Last Chance to see David Holt and Suzanne Nacha at Loop

This is the last weekend to see the exhibitions by David Holt and Suzanne Nacha at loop gallery. The show closes on Sunday, November 6, 2011 at 4 pm.
To see Artsync interview with Suzanne Nacha,  visit the ArtSync website here. There is also coverage of the opening by Artsync in their Gallery Hop feature here.

Suzanne Nacha at Harbourfront Centre Project Room

 Not only does Suzanne Nacha have her show "Signs for Travellers" on at loop Gallery, but she also has a concurrent exhibition at Harbourfront Centre called "In Deep" which opened in Harbourfront's Project Room on September 30 and runs until December 1, 2011.

Her Harbourfront exhibition "In Deep" is an installation that uses underground imagery as a metaphor for the human condition. Utilizing a narrow range of visual logic that hovers between illusion and abbreviated sign, a subtle, dark humour guides the viewer through a landscape both physical and psychological.

Held together by a common water level - a dialogue around the language of painting and the nature of the human psyche playfully unfolds in this installation of large-scale painted objects.

Suzanne Nacha is a Toronto based artist working in painting, sculpture and installation. Through the systematic abstraction and anthropomorphism of industrial and natural landscapes, she seeks to make iconic images that act at times as psychological mirrors to human experience. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States and Europe and represented in private and public collections including the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the National Bank of Canada and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, she holds degrees in both Fine Art and Geology. She has taught in the Fine Art departments of OCAD University, Sheridan/UTM and York University and for the past fifteen years, has worked in the mining industry mapping geographies of fortune and need.

Image: In Deep, installation detail, oil on panel, 2011, image courtesy of the artist

Harbourfront Centre
235 Queens Quay West
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5J 2G8
(416) 973 4000

David Holt and Suzanne Nacha at Loop Gallery

loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members David Holt entitled Landscapes and Subjects from Natural History, and Suzanne Nacha entitled Signs for Travelers.

David Holt’s paintings in his third show at Loop depict landscapes as well as motifs derived from displays of birds, antiquities, and other collections found in museums of natural history. Many of the works playfully reinterpret the grid-like arrangements of objects in museum display cases while others elaborate on concepts of ideal landscapes, from both Eastern and Western classical traditions. Taken together, the works explore our ideas about nature, culture, and memory.

A painter who has had many solo and group shows in the US, David Holt has been the recipient of a painting grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and an artist residency at the Ragdale Foundation. Holt lives and works in Toronto where he teaches art at Upper Canada College.
In a classically inspired narrative that looks at the idea of passage as both a means of access and a turning point or crossroads, Suzanne Nacha’s series of paintings entitled Signs for Travelers offers up a simplified visual logic that acts as a mirror to the human condition. Dark humour prevails as anthropomorphic forms evolving from underground tunnels, caves and rail systems play at the boundary between visual sign and physical trigger.

Suzanne Nacha is a visual artist working in painting, sculpture and installation. Through the systematic abstraction and anthropomorphism of industrial and natural landscapes, she seeks to make iconic images that act at times, as psychological mirrors to human experience. Born in Hamilton Ontario, she holds undergraduate degrees in both Geology and Fine Art from McMaster University and the University of Guelph respectively, as well as an MFA from York University in Toronto. She has taught in the Fine Art departments of OCAD, Sheridan/UTM and York University, and for the past fifteen years has worked in the mining industry mapping geographies of fortune and need.

Patrick Macaulay is the Head of Visuals Arts at Harbourfront Centre. Over the past fifteen years he has curated numerous exhibitions and has moved the visual arts programming at Harbourfront Centre in new and exciting directions. He received his MFA from The Art Institute of Chicago, BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and has worked in the studio programme at The Banff Centre.

October 15 – November 6, 2011
Reception: Saturday, October 15, 2011, 2-5 PM
Q&A: Saturday, October 15, 2011, 1 PM moderated by Patrick Macaulay

Images: David Holt, Landscape with Bird, acrylic on linen, 20 x 20 inches, 2011; Suzanne Nacha, tongue tied, oil on panel, acrylic, rope, 25 x 32 inches, 2011.

More loop at Art Toronto 2010

There is such a range of talent among the loop artists. Here is another selection of work that is available for sale at Art Toronto 2010 (Toronto International Art Fair).

Gone Missing by Yvonne Singer, 2010
Neon Installation, 30x9 inches
$2000

undersinister by Suzanne Nacha 2008
Oil on canvas, 26x22 inches framed ellipse
$1200

Sacred 2 by Elizabeth Babyn
Acrylic on canvas, 12x12
$400

Loop Gallery received a mention in today's Globe and Mail in the Arts section, page R15, in an article by Larry Humber called "No $100 Warhols, but there are bargains". This is what was written about Loop:

"The Loop Gallery, which recently relocated to Dundas West from Queen Street, is a cooperative with members each allotted a space. Works on the block include Martha Eleen's oil on wood titled Winner, priced at $900. Another member is cartoonish Gary Clement, whose watercolour Untitled/Air is $400". 

WINNER by Martha Eleen 2009
Oil on wood, 16x16
$900

LOOP Members at Harbourfront Centre Winter Exhibition

LOOP Gallery members Martha Eleen, Suzanne Nacha and David Holt are participating in the Big/Small exhibition curated by Patrick Macaulay at Harbourfront Centre and invite you to see their work which will be on display January 23 to April 4, 2010. This exhibition "brings together eight Ontario-based painters to reveal each participants' unique approach to realizing the landscape".

Suzanne Nacha: Focused on imagery from underground mine shafts, cave systems and rail tunnels, my current body of work entitled Origin seeks to present landscape as an intimate location. In many of these shaped paintings a struggle exists between the architecture of the space, the shape of the canvas and the abbreviated marks that define it. With this particular image I was interested in creating a space that would appear as though it was carved out of the darkness by the very lights it contained. 

Underground 7, Oil on Canvas, Copyright of Suzanne Nacha, 2009

David Holt: My recent paintings depict subjects from natural history, architectural history, antiquities collections, and botanical gardens. The garden landscapes are influenced by my love for the classical landscapes of Poussin, Asian landscape painting and calligraphy, and children’s drawings. Although I make many small drawings of the subjects, the paintings themselves are derived purely from imagination and memory. I try to evoke the motifs playfully with abbreviated forms and an economy of means. I also try to make each brushstroke convey something of nature’s energy while serving both representation and composition.

    Big Hedge 2009

    Acrylic on Canvas, 30x24, Copyright of David Holt, 2009

Martha Eleen is also in the community-centred show in the Harbourfront Centre Architecture Gallery opening the same night (guess she has to be in two places at once!). This show involves three architects and one painter on the topic of how architecture shapes the community. Martha's series Necessities of Life is about the poetics of using box mall signage.

The artists invite you to join them at the openings at Harbourfront Centre on Friday, January 22, 2010 from 6-10 pm.

Question and Answer Session with Audrea DiJulio and Suzanne Nacha

This is the final weekend to see Origin by Suzanne Nacha and Post-Haste by Audrea DiJulio at Loop Gallery.

Weekend hours will be Saturday 1-5 pm and Sunday 1-4 pm. 

Please join the artists at Loop Gallery on Sunday, December 20, 2009 at 2 pm for a Question and Answer session led by painter, writer and curator Pete Smith.

Loop Gallery
1273 Dundas Street West
Toronto, Ontario
416-516-2581

A Conversation with Audrea DiJulio and Suzanne Nacha

Call it synchronicity, fate or a happy accident, but the random pairing of Suzanne Nacha’s hypnotically subtle paintings (Origin) with Audrea Dijulio’s engaging sculptures (Poste Haste) creates a synergetic impact that is rare in a show that wasn’t orchestrated by a top notch curator. The following interview by Charles Hackbarth was conducted by e-mail over the course of a number of days. It has been reconstructed here as a conversation between him and the two artists.

Charles Hackbarth: Did the two of you know each other before this show?

Audrea: No not before membership at Loop however, we do share a similar background in that she (Suzanne) did her Masters at Guelph about the same time I did my BA and we are also both from Hamilton so I think it is inevitable that some of that is going to inform our work and result in overlaps.

CH: Did the fact that you were showing together shape your art in any way?

Audrea: Both of us, I believe, had completed work and established ideas and methodology for the show before there was any indication of who we were showing with. In fact I didn’t even know that Loop showed artists together like that. Our pairing was random and initially it sparked some panic in me because as a sculptor , especially considering the scale of my work, it is impossible to not be affected by or impact other work and structural elements in the space. Once I found out who I was showing with I wanted to meet her and see her work so that we could discuss the relationship between our works.

Quickly we realized that both of us had an organic sense that emanated from the work but also we had a structured intent that I believe comes from us having undertaken alternate educational directions, geology (Suzanne) and civil engineering technology(Audrea) respectively. Ultimately however, it was the critical art theory part of our art education that began to speak louder then the work itself so installation became quite an arduous task as a result.

Suzanne: For my part all, but one of my paintings was completed well in advance of the show. There is one (the elongated upright ellipse painting entitled 'loaded' ) that was painted around the same time that I saw Audrea's invite image. I definitely noted the similarity with her image and my painting in terms of palette and humour - and I played that up. I thought that it may have a relationship with her sculpture - but I wasn't entirely sure and also I didn't know if Audrea would be interested in showing some overt relationships between our work. I do remember, however, that Audrea (from the very start) suggested that we treat our show more like a two person exhibtion - since we were sharing the space (and this was my preference as well).

CH: Audrea, your media are obviously common, everyday materials along with some basic infrastructure type materials – pipes, etc. Is there a philosophical underpinning to the choice of material? I’m thinking Arte Povera type transformation of basic material. Also, does the notion of alchemy (turning base material into “gold”) factor in?

Audrea: This question has a lot here to address I'll try to keep the ideas organized….

You use the term ‘infrastructure’ type material. You can’t use that when talking about my work because there is no ‘underlying system’ I do not have a system of pipes, for example, that is somehow creating a framework for my sculpture. The pipe has the potential to be part of an infrastructure and that I describe as ‘implied function’ but not infrastructure. More accurately the materials I use are structural in that they are all playing a role in supporting the larger structure.

When you use the word Alchemy you force a conversation about (Marcel) Duchamp…. I am not going to get into that because yes I use found objects but not in that way. If anything I’m just breaking hierarchies in materials.

As for philosophical underpinnings, I favour the phenomenology side of philosophy as opposed to the psychological. I think Suzanne, in my opinion, has a psycho-analytical sense to her work that I definitely don’t have.

Arte Povera is political, this work is not political. I suppose you are making that association because of my use of ‘everyday’ materials (CH: Yes, I’m referring to the use of materials) however, that is not enough because my primary concern is with form; Arte Povera was not so much concerned with form as they were the relationships between the components within their work.

CH: Suzanne, I find it interesting that your paintings are about the subterranean world – sewers, etc. I think of these as dark, chthonic, visceral places, yet your work is very clean and “sanitized”. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Suzanne: As I've continued to work on this series over the past several years the paintings have become darker over time and more connected to their original subterranean reference. One of the more recent works in the show is the small diptych behind the desk entitled 'Limbo: fraternal'. With this particular painting I was trying to push a balance between the water that is painted in a more fluid manner and an overall authoritative structure that is dictated by and in turn supported by the circular edge of the canvas. It's true though that the much cleaner structure does always dominate over chaotic mark making with this series. I would put this down to my preference for paintings that get at the essence of an image or idea. Toward this end, I will often deliberately try to create convincing spatial illusions by using a line or colour in the simplest possible way. In the very cartoonish painting entitled 'the gluttonous' for example, a fat protruding space is defined by (and appears to be held in place by) a belt-like line initiated by the canvas edge.

CH: Suzanne, one can’t help but notice the twinning and mirroring of images. This brings to mind all kinds of concepts, the doppelganger being just one. Stereoscopic vision being another.

Suzanne: Yes, definitely...mirroring, twinning and folding are all there. I've observed this in many of my underground references - especially where there was water involved. But more than a formal or compositional strategy I was interested in the suggestion of altered states, psychedelia and an overall sense of the paintings as psychological rather than actual spaces. I did a series of screenprints during a residency at Open Studio last year and with these works in particular the psychedelic and mirroring aspects became a focus.

CH: Also, if both of you can speak about the overlap you find in each other’s work?

Audrea: Overlap… I think the strongest overlap comes from our compulsion to use elements which are rigid and familiar and change them into something vague so that it can be reconsidered, if you see it like that, then the tendency towards the organic, in this case, comes from a duality that is created.

Suzanne: I believe the crucial overlap in our work comes down to our interests in the structure of materials and how this can be played with and manipulated to affect the viewer's experience of balance and stability. There are also definite overlaps in terms of colour and humour.

Artist Profile: Suzanne Nacha

As a child, Suzanne Nacha created signs alongside her father in his sign painting business, but did not consider fine art as a career until after she completed her undergraduate degree in geology in 1989. She then pursued a BA in Visual Arts from Guelph University and an MFA from York University. Although Suzanne's preferred medium is oil paint, she has been influenced by sculptors such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, finding their "interest in the organic form and its ability to deliver psychological import" compelling. Painters that approach their subjects in sculptural ways such as Giorgio Morandi and Wayne Thiebaud, have also been an influence.

Taking inspiration from the natural world and from "something that an image suggests", Suzanne  begins her exploration of the subject matter by making many studies in gouache, manipulating these in terms of composition, colour and overall format. Sometimes this process leads to a larger work or will result in an image being abandoned in favour of others. In her current series of work Origin currently on display at Loop Gallery, Suzanne explores the underground imagery of tunnels, caves and mine shafts manipulating them to "create a sense of physical unease". Many of the titles are derived from the descending rings of Dante's version of hell.

1.  You work on very unusual formats of supports. Do you construct these yourself? Was this just for this particular show or do you usually work that way?

"In my last body of work entitled 'the geology of morals' I paired sculptural forms with simplified landscape paintings in order to animate a reading of something unseen within the landscape. I felt that at the time the sculptures were more successful in capturing a sense of form and materiality than the paintings they were paired with. With this new series entitled 'Origin" my strategy was to try to make the paintings do the things that the three dimensional sculptures did so well. Shaped canvases were an obvious solution to me and this meant that the internal visual logic of the picture plane was dictated by the external structural edge of the support."

2.  What fascinates you about underground tunnels, caves and mine shafts? And have you ever climbed into a cave?
"I was thinking about these underground spaces as the hidden darker side of landscape and somehow opposed to what we know exists on the surface of the earth. I imagined these to be hollowed out sites - the caches or storage basins of history. I wondered what these spaces might have to say to us now - in light of recent histories and thus began the Origin Series.  
In the past I've been in a couple of small minor caves, in several underground mines and very recently, I visited the catacombs in Rome."

3. If you could chose anywhere in the world to travel and paint, where would you go?

"I'd really like to go to the Caves of Drach in Mallorca, Spain and also to the Mommoth Caves in Kentucky."

4. What is your next project?

"I am working on some large diptychs that continue the Origin Series (showing right now at Loop). I also have some side projects...a large group of works on paper that continue the narrative of the Origin series and an animation project on the theme of mining and the human condition."

Loop Gallery has Suzanne Nacha's Origin Series on display until December 20, 2009. To see more of Suzanne Nacha's work, visit her website here.

Audrea DiJulio and Suzanne Nacha Opening at Loop Gallery Tomorrow

In Audrea DiJulio's exhibition Post Haste at Loop Gallery, she has brought together familiar materials such as cardboard and plastic to develop intuitive sculptures in a hasty construction based process. The forms have an organic and colourful character which both delight and surprise the viewer.

 

 

Origin, Suzanne Nacha's exhibition at Loop Gallery, includes iconic images that reflect the human experience in paintings, prints and drawings. Unusual formats of presentation including circular canvases portray underground imagery featuring caves, tunnels and mine shafts and invoke references to Dante Aligheiri's Inferno. Suzanne Nacha's striking and uncommon format of presentation hovers between architecture and anthropomorphic form. 

 

Please join Suzanne Nacha and Audrea DiJulio for the opening reception at Loop Gallery tomorrow, Saturday, November 28th from 2-5 pm

1273 Dundas Street West

Toronto, Ontario

416-516-2581

The show runs from November 28th to December 20, 2009. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Saturday 1-5 pm, Sunday 1-4 pm.