Elizabeth Babyn and Linda Heffernan at Loop Gallery

loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Elizabeth Babyn entitled Illumination and Linda Heffernan entitled Inadvertent Intervention.

Elizabeth Babyn's current body of work, titled Illumination, derives its inspiration from a selection of under painted images depicting sacred geometry, sacred places and sacred architecture on raw canvas. With spontaneous large gestural brush strokes, she allows her intuition to direct her as she navigates her way through the canvas.

Babyn obtained her BFA with honors in Drawing and Painting at the Ontario College of Art and Design. She paints and teaches at her Bolton studio, north of Toronto. She has been a Loop Gallery member since 2003 and has exhibited in Ferrara Italy, Propeller Gallery for the Visual Arts, Spin Gallery, Whitney Gallery, SGI, McMichael Gallery, Caledon East Studio Tour and various other venues in the surrounding area.

Linda Heffernan’s Inadvertent Intervention is a series of paintings that explores the aesthetic beauty in the potential ramifications of extreme climate change by imagining satellite views of Canfield oceans.

Linda Heffernan is a Whitby-based artist exploring themes of consumer capitalism and bureaucracy in an ever more interconnected global economy. She has a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design. Linda is a member of Loop Gallery and has exhibited her work in a number of galleries in Toronto's Queen West district as well as Whitby's Station Gallery and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa.

August 28 - September 19, 2010
Reception: Saturday, September 11th, 2 - 5 pm

Question & Answer Session: Saturday September 18, 3 pm

Moderated by Catherine Beaudette.

Save the Date - Sunday, October 17, 2010

Save October 17, 2010 on your calendar. Loop Gallery is planning a fabulous fundraiser at Lula Lounge in Toronto.  The doors will open at 7 pm. At 8 pm, a concert will begin with great music performed by Aaron Davis, Jonathan Goldsmith and friends. Following the concert, there will be dancing for the remainder of the evening (from approximately 930 pm until 11 pm).  

Tickets are $30 each and are available through Loop Gallery or from any Loop Gallery member.

Interview with Alistair Magee by Otino Corsano

To read Otino Corsano's interview with Alistair Magee about his work in loop's current exhibition Faithful and Faithless Messengers, click here.

Photos from the Opening Reception for Faithful and Faithless Messengers

Photo credits: Ester Pugliese, 2010

loop Gallery presents Faithful and Faithless Messengers

Faithful and Faithless Messengers 

   

Mark Adair

Catherine Daigle

Patrick Jenkins

Alistair Magee

Mary Catherine Newcomb

Rochelle Rubinstein

 

August 11 - 22, 2010
Reception: Thursday, August 12th, 6 - 9 pm

  

loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition entitled Faithful and Faithless Messengers by Mark Adair, Catherine Daigle, Patrick Jenkins, Alistair Magee, Mary Catherine Newcomb and Rochelle Rubinstein. The exhibition addresses the dual nature of the artist as both messenger and art historian aware of the long history of messengers in art, be it The Virgin Mary, The Lord of the Flies, The Redeeming Angel, or just  language itself  "... lost in a sea of paint."  Works range from sculpture, printmaking and painting through to animated film.

Mark Adair:  “After my father died my mother told me that she wanted an angel for her tombstone. Now angels are not rare in art history so I did my due diligence and tried to figure out what one would look like. Then I found a slab of marble in the ruins of an old insane asylum and chipped and scraped away at it for about a decade on and off until I came up with this piece. The style comes from a Sumerian cylinder seal I saw in The Louvre. Perhaps angels were still around then as the Mesopotamians were closer to the beginning of time.”  


Catherine Daigle:  Between 2001 and her death in 2006, Catherine Daigle did a number of works using insects and stenciled images of flies. The little piece in this show Hissing for Flies was by inspired by Isaiah 7:18 (in the Old Testament), "And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord will whistle for the fly". Daigle made works on acetate, plexiglass, and paper that were suggestive of clouds of flies, a phenomenon most us associate with foreboding.

Patrick Jenkins:  In this exhibition Jenkins presents two films along with Giclèe prints of some of the individual paintings created in the making of the movies. Labyrinth is a surrealistic mystery in which a detective encounters strange phenomena and beings from the afterlife. Towers Rising, an animated film loop, was created spontaneously, and in retrospect, Jenkins realizes it was a response to 9/11. Jenkins’ work explores the journey of the spirit through life, the imagination, and in Towers Rising, a desire for gentleness in a post 9/11 world.


Alistair Magee:  The technique employed to make these paintings involves repetitive stenciling of written language used as a system or grid to support more expressive brushwork. Palimpsest is central to the work. In all of his work since 2000, Magee has attempted to unmoor legibly meaningful but formulaic language and pull it back into the realm of abstraction. The stasis of inscription is released to ambiguity in a sea of paint.

Mary Catherine Newcomb:  Assumption of the Virgin 1996. “I have always been interested in the relationship between the spiritual and the corporeal, partly because I was raised to think that there wasn't one and partly because I am a sculptor. This piece plays off the Catholic feast of the Assumption (celebrated August 15th) when the BVM was bodily received into heaven. There is an intellectual debate as to whether she died before the ascension or was vacuumed up just as she was about to die - I can't see that it matters as she was only dead for a bit. Assumption can be an active or passive verb - meaning two different things... the gesture of the legs suggests questions about the relationship between the body and the sacred. The beeswax refers to, and smells like, Catholic church candles of my childhood. Beeswax has also been used to sculpt bodies over the bones of the saints – i.e. flesh out relics. The piece is cast from my own body and the legs are hollow.”

Rochelle Rubinstein:  Over & Above is the newest addition to an ongoing project called Marginalia, which consists of hundreds of printed, painted and carved wood panels. It was originally inspired by the 16th century codices of Mexico. When the Spanish army of Cortez converted the Aztecs to "the true faith" at sword point, it was under a banner bearing an image of the Virgin Mary. In Over and Above, a blond Mary holds her boy, surrounded by archangels and messengers and by the Hebrew phrase, "And his banner over me was love" (Songs of Songs in the Old Testament). It is a riff on The Book of Kells, the 7th to 9th century Irish manuscript codex. Images of woman, boy, angels, stones, babies, and words have been printed and over-printed on the four large wood panels. This repetition leads to variation and invites reflection.


Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Thursday, August 12th from 6-9 pm. 

Question and Answer Session with Eric Farache

Loop Gallery is hosting a Question & Answer session with Eric Farache moderated by David Jager on Saturday, August 7th at 3pm.

 
Eric Farache's's exhibition of large format photography at loop Gallery, titled Manifest Dream, is an investigation into the convergence of time, image and memory through richly layered multiple exposures. Farache works with layered images all created in-camera, not digitally. Through exposures, reference points are created and strung together, creating a whole new reference point based on a very personal visual language.

Throughout Farache's practice, his work has consistently focused on the passage of time - capturing moments in history as well as place. Eric is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design (1994) in Fine Art and the University of Leeds where he earned his Masters in Fine Arts (2000). He often expresses his ideas in photography, sometimes utilizing the cheap and sensationalistic Holga camera.

David Jager has been a regular Art writer for NOW magazine for the last six years. He has also contributed articles and reviews to Canadian Art, including extensive cover profiles on Vancouver painter Ben Reeves and Video artist Kelly Richardson. He has also translated and edited works for the International Journal of Phenomenogical Psychology, and recently edited and translated a new work of cultural history by Professor Van Den Berg on the Two Laws of Thermodynamics. He is currently working on a book of philosophical essays by his father, Professor Bernd Jager, who is professor emiritus of Psychology at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

Eric Farache's Manifest Dream & Isabelle Hémard's Fuzzy, Furry and Cloudy exhibitions at loop Gallery run until Sunday August 8th.

Video of Question and Answer Session with Lorene Bourgeois and William Huffman

If you missed the Q&A session at Loop Gallery with Lorene Bourgeois and William Huffman a few weeks back, you can now view it here.

Isabelle Hémard at Loop Gallery

An exhibition of new drawings by Isabelle Hémard entitled Fuzzy, furry and cloudy is currently on display at Loop Gallery in Toronto.

In describing her work, Isabelle says:

"An unapologetic, hopeless romantic, I cannot filter what pulses through my heart from bleeding onto my paper. Fuzzy, furry and cloudy shares company with my previous public offerings though the honesty of my emotional self set free by the medium. 


The work is my catharsis from longing, my full blush of lust, my interpretation of the substantial weight of human attachment. I scratch, paint, carve, print, and sew each mood, each experience through and onto my materials…exposing them to myself.  Each dot... every fat or thin line... placement of pastel hues against dark sweeping negative spaces, even selecting each color is thrilling for me.


My personal experiences in love and life are a common bond with mankind. Further elaboration would only serve to diminish the connection between Art and Viewer.


I have been printmaking for 25 years and I love the layering and the manual, ancient component of the technique. I have missed the immediate gratification of drawing and painting so in this collection I have revisited those techniques. Large scale crayon drawings mixed with pastels and paint. My process of selection has been whatever feels good at that precise moment in time. The beauty of my process has been the simple lack of it.  The uncertainty of following my instincts to see where they might take me, not unlike the ‘process’ of falling in Love…


I also discovered that weather patterns accurately translate my feelings.  It has been overcast these days, but there are optimistic pink sunsets on the horizon promising glimpses of sun.  As for ’furry things’? Thank God for them and the fuzzy feelings that make me feel safe…happy…content..."



Toronto-based artist printmaker Isabelle Hémard was born in 1966 in France, and has lived in Canada since the early nineties. She completed her MFA at Diplôme National Supérieur d'Arts Plastiques in France and has exhibited in Canada and internationally. Her work can be found in many private, public and corporate collections.  Her work is available in Toronto through Loop Gallery, Open Studio and Tracey Capes Fine Arts. Isabelle's exhibition will be on display at Loop Gallery until Sunday, August 8, 2010. 

The Bloordale Alternative Art Fair

Join us this Saturday at the Bloordale Alternative Art Fair!  
                  
Loop Gallery is one of 20 Toronto galleries and artists that will be displaying their work at the Bloordale Alternative Art Fair (BAAF) on Saturday July 24, 2010. The fair takes place from 1 to 9 p.m. All artworks will be under $100.

Participating loop members include:

Tanya Cunnington
Tara Cooper
Elizabeth D'Agostino
Audrea DiJulio
Libby Hague
Linda Heffernan
Jane Lowbeer
Ingrid Mida
Suzanne Nacha
Mary Catherine Newcomb
Maureen Paxton
Barbara Rehus
Yvonne Singer

The BAAF is part of The New Bloor Street Festival. Previously known as Big on Bloor, this years' outdoor street festival is being hosted by the Bloordale Business Improvement Area (BIA) rather than being a joint effort between Bloordale and Bloorcourt BIAs.

For the festival, Bloor Street West will be a pedestrian-only zone between Lansdowne Avenue and Dufferin Street. Head to the west end of the festival for the Bloordale Alternative Art Fair, which takes place between Lansdowne and St. Clarens avenues. The BAAF is flanked by Toronto Free Gallery on the west end and Mercer Union on the east.

Coordinated by local curator Carla Garnet, the BAAF will include special events, performances and gallery exhibitions by artists, curators, art dealers and university art teachers. Art School Continues with teachers and students shared exhibitions tables. Curated projects by major commercial and artist run galleries.

Other fun stuff to see and do at the festival:
At Dufferin there will be an Art Court featuring student artwork by York University and The Ontario College of Art and Design students.

The festival will serve as the launch site of the Bloor Magazine, spearheaded by activist/artist Dyan Marie.

At 6:00 p.m. all the booths along Bloor Street will transform into a giant picnic table replete with table cloth, creating a dinner party banquet right out on the street.

The festival also features two live music stages, licensed outdoor patios, a food court, children's activities, and 300 vendors including not-for-profit organizations, as well as artisans selling jewellery, books and clothing.

Review of Loop Show on BlogTO

Loop Gallery's current exhibition of work by Eric Farache and Isabelle Hemard work is featured in BlogTO review by staff writer Matthew Purvis. Read the review with this link.