesday, July 17, 2013

loop Gallery presents Frank Perna: Water/Sky/Scapes




July 20 – August 11, 2013
Reception: Saturday, July 20, 2013, 12-5 PM

loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by guest artist Frank Perna entitled, Water/Sky/Scapes.

For over a decade, Perna has traversed, photographed, and painted the scenic Canadian landscapes of the Kawarthas and Egan Chute. Continuing in this vein, he has revisited the Kawartha Lakes area for his latest suite of paintings which showcase fragments of the land through detailed lake-view reflections. Visual sources for these waterscapes are constructed using sequential photographic imagery to capture subtle shifts in perspective, evoking the constant flux of these delicate ecosystems. Fascinated by the visual abstraction already present in nature, Perna uses contemporary technologies to engage a great

Canadian artistic tradition.

Also on view will be Perna's Cappadocia (Turkey) series. These paintings explore fantastic landforms shaped by volcanic millennia, and occupied by early Christians who fled the Roman occupation by carving into and hiding in labyrinthian caves.

Perna is a Toronto-based artist and curator who has exhibited across North America. He is a graduate of the Ontario college of Art, and has been working as a visual artist out of Toronto and southern Ontario for over 30 years. In 1989, Perna produced the underground graphic novel, Preservation of Obscurity, published by Lump of Squid comics. He has received numerous artist grants and his work has been placed in private collections all over Canada.

Please join the artist in celebrating the exhibition opening on Saturday, July 20th from 12-5 PM.

Don't miss the closing reception presenting live musical guests, The Woodshed Brass Orchestra on Sunday August 11th at 2 pm.

For more information, visit www.frankperna.com.

Img: Frank PernaDouble Visionary, 2013, 48 x 36 in; Canyon Pooling

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Loop’s Summer Correspondent Sarah Letovsky visits MOCCA

Louise Bourgeois, Cell (The Last Climb), 2008 National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Louise Bourgeois Trust. Photo © National Gallery of Canada


Summer Programming at MOCCA


Sarah Letovsky

 

As my final gallery review for loop’s blog, I chose MOCCA - the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, a public hotspot for contemporary art in Toronto.  It’s pay what you can, and located right in the heart of Queen West, making it the perfect place to drop in and see some art when you’re in the mood. Summer can often be a slower season for art, but MOCCA’s current shows are some of the most exciting that I’ve seen this year: a retrospective of Louise Bourgeois visiting from the National Gallery, “Three Known Points” by David Armstrong Six, and “Dancing with Che: Enter Through the Gift Shop” by Barbara Astman.

Astman’s work is a collection of Che-related paraphernalia displayed in a gift shop setting, as if they were retail objects: postcards, t-shirts, tote bags - all with Che’s image on them. They have all the familiarity of tchotchkes but keep their distance as objects for contemplation rather than consumption. “Dancing with Che” is an intriguing comment on the commercialization of political figures and re-appropriation of cultural icons. David Armstrong Six’s “Three Known Points” is also an interesting exhibition; a collection of dynamic, freestanding sculptures each named after various vocations - The Changling, The Janitor, The Mole - all created by the Montreal artist during a 2012 residency in Berlin.

Barbara Astman, Dancing with Che: Enter Through The Gift Shop (detail), 2011. Courtesy of the Corkin Gallery. Photo: Jennifer Rose Sciarrino
What I’ve really come to see, though, is “Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010”. It’s a hard enough task trying to create a retrospective for an artist that has had such a prolific and influential career - but MOCCA has done an excellent job in borrowing work from the National Gallery for a show that both encompasses the breadth of her work, and also the emotional framework that Bourgeois was operating under after leaving her family and friends in Europe and moving to New York in the late thirties. It’s a mixed show, as was Bourgeois’ career, but artfully chosen; a collection of organic, elegant ink drawings from the 1950s, gouache paintings from 2007, a large sculpture created from a staircase rescued from her Brooklyn studio.

The selection of work exhibits Bourgeois’ trademark sexual overtones as well as the artist’s not-so-subtle references to female genetalia. A group of sculptures from her Echo series (2007) are a particularly fitting example of this. They stand in one corner - large, voluptuous, bronze castings of her discarded clothing that have been painted a chalky white. But it’s really Bourgeois’ Personnages (1946-1955) that steal the show, a series of delicate statues punctuating the room like totems. Each is created from a different material or painted in a different colour, and they’re all unique and odd. Together they feel like a lonely crowd; the more you look at them, the more they become anthropomorphic, and seem to embody a spirit and their own personality. There’s a sense of melancholy and nostalgia to these Personnages, the sadness that comes from looking back on relationships and people you once knew and lost. 

The show focuses on work that reflected Bourgeois’ own feelings of loss and nostalgia; but the chosen works also capture a sense of peace, understanding, and finality. As a retrospective, it’s a fitting and poignant goodbye to a beloved artist.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Summer Correspondent Sarah Letovsky on loop's new shows


Catherine Carmichael, Elasticity, Fracture and Flow (with column), 2013

Catherine Carmichael and John Ide at loop Gallery

Sarah Letovsky


Perched at the front of loop Gallery is Catherine Carmichael’s odd and colourful sculpture, Elasticity, Fracture and Flow (with sphere) (2013), a large transparent sphere standing on concrete legs, expelling colourful flowers at one end and a mouth-shaped Veuve champagne box at the other end. Although it’s a wild mix of inanimate objects, they all seem to act together as bodily extensions of one animal; it looks as if it’s about to stretch its wobbly legs and take off, like an animated creature in a Miyazaki film.

Another piece, Elasticity, Fracture and Flow (with slope) (2013), a whimsical desk-like creature, presents four cryptic closed paper bags sitting next to one another in four uniform papier-mâché boxes. Underneath the sculpture lies a little collection of crystals, each sitting on a piece of unintelligible paper. Carmichael’s work is mysterious, and feels like a dream I might've had once, or a different world dreamed up by Jim Henson. Her creations are things that almost resemble real creatures or objects, but pull back from representation into a semi-abstracted alternate reality. Carmichael’s show stimulates your imagination, and reminds you of a place you visited and forgot, or maybe never visited at all.

Catherine Carmichael, Elasticity, Fracture and Flow (with slope), 2013 (detail)

John Ide’s show, “How Paper Remembers”, is a testament to his emphasis on process-driven work. Speaking to him about his upcoming show a couple weeks ago, he shared with me that as an artist, his focus has shifted from the conceptual side of creation to the formal side, in a search for more artistic control of the product itself. 
John Ide, "How Paper Remembers" (Installation shot)
His work is a collection of almost exclusively abstract drawings created by repeated crosshatching, with circles and squares emerging through thousands of meticulous pencil marks, and the occasional silhouette of a face. You sense that there is layering, that other objects or images are hiding and emerging from behind each other.  As Ide phrases it in his exhibition statement, it’s both “forgetting and remembering”. Ide’s work is a play of binaries, and a push and pull of light and darkness. Most of all, you can see the artist’s hand in the work - a sense of repetition, a repeated gesture, and an acute awareness of the immediacy of the medium.

Catherine Carmichael and John Ide will have their work up at loop until july 14th, so drop in and see the show before it finishes!