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.

Last Chance to See Heather Carey and Ian McLean at Loop

Ian McLean

Heather Carey

This is the last weekend to see Ian McLean and Heather Carey's exhibitions of paintings at Loop Gallery. Globe & Mail art critic R.M. Vaughan mentions them in today's Visual Arts Review Other Venues and says "Last chance to see Carey & McLean's separate but blended sets of paintings. Carey mixes abstract forms with architectural details - bttresses and blobs. McLean recreates mid-century luxury homes but paints them as if they've been dunked in acid. Clearly home is where the (broken) heart is."

The gallery is open today, Saturday August 13 from noon to 5 pm and tomorrow Sunday from 1-4 pm.

Loopers in the news

Here are some loopers who have made the news recently:

Sandra Gregson

Sandra Gregson was mentioned in R.M. Vaughan's weekend review of Toronto's art scene in the Globe & Mail. He wrote this about Sandra's recent show at Loop: "Last chance to catch Gregson’s shredded-book wonders – exquisite mobiles, carpets, sculptures and collages made from carefully threaded strips of hapless, grinder-fed books. Best (ab)use of Joyce’s Ulysses ever." Read the complete article here.

Modification, oil on canvas (16x20) by Ian McLean

Ian McLean was featured in the last issue of Hamilton Arts and Letters in an article called Ian McLean: Yards & Muscle Cars by Andrea Rabinovitch. She describes McLean's work as follows:
"Stylistically impressionistic in richly hued colours, the use of the sharply delineated pristine swimming pools in many of the paintings suggest, nature controlled, confined within a very strict order that is considered a status symbol we all subscribe to. Like the Hockney pools of the late sixties, they are used as a compositional tool to describe a place, both real and metaphorically inherent in us hapless humans, but also to consider the nature of water contained." Read the complete article here.

Libby Hague at the AGO

Libby Hague's installation at the AGO was reported in ArtDailyNews and included the following quote from curator Michelle Jacques, the AGO's acting curator of Canadian art. “Libby Hague’s playful, yet foreboding narratives give physical form to fictional worlds that simultaneously mirror and manipulate reality. 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.”

And I published an extract of my conversation with Director and CEO of the AGO, Matthew Teitelbaum, on Fashion Projects. We chatted about art and fashion. The link is here.

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.

Review of Ester Pugliese's Work by R.M. Vaughan

Empirical Spaces #2 by Ester Pugliese 2011

Art critic R.M. Vaughan of the Globe & Mail included an invitation to his readers to visit Loop Gallery for the last weekend of Ester Pugliese's series of paintings called Empirical Spaces. He says "Like some unformed dream coming into slow but inevitable shape, Pugliese’s works invite, and reward, a long, free-associational gaze." The complete review can be read here.

The gallery will be open today from noon to 5 pm and tomorrow from 1 to 4 pm. Another not to be missed show is Sandra Smirle's exploration of randomly selected locations called "Like/Unlike and other circular decisions".

Gary Clement and Thelma Rosner at Loop

Moon Base Alpha by Gary Clement 2011

Even before the opening of Gary Clement's and Thelma Rosner's shows at loop Gallery today, their work has attracted reviewer's attention.

The Globe & Mail newspaper's reviewer R.M. Vaughan says "Clement's madcap, itchy drawings about 'dark matter' and Rosner's liturgy-and-politics-informed paintings about the Israel-Palestine conflict appear to be an odd match - but both artists are seeking manageable answers to impossible questions." (Globe and Mail, The Exhibitionist by R.M. Vaughan, Saturday, February 19, 2011, Globe Arts page R14)

The National Post featured an interview of Clement about cartoons and creativity in yesterday's paper. Written by the Post's Barry Hertz, the interview reveals that Clement "did maybe 400 drawings initially, then got it down to 150 for the second cut, and from that edited it down to 42. They all had to be ink on paper or ink and collage on paper." The full text can be read here.

Join Gary Clement and Thelma Rosner at loop Gallery this afternoon from 2-5 pm to celebrate their opening.

loop Gallery is located at 1273 Dundas Street West at Dovercourt. 

The new rule of cool: Gobs of colour by R.M. Vaughan

White Tortoise by JJ Lee 2010, Mixed Media Collage on Paper, 22x30

R.M. Vaughan, Globe&Mail arts reviewer, describes the saturated and vivid hues in five of six art exhibitions he viewed in Toronto this week as the "new rule of cool". Receiving a mention in the sidebar for shows in other venues is loop gallery member JJ Lee's show The White Tortoise of Ch'u which opens today. He describes her as a "sensualist collagist extraordinaire". To read the entire column, click here for the link.

Having seen JJ Lee's work up close during the installation of my own work in the front gallery at loop, I concur with R.M. Vaughan. Who needs a seasonal affective disorder lamp when you can bask in the sunny and happy hues of JJ Lee's beautifully collaged illustrations of Fabian Boutilier's book The White Tortoise of Ch'u?


Join us today for the opening reception at loop Gallery from 2-5 pm. JJ Lee and Fabian Boutilier will also be doing readings and answering questions tomorrow January 23rd at 3 pm as well as January 30th, February 6 and 13 at 3 pm.

A Review of Loop Member Sandra Smirle's Show at WARC by R.M. Vaughan

R.M. Vaughan of the Globe and Mail wrote a review of Loop member Sandra Smirle's show at WARC. The article was published on Saturday, November 27, 2010 and can be read in its entirety here.

Sandra Smirle at the WARC Gallery

An extract of the article is included below: 

Sandra Smirle at Women’s Art Resource Centre Gallery
Until Nov. 27, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 122, Toronto; www.warc.net

Today (Saturday, November 27, 2010) is your last chance to catch Sandra Smirle’s haunting shadow puppetry at Women’s Art Resource Centre.

Using table-sized, laser-cut circles of Plexiglas, thick creamy paper cut by hand and a huge 10-foot by 14-foot sheet of Tyvek (an industrial polyethylene that resembles canvas), Smirle crafts topographical cut-out maps of random street corners. She then projects lights through the maps, creating a dancing interplay between the lit surfaces and their crisp shadows.

Mapping, Smirle’s wispy shadows argue, is an inexact science – one as susceptible to the vagaries of perception as any other decoding process. To wit, Smirle culls her maps from imagery gathered by satellites, a system that sells itself as indisputable. But by metaphorically and literally putting the technology under the spotlight, she turns these allegedly infallible geographies into fluttering, ethereal speculations, questions their reliability.

No space is wholly knowable, no matter how many angels we can now count on the heads of pins.

R.M. Vaughan of the Globe and Mail reviews Libby Hague at Loop

In his weekly column The Exhibitionist, R.M. Vaughan of the Globe and Mail newspaper wrote a delightfully upbeat review of Libby Hague's current exhibition at Loop Gallery.

"Stretching her flora and fauna from ceiling to floor, Hague has created a deliciously tilted world, a cascade of curly, printed paper flowers, nursery-hued dollops and pools, dainty tinsel sprouts, bendy shapes that resemble fat orchid roots, and a miniature archipelago inhabited by surreal plant forms and organic mis-shapes. Unafraid to be pretty and (methodically) messy at the same time, Safety Net is the boldest example yet of this experiment-driven artist's determination to set printmaking free, let it out of the frame."

To read R.M. Vaughan's  full review, click here.

Libby Hague's exhibition Safety Net continues at Loop Gallery until Sunday, June 13, 2010. 

Today at 3 pm, Loop Gallery presents Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein in a Question and Answer session moderated by Pat Macaulay.