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

Interview with Rochelle Rubinstein

loop member Rochelle Rubinstein was recently featured on The World of Threads Festival Weekly Fibre Artist Interview Series.  In this interview, she describes her working process, sources of inspiration and other aspects of her artistic practice. Read the interview here.

Rochelle Rubinstein's current exhibition with Lanny Shereck entitled HOMESTEAD is at loop Gallery until September 25, 2011. Homestead, features a collaborative installation of Lanny's house-like structures covered with Rochelle's block-printed, painted and embroidered silk - an exploration of the notion of home and of dwelling. Together the artists intended to evoke the permanence and strength of stone in combination with the fragility and comfort of fabric.

Homestead: Rochelle Rubinstein and Lanny Shereck

Rochelle Rubinstein and Lanny Shereck
Homestead

September 3 - September 25, 2011
Reception: Thursday, September 8, 6-8pm

Rochelle Rubinstein and Lanny Shereck at Loop Gallery

loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Rochelle Rubinstein and Lanny Shereck, entitled Homestead. 

“We shape our dwellings and afterwards our dwellings shape us.”

Winston Churchill

This exhibition presents an exploration of the notion of habitation and homesteading.

The evocation of home in a collaborative installation, DWELLING, combines the permanence and strength of stone with the fragility and comfort of fabric.  The three structures, one hovering slightly above ground, with their accompanying chimneys or silos, evoke old barns, quaint cottages, or mini-shelters. Their lack of functionality, including an absence of doors and windows, is both alarming and sad.

Individual works by Rochelle Rubinstein consist of printed, painted and carved wood panels depicting imaginary villages. Here, ideas and concerns about the home extend to the communities that shape us. Issues of privacy, alienation, and claustrophobia permeate these environments, where Sherpa villages morph into suburbia, straw bale cottages into concrete bunkers.

Lanny Shereck has created painted and collage works of architectural and building debris, referring to the materials, methods and values with which we shape our homes. This work evokes the messy processes of destruction and construction that somehow give form to our quest for habitation.

Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Thursday, September 8, 2011 from 6-8 pm.

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 of Question and Answer Session with Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein

If you missed Saturday's Question and Answer session with Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein moderated by Pat Macaulay at Loop Gallery, don't despair. Click on this LINK to see clips filmed by Ester Pugliese. 


Libby Hague's SAFETY NET & Rochelle Rubinstein's SHAFT exhibitions run until Sunday, June 13th.

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.

Leah Sandals of The National Post reviews Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein Show at Loop

Leah Sandals of the National Post chose Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein's current show at Loop Gallery as a "prime pick" in her column Sights High and Low.

She begins her review with "Luscious material processes and playful creative experiments highlight this two-person show." Sandals concludes that "In the end, both exhibitions highlight what's often missing from galleries, and even visual culture at large -- the productive messiness of studio spaces, rooms that can be cozy and expansive all at once." 

To read the full review,  click here.

Join Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein at Loop Gallery tomorrow, Sunday, June 6th at 3 pm for a Question and Answer session moderated by Pat Macaulay.

Question and Answer Session with Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein

Join us for a Question & Answer session this Sunday, June 6th at 3pm for Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein in conversation with Pat Macaulay.

Libby Hague is a visual artist who works primarily in print installation.  Based in Toronto, she is featured in the British book, Installations & Experimental Printmaking by Alexia Tala and won the 2009 Open Studio National Printmaking Award. She is represented in many public collections including the Donovan Collection at the University of Toronto.

Rochelle Rubinstein is a Toronto-based artist whose work has been exhibited in diverse venues worldwide and can be found in public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.  As a community arts facilitator, her workshops and projects with groups such as battered women are based upon methods that are central to her own artistic practice. 

Pat Macaulay is the Head of Visual Art at Harbourfront Centre. Macaulay's most recent curatorial projects include a group of exhibitions opening on June 18 at Harbourfront: Combine is an exhibition of eighteen artists from Saskatchewan. Redux Park is an exhibition of three architecture firms 5468796 (Winnipeg) Brook McIlroy (Toronto) and Vlan Paysage & Atelier in Situ (Montreal) and an installation by T&T. Beyond Imaginings is a large outdoor photographic exhibition with Becky Comber, Keesic Douglas, Martie Giefert, Mark Kasumovic, Rob MacInnis, Erin Riley, Meera Margaret Singh, Garett Walker.

Libby Hague's SAFETY NET & Rochelle Rubinstein's SHAFT exhibitions at Loop Gallery run until Sunday June 13, 2010.

SAFETY NET and SHAFT are exhibited concurrently with STILL LIFE ON EARTH, a collaborative installation by Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein, at Mon Ton Window at 402 College Street.

Question & Answer Session:

Libby Hague & Rochelle Rubinstein

Sunday, June 6th, 3 PM at loop.

Moderated by Pat Macaulay, Head, Visual Art, Harbourfront Centre,

followed by Afternoon Tea at 402 College Street.

Rochelle Rubinstein at Loop Gallery

Rochelle Rubinstein is currently exhibiting at Loop Gallery in a show entitled SHAFT.

A follow up to last year’s homage to Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic, SHAFT expands upon Rubinstein’s interest in strong narrative themes conveyed within an abstract, formal language.  These larger wood panels, printed, painted and carved with subtle detail in a bold manner, depict the shaft as a pit, a conduit, passageway, a well, but also as a barb, a blow, a wound, a dig.

A series of columns, sheathed in printed, painted and quilted fabric and paper, serve as counterpoints to the wood panels. These are at once shafts as spears or staffs, or shafts of light, beams, radiance and darkness, life and death.


SHAFT will be exhibited concurrently with STILL LIFE ON EARTH, a collaborative installation with Libby Hague, at Mon Ton Window at 402 College Street.

Rochelle Rubinstein is a Toronto-based artist whose work has been exhibited in diverse venues worldwide and can be found in public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.  As a community arts facilitator, her workshops and projects with groups such as battered women, people with eating disorders, and health workers, are based upon methods that are central to her own artistic practice: drawing, printmaking, painting, sewing and bookmaking.

SHAFT will be on display until June 13, 2010.

Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein

Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop members Libby Hague entitled SAFETY NET and Rochelle Rubinstein entitled SHAFT.

Libby Hague

Libby Hague's exhibition called SAFETY NET is "The trans-atlantic shift of the Elliott plaid", a deconstructed riff on Hague's ancestral tartan with an interjected grove of birch trees, and Safety net, designed to retain things of value and connected to a cluster of strangely optimistic creation experiments. A selection of landscape paintings with sculptural complications, includes Shotgun marriage, Abracadabra - and it did, Tender + Tight and Heaven does a backbend.

Libby Hague  is a Toronto-based visual artist who works primarily in print installation. Her recent exhibitions include being natural at the Durham Art Gallery and One step at a time at the Art Gallery of Mississauga. She is featured in the British book, Installations & Experimental Printmaking by Alexia Tala and won the 2009 Open Studio National Printmaking Award. She is represented in many public collections including the Donovan Collection at U of T.

Rochelle Rubinstein

Rochelle Rubinstein’s exhibition SHAFT expands upon Rubinstein’s interest in strong narrative themes conveyed within an abstract, formal language.  These larger wood panels, printed, painted and carved with subtle detail in a bold manner, depict the shaft as a pit, a conduit, passageway, a well, but also as a barb, a blow, a wound, a dig.  A series of columns, sheathed in printed, painted and quilted fabric and paper, serve as counterpoints to the wood panels. These are at once shafts as spears or staffs, or shafts of light, beams, radiance and darkness, life and death, etc.

Rochelle Rubinstein is a Toronto-based artist whose work has been exhibited in diverse venues worldwide and can be found in public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.  As a community arts facilitator, her workshops and projects with groups such as battered women are based upon methods that are central to her own artistic practice.

SAFETY NET and SHAFT will be exhibited concurrently with STILL LIFE ON EARTH, a collaborative installation by Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein, at Mon Ton Window at 402 College Street.                                        

Libby Hague's and Rochelle Rubinstein's exhibitions will be at Loop Gallery from May 22 - June 13, 2010.

Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Sunday, May 23rd from 2-4 pm.

Learn more about Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein's work during a Question & Answer Session at loop on Sunday, June 6th at 3pm. Moderated by Pat Macaulay, Head, Visual Art, Harbourfront Centre, followed by Afternoon Tea at 402 College Street.