VIDEO & PHOTOS FROM THE OPENING: Charles Hackbarth and Barbara Rehus

Charles Hackbarth’s Everything AND Nothing and Barbara Rehus’s Can’t. Breathe. opened to a lovely crowd composed of friends and family last Saturday. Please enjoy the short video and photos taken at the reception.

Video and photos by Patricia Njovu

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.

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

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.  

How I Learned to Love Facebook by Charles Hackbarth

It’s 6 am and I’ve just woken from a dream in which I’d written the most clever facebook  status update in the history of electronic networking. Unfortunately, the content of that update had vanished like vapours on a windshield. Compelled to write an update, I recounted the fact that I’d had a dream but lost it’s illusive content.

Six months ago, when friends suggested that I join Facebook, I scoffed. What me?  I’m an avowed anti-social lone wolf. I never answer the phone and I cross the street to avoid people. Even spending time with my loved ones can be tense if I haven’t spent enough time alone. But curiosity got the better of me and, slowly, cautiously, I ventured into the vortex.

So, I opened an account and added friends that I knew itrw (in the real world) who were on Facebook. I was happy to say I had 20 facebook “friends”. However I couldn’t help noticing that other facebookers, especially my artist friends, had hundreds, even thousands, of “friends”. How on earth can someone have that many friends? It seemed artificial, greedy, slutty and voyeuristic. And of course, it is. Yet… I couldn’t help trolling through the friend lists of other people. I noticed that my friend Jeff in Ottawa had friended  ArtListPro, a rambling full throttle smorgasbord of unmitigated art information.

I noticed that ArtListPro had more than 200 friends so I started posting photos of my work on their page and commenting on the postings. Much of the postings were of international artists. I was fascinated. I wondered where they were based – New York, L.A. Rome?  Before long I found myself in a dialogue with Chris Healey one of the proprietors. Turns out, ArtListPro was based in Toronto, a mere kilometre from loop gallery. ArtListPro was launching a website. Chris was organizing an art exhibit at CulturShok on Queen Street West at Dufferin to launch the site so he invited me to include a piece. Of course I jumped at the opportunity. The ArtListPro community extends far beyond the city limits. A number of guests at the opening traveled from Ottawa, Montreal and Guelph.

More recently, Juno Youn organized a fundraiser for Haiti using Facebook. In fact the show opens tonight (Saturday, February 6th at Jimmy’s Coffee on Portland Ave). Juno sent out a call for art for the silent auction. I, once again, jumped at the opportunity. In just two months I have participated in two shows which were initiated through Facebook. My friend list grows daily. Once I got passed the initial shy stage of cyber networking I entered into what I called my facebook slut phase. I threw myself at any artist or musician I recognized. Before long I found myself among the who’s-who of Canadian Art and experimental electronic artists. Two communities I have an affinity with.

Sixteen years ago, when my wife was doing her masters at York, we had access to the internet through her university account. Back then, everything was text. I’m talking pre-Windows. My fantasy about what the internet would offer is very much what facebook offers today, an opportunity for each of us to be one of the jewels in Lord Indra’s Net.  According to Wikipedia, Lord Indra's Net: In Buddhism, one of the metaphors for the inter-connectedness of all things is found in Indra’s Net. In Vedic mythology, the net hangs over the palace of the god Indra. The net is held together by a jewel located at each intersection of the net’s fibers and when the sun shines on one jewel, the reflection of that jewel becomes a part of all the other jewels’ radiance.
Indra’s Net is part of a Buddhist teaching which describes infinite realms of space within infinite realms of space, all connected, all dependent on the others.

By Charles Hackbarth

my ghost likes to travel

These paintings come together in a process that feels haphazard and chaotic. To begin, the waters must flow. Paint is diluted, viscosity is determined. A spill is launched. Textured gesso, or raw un-stretched canvas, waits, drinks in the manna, begs for more. This is the way continents form. Coloured mud coagulates. Sometimes it blends into the damp waiting loam, sometimes it runs side by side through twisted terrain creating raspberry ripples or cosmic gas clouds. I crouch down close to the canvas, sit back on my heels and watch the paint dry, boredom’s proverbial cliché. I am transfixed. (This is not boring to me). Sometimes I am compelled to tip the whole thing to the north, running rivulets in harmony, tilt it to the east and back south. Thus, a network of loops is produced. Cells. Catacombs. Cul-de-sacs. Sub-divisions in the desert. Embedded within each terrain is the map, the matrix. In order to keep us safe, in order to get us home, maps must tell us little white lies. Blood must flow for life to continue. Capillaries carry my dreams beyond tomorrow, toward the unknowable. Future generations sail down these salty rivers. Ancestors lurk within microscopic cells, waiting to tell their unfinished stories. I hover above the topography of drying paint, a satellite on reconnaissance. A network of patterns and systems emerge from the mist, mysterious and comfortable. I watch as layers peel away, sub-atomic, chthonic, geological, geo-political, social, biological. They tell me what I need to know. They show me how to stay safe and how to find my way home. But who are these visitors? Faces materialize out of the tangle of patterns. Some of them are familiar; my grandmother and my grandfather. Others, I don’t know. Are they ghosts who’ve come to haunt me? The strangers who lurk in my own subconscious? Pilgrims or refugees?