Interviews on the World of Threads

Toronto artist and loop member Gareth Bate is also the exhibition curator of the upcoming World of Threads Festival. This exhibition of contemporary fibre art will take place in November 2012 in Toronto and Oakville and include the work of local, national and international artists.


Loop members who have been featured in the weekly series of artist interviews include:

Yael Brotman
http://www.worldofthreadsfestival.com/artist_interviews/056_yael_brotman_12.html

Sandra Gregson
http://www.worldofthreadsfestival.com/artist_interviews/040_sandra_gregson_11.html

Libby Hague
http://www.worldofthreadsfestival.com/artist_interviews/044_libby_hague_11.html

Mary Catherine Newcomb
http://www.worldofthreadsfestival.com/artist_interviews/051_mary_catherine_newcomb_2012.html


Rochelle Rubinstein
http://www.worldofthreadsfestival.com/artist_interviews/030_rochelle_rubinstein_11.html

To learn more about The World of Threads Festival, visit  http://www.worldofthreadsfestival.com

Last Chance to See The Exhibitions of Mary Catherine Newcomb and Martha Eleen at Loop Gallery

Mary Catherine Newcomb at loop Gallery

The exhibition of work by loop artists Mary Catherine Newcomb and Mary Eleen was reviewed by Toronto art critic Terence Dick. Read his Akimbo blogreview here. The gallery is open this afternoon from 1-4 pm and the show closes today.

R.M. Vaughn's Review of the Exhibitions of Martha Eleen and Mary Catherine Newcomb at Loop Gallery

The Great Hare by Mary Catherine Newcomb

Globe & Mail art critic R.M. Vaughn reviewed Martha Eleen and Mary Catherine Newcomb's exhibitions at loop Gallery, suggesting that the show which may at first "appear dissonant" actually reveals underlying tensions and subliminal commonalities that make the artists a "good team". Read the full text of the review called The Zen of Post-conceptual Art here.

Opening at Loop Gallery January 7, 2011

Paintings by Martha Eleen

Michele Harney and Martha Eleen's dad

The gallery is open today from noon to 5 pm and on Sunday from 1 to 4 pm. Photos shown above are from last weekend's opening. Martha Eleen will be giving an artist talk at Toronto School of Art on Wednesday, January 18th at 6 pm.

Martha Eleen and Mary Catherine Newcomb at loop

loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Martha Eleen entitled I,Huck, and Mary Catherine Newcomb entitled Grassy.  

Tough Luck (oil on wood, 30x30) by Martha Eleen (2011)

I, Huck is the latest exhibition by Toronto-based artist Martha Eleen which maps the domestic space framing the artist’s relationship with her son Gabe, who is vulnerable and requires constant support.  This is an inside view of a dynamic person whose natural gifts of sharp wit, emanating love, and disarming honesty are often obscured by disability bias. The titles used in the work are quotes from Gabe. Fascinated by analog audio technology, Gabe listens to several recorded versions of Huckleberry Finn and likes to call himself ‘Huck.’ He thinks the “n” word is “neighbour”.

Martha Eleen is an honours graduate of Emily Carr College of Art, Vancouver, Canada. Her artistic practice engages the ideas of cultural landscape, the construction of society, and the politics of space through painting. Her work has been exhibited in public galleries in Canada, the United States, Japan, and Mexico. Martha Eleen is represented by loop Gallery in Toronto. She teaches painting and drawing at the Toronto School of Art.

Untitled (detail), rabbit's ear, glass, silver, grass by Mary Catherine Newcomb (2011-12)

In her exhibition at Loop Gallery Mary Catherine Newcomb combines an image of the hare, a recurring personal symbol, with her interest in working with living media in the 8’ long “Great Hare”. The exhibition also features a number of smaller pieces including a rabbit’s ear suspended in olive oil with a small silver cup, six silver beans on a small bed of grass, and a series of ink drawings on the rib bones of a cow. These works, together with the Great Hare, whose pelt of coiffed turf is literally alive to the touch, raise questions about relationship between different life forms. 

Mary Catherine Newcomb is a sculptor based in Southern Ontario who was born and raised in Montreal. She has received numerous awards form both the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work has been widely exhibited in Canada and internationally.

Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday, January 7^th from 2-5 pm.  Learn more about Martha Eleen and Mary Catherine Newcomb’s work during a Question & Answer Session at loop on Sunday January 15^th, 2PM. 

Progress Report on The Great Hare

Artist and loop member Mary Catherine Newcomb has been creating a fifteen foot long reclining hare with a pelt made of turf in the Cambridge Sculpture Garden. This land art installation is part of the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area that begins this week on Friday, September 16, 2011.

This is Mary Catherine Newcomb's final report before the CAFKA opening this Friday.

The hare continues to grow in a satisfactory way with a few exceptions:  The fur has grown to an extent (in most places) that I have been able to take it into shape a bit.   It is also thick and bunchy (in most places) so that in this last week, I will be able to compress, comb and cut into better shape.

The ears are still looking "stuck on"  and the tips brown. In addition to this one ear has a great brown blotch. I decided to seed and hope for the best, slightly repositioning the sprinklers for optimum ear coverage.   The toe ends tend to be a bit brown as well, but I think I will be able to comb them over. I decided at the time that replacing part of the ear turf and devising a better ear irrigation system would be a good idea. I had been planning to cut the small grass bits in my back yard last week - but ran out of time - good luck as some of it is quite long and may be of some help here.  Now that the weather has turned cooler,  growth will be slow.  This week, I will replace some turf and also devise eyes and work on details (this will probably entail digging up much of my back yard - purchased turf is just not long enough.)  It will be a long week.  

 The Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area runs until October 2, 2011. This year's theme SURVIVE:RESIST.

The Weekly Hare Report from M. Catherine Newcomb

On Thursday the 25th, the morning after the Great Storm, we put the ears on the hare. With the help and daring of Rex and John it was accomplished in about an hour.  The hare itself has been growing well and ears and tail will need a bit to catch up.

I visited the hare on the next day and did quite a bit of clipping/ pruning as well as  planting a bit of seed on his crown which had been disrupted by the ear operations - and around the face where he was looking sparse.

John and Rex are triumphant at the end of it. Judy took off the bottles and took some extra photos of the hare growing into itself nicely (last three photos).

All photos are by Judy Welsh except for the moment of triumph taken by me.

Post by Mary Catherine Newcomb

Update on the Great Hare Project

The Great Hare (in progress)
Photo by M.Catherine Newcomb

Artist and loop member Mary Catherine Newcomb continues to monitor the growth of her fifteen foot long reclining hare in the Cambridge Sculpture Garden. This land art installation is for the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area that begins September 16 and runs to October 2, 2011.

M. Catherine Newcomb raking The Great Hare
Photo by Judy Welsh

Mary Catherine Newcomb's Great Hare sent this update on the project:
"I visited the hare on Friday. Parts of the pelt had grown long enough to rake into the right direction and I did a bit of face pruning.  There is only one sprinkler on it at the moment.  The gardener for The Cambridge Sculpture Garden has dug in the hose for it and will be digging in a second hose early this week so that there can be two sprinklers  in anticipation of the ears.  I am going to add the ears and tail on Thursday with the help of volunteers - I anticipate a bit of an ordeal but will be glad to have them out of my driveway and under the watchful eye of the hare stewards (Judy Welch and Judy Major Girardin from the Sculpture Garden.) The neck ruff and chest fur is not growing as quickly as the rest - so I may get a third sprinkler or extra hose to focus on this area." 


For more information about the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area, visit their website here.



Photos provided courtesy of M. Catherine Newcomb c2011

Growing a Rabbit

The Great Hare by M. Catherine Newcomb

Artist and loop member Mary Catherine Newcomb is growing a rabbit in the Cambridge Sculpture Garden. This fifteen foot long reclining hare has a pelt made of turf.  This land art installation is part of the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area that begins September 16 and runs to October 2, 2011. This year's theme SURVIVE:RESIST.

In the artist statement for the piece, M. Catherine explains that "According to Algonquian myth, the Great Hare (Michabo)  is considered to be the grandson of the moon and son of the west wind and is recognized as the animal demi-urge." 

When M. Catherine was a young girl, about about the age of ten or eleven, she discovered that rabbits do in fact gather under the full moon.  She had been walking in the woods in Quebec with her grandparents the morning after a full moon when they came upon their gathering place.  This convinced her (and still does) that "something profound and mysterious is going on behind a veil of what we describe as real."

CAFKA volunteers helping with the installation of M.C. Newcomb's work

This work required the help of a team of CAFKA volunteers as is evident from the photos from the installation. Volunteers helped her to install the body and add legs and head which were formed in advance by building turf and earth into welded steel forms. M. Catherine explains that the process of installation  is ongoing. "I am grooming/clipping the turf on a weekly basis as the hare grows into something more hare-like.  I am still growing ears and tail in my driveway and will add them to the hare when they are better established - probably late next week or early the following week.  At this stage it is really important that the turf establishes itself.  I was concerned about getting moisture to stay beneath the vertical surfaces as opposed to just running off - hence the bottles that are attached to deep watering spikes."

Watering the rabbit

For more information about the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area, visit their website here. To see more of Mary Catherine Newcomb's work, visit her website here.

Photos provided courtesy of M. Catherine Newcomb c2011

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. 

Video Clip from the Conversation with Mark Adair and Mary Catherine Newcomb

The gallery is closed this week for installation and it will no longer be possible to see the beautiful work of Mark Adair and Mary Catherine Newcomb. However, there is an enlightening video clip of the Question and Answer session with Mark and Mary Catherine which was facilitated by Gordon Hatt.

Listen to this four minute clip and learn more about the artistic process. Click on the Vimeo link here.

Daphne and Apollo

Today is the last day to see this extraordinary sculpture by Mark Adair called Daphne and Apollo. When I saw this, I marveled at Mark's incredible skill at making wood come alive.

Loop Gallery is open today from 1 to 4 pm. Also on view are Mark's drawings and Mary Catherine Newcomb's magical bunny sculpture called Chocolate.

Mark Adair & Mary Catherine Newcomb in conversation with Gordon Hatt.

Join us at Loop Gallery TODAY Saturday April 17th for a Question and Answer session at 3pm. Gordon Hatt will facilitate the discussion with Mark Adair and Mary Catherine Newcomb.

Mark Adair is a Toronto artist who does charcoal works on paper and makes sculpture. His work was recently featured in the Patrick Jenkins documentary, Death Is In Trouble Now, airing on BRAVO! Television, which was also the basis for a 25-year retrospective of Adair's work mounted at Brock University's Rodman Hall Arts Centre. Adair is a graduate of York University, Toronto (BFA 1979) and the University of Victoria (MFA 1982). He is a founding member of the Torontoniensis Collective with whom he has exhibited since the mid 1990's. He has exhibited with Loop since 2004.

Mary Catherine Newcomb was born and raised in Montreal. She received her art education at University of Waterloo and York University. She currently works and resides in Kitchener, Ontario. She has received numerous grants and awards and her work has been exhibited internationally.

Gordon Hatt is an independent arts writer and curator living in Kitchener, Ontario. He was the Director/Curator at Rodman Hall Arts Centre in St. Catharines from 2004 to 2007 and before that the Curator of Temporary Exhibitions at Cambridge Galleries, Cambridge Ontario.

Mark Adair's Death's Children & Mary Catherine Newcomb's Chocolate exhibitions run until Sunday April 18th. Gallery hours are:  Saturday, April 17th 1-5pm and Sunday, April 18th 1-4pm

Gary Michael Dault Reviews the Current Show at Loop Gallery

Art critic Gary Michael Dault has written a review in today's Globe and Mail Newspaper of the current show of Mary Catherine Newcomb's and Mark Adair's work at LOOP Gallery. His review is called "A bunny with a chemical scent and a hint of myth" and can be read here.

Of Mary Catherine's Newcomb's hand sculpted rabbit, Dault says "Stretched out on its bed of crushed stone, Newcomb's chocolaty rabbit looks like a victim - like a creature sacrificed, as both primitive rituals and the story of Jesus's death, rebirth and scension would have it,  in order to bring about the re-emergence of new life. In Newcomb's skillful hands, it's no distance at all from the low comedy of her mucking about in an animal feed bin to the generation of myth. Her bunny may be made of ignoble stuff, but it has about it an aura of sanctity."

Dault also offers high praise to Mark Adair's work calling them "brilliantly spooky" and comparing his "tiny, astonishingly detailed charcoal drawings" to Hans Holbein's Dance of Death woodcuts from 1538.

The exhibition by Mary Catherine Newcomb and Mark Adair continues at Loop Gallery until Sunday, April 18, 2010.

Upcoming Exhibitions by Mark Adair and Mary Catherine Newcomb

LOOP Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Mark Adair and Mary Catherine Newcomb.

Mark Adair’s Death’s Children is a new series of small charcoal drawings that completes Death Drinks, a narrative about the adventures of Death in the modern world. Adair has worked on and off on the series for a decade and it has been exhibited in many shows in various stages of development. Both the subject matter and the labour intensive and detailed style of the work are inspired by the art of the 14th Century in western Europe.

Mark Adair is a Toronto artist who does charcoal works on paper and makes sculpture. His work was recently featured in the Patrick Jenkins documentary, Death Is In Trouble Now, airing on BRAVO! Television, which was also the basis for a 25 year retrospective of Adair's work mounted at Brock University's Rodman Hall Arts Centre. Adair is a graduate of York University, Toronto (BFA 1979) and the University of Victoria (MFA 1982). He is a founding member of the Torontoniensis Collective with whom he has exhibited since the mid 1990's. He has exhibited with Loop since 2004.

Mary Catherine Newcomb is exhibiting a four foot long reclining "chocolate" hare at Loop Gallery. The hare regards the viewer balefully and actually consists of a malleable material that smells slightly oily or rancid. A suspended, oversized apple blossom crown that is made from copper, bronze and steel accompanies the rabbit. While heralding the beginning of spring, this exhibition juxtaposes ideas about beauty, illusion, consumption and our complex and often romantic relationship with nature.  

Mary Catherine Newcomb was born and raised in Montreal. She received her art education at University of Waterloo and York University. She currently works and resides in Kitchener, Ontario. She has received numerous grants and awards and her work has been exhibited internationally.

Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday, March 27th from 2-5 pm.