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. 

You can read her interview here. http://www.worldofthreadsfestival.com/artist_interviews/087_kim_stanford_13.html

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

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 Perna, Double Visionary, 2013, 48 x 36 in; Canyon Pooling

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.

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!

Loop's Summer Correspondent Sarah Letovsky visits ESP

 

 

Beth Stuart, Teens in Tight Jeans (detail)  (2013)

BETH STUART at ERIN STUMP PROJECTS

Sarah Letovsky

Beth Stuart, But a Weak Smile (2012)

When you first enter “LOUD.BROWN.SHROUD”, Beth Stuart’s new show at Erin Stump Projects on Queen Street West at Dovercourt, you’re greeted by a melange of work - paintings, sculpture, hanging objects. It’s also a playful mix of textiles - linens, leather, tile, paint, gold leaf. Stuart’s forte doesn’t just lie in one mode of creation - she thrives on the complex conversation created by a diversity of objects.Too Bright Light (2013), the large painting that greets you when you enter is a strange play of warm colours, oblique shapes, and bananas. Next to it is Teens in Tight Jeans (2013), a long, skinny, tiled pole, with a green arc resting on top, with large hoop earrings on either side. It’s a strange placement of objects, but they seem to be having a conversation.

Stuart, who was shortlisted for the 2010 RBC Canadian Painting competition, clearly works from a very conceptual place, and her work is rooted in cultural and literary references. At the front of the gallery is her artist’s statement, in which she writes, “as the three push on and pull off, they look, they consider their affinities and their conflicts, they tease their fractious symmetry. There is a shuffling dance to recommit the balance in their reflections, to adjust for change”. It’s certainly cryptic, but this is part of Stuart’s modus operandi; she plays on the edges of abstraction and figuration, a constant oscillation of meaning and reference. She leaves clues for us, maybe even red herrings, and let us consider, infer, or invent our own interpretation of her pieces. 

There’s also a definite sexual overtone to this show. Each piece in itself might not be overtly sexual, but together they tell a different story. Rode Hard, Put Away Wet (2013) is a marbled ball, suspended from a long leather string attached to the wall, reminiscent of a Louise Bourgeois-era of abstracted sculpture referencing the body. Another piece, But a Weak Smile (2012), is a large piece of grey linen suspended in the wall, its shape a double entendre- a coy smile, and a distinct hint at the female reproductive system. I definitely read the bananas differently as I passed by on the way out.

“LOUD.BROWN.SHROUD” closes on July 14th, don't miss it!

Photographs From John Ide & Catherine Carmichael Opening

Reception Saturday June 22, 2 to 5 p.m.: Catherine Carmichael and John Ide

Opening Saturday June 22, Catherine Carmichael: Elasticity, Fracture and Flow and John Ide: How Paper Remembers

The exhibitions continue until July 14, 2013.

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

John Ide, Composition Yellow (detail) 2013

Continuing a tradition of performative and unconventional object making, Carmichael presents a trio of wheeled sculptures in Elasticity, Fracture and Flow. These decidedly non-utilitarian creations fuse crude reclaimed materials including industrial concrete, nail polish, wire, and discarded paper into remarkably fragile and contemplative arrangements. Stationary, but ripe with the potential for movement, these curious accretions are both sculptures and poems on wheels. Carmichael is a Montreal-based performance and installation artist who has exhibited internationally. Her work can be found in public and private collections across Ontario, including the Donovan collection in Toronto, and the Tom Thomson Gallery in Owen Sound. How Paper Remembers is about forgetting and remembering. Throughout his career, Ide has borrowed images from family archives, the art of the past, and modern commercial media to explore confluences of personal and collective memory. In this body of work, this imagery fades into the background of thousands of cross-hatched lines which he erases and redraws, to create patterns of light and dark that randomly remember bits and pieces of what was there before. Ide is a Toronto-based artist who has exhibited widely. He created filmic works earlier in his career but returned to drawing in the mid-2000s. Recent exhibitions include “Process” at Toronto’s Gallery 1313, and “Time, Shadow, and Light” at Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant.

Loop's Summer Correspondent Sarah Letovsky visits Cooper Cole

Body builder (Vintage photo) (2013), Gina Beavers

Gina Beavers & Devin Troy Strother

Sarah Letovsky

Cooper Cole Gallery isn’t known for playing it safe, and their latest exhibition of work by Brooklyn based Gina Beavers & LA based Devon Troy Strother is definitely outside the box -  both metaphorically, and literally.

Gina Beaver’s half of the show is a series of cropped, monochrome, three-dimensional male abs. Beavers builds up layers of acrylic paint to give her pieces a structural element, placing the work somewhere in between painting and sculpture. Beavers, whose previous show “Palate” (2012) was based on Instagram photos of food, clearly thrives on playful, tongue-in-cheek comments on cultural cliches and topical references. This new work is definitely in the same realm, with a mix of sarcasm, immediacy, and fetishization.

THAT MATISSE SHIT, STILL LIFE INTERIOR WITH MASHANDA, "GUUUUUUURL I'M SO SLEEPY THO" (2013), Devin Troy Strothers

Similarly, Devin Troy Strother has created a body of three dimensional, playful pieces. Strother has gained recognition for his strikingly unconventional mode of work, which combines paint, crayon, marker, glitter, and construction paper in a colourful depiction of little figures and scenes, often popping out of the frame. Because of his artistic decisions, these have a naive, amateur quality (he usually signs them in the bottom-right corner in the manner of 12-year-old art projects), but are matured by their strong composition, intentionality, and often sexual subject matter. We’re clearly having an adult conversation with Strothers. His work is a kind of new Fauvism; mocking and reinventing old modes of art and re-appropriating them in new ways. The titles of the pieces are, to my mind, just as important as the work itself, and reveal a more layered conversation on race, art history, pop culture stereotypes, and Ebonics. One piece, a clear rendition of a Matisse, is discovered later to be called THAT MATISSE SHIT, STILL LIFE INTERIOR WITH MASHANDA, "GUUUUUUURL I'M SO SLEEPY THO" (2013). For art buyers, it definitely rolls off the tongue.

This exhibition is on until June 29th, so check it out before it closes at 1161 Dundas Street West, just down the street from Loop!

(Images courtesy of Cooper Cole)