Category: Uncategorized

Julia Hall

August 2012

Jenine Marsh

August 2013

Aryen Hoekstra

August 2013

David Armstrong Six & Kristan Horton, Moyra Davey, Nestor Kruger, Gordon Lebredt, Elizabeth McIntosh, Euan Macdonald, John Massey, Andrew Reyes, Kevin Rodgers, Sally Spath and Stephen Wicks	May 24 – June 29, 2013
Curated by John Goodwin

Katie Lyle and Bridget Moser

July 7 – August 13, 2016

“The ear might be described as a bowl with elongated brim along its upper and lower extremities…” [1]

A Face or a Script Where the Lines Keep Changing is a two person exhibition of recent work by Katie Lyle and Bridget Moser. Consisting of painting, video, and photography, the exhibition is a collection of solitary portraits integrating faces, figures, and everyday objects in order to tease out new methods and structures for depicting the self. Initially inspired by the rigid framework and step-by-step methods of how-to-draw manuals for human bodies, the works in this exhibition defamiliarize standard modes of depiction, rearranging familiar shapes and objects into unexpected configurations that are at times strange, affective, or funny. But in these new compositions, the unfamiliar can also collapse in on itself. In one painting, a paint brush attached to the canvas becomes a stand-in for the figure’s hair, a bridge between depiction and process. In a documented performance, a small plastic stick becomes a proxy for a human finger. We might understand a body through its easy associations with commonplace objects, the ear might be described as a bowl with elongated brim…

[1] John H. Vanderpoel, The Human Figure (1907)


The artists would like to thank Daniella Sanader for writing a text to accompany the exhibition.

Katie Lyle is a visual artist based in Toronto. Recent projects include: Evans Contemporary, Peterborough (2016); HPI, Toronto and The End of Vandalism, Erin Stump Projects, Toronto (both 2015). Group exhibitions include: Model Project Space, Vancouver; Garden Gallery, Toronto; The Nanaimo Art Gallery (all 2015); Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria (2013); and Art Metropole, Toronto (2012). Recent and ongoing projects include a collaborative performance project with dancer Shelby Wright and publications with Slow Editions and Blank Cheque/Publication Studio Vancouver.

Bridget Moser is a Toronto-based artist working predominantly in performance and video. Her work has been exhibited at institutions across Canada including The National Arts Centre, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mercer Union, MSVU Art Gallery, and Western Front. She has presented projects internationally in New York, Miami, Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Verona. She is a recipient of the 2015 William and Meredith Saunderson Prize and a 2016 TFVA Artist Prize Finalist.

Erica Mendritzki

January 7 – February 27, 2016

Like a lot of girls, I would like to have the chance to talk to somebody man to man. I would love to speak frankly, and with authority. I would say things in a calm, deep, reassuring voice—even if I was bad at it.

It’s ok to be bad at this.

To engage with the history of art or the history of ideas, as a woman, is to interrupt a century-spanning conversation in which the rules of engagement and the topics of discussion have been set by men.

Let me talk to you, man to man, about how this feels.

Erica Mendritzki is an artist who lives in Winnipeg.

Liza Eurich and Tegan Moore

May 12 – June 25, 2016

In order for cultural commodities to function expediently, legibility and transparency act as a conduit that permits these items to reach an expanded audience, whereby clarity ensures that meaning is directly and immediately translatable. As a result, these strategies widen the scope of commodities and simultaneously allow for ease of consumption. This facilitates the logic of capital and promotes an ever-expanding marketplace.¹

Things that prefer to be quiet. Things that refuse to be visible.

Semiopaque considers the implications that arise from the act of producing works imbued with a deliberate characteristic of reticence. Latency is not a refusal; it does not mark immobility or illegibility, but rather it functions as a site of contestation.2 Reticence can work both within and beneath a system of inquiry, producing meaning through an intentional restraining of one’s own actions. The self-limiting quality of the quiet or hidden object can allow it to elicit unexpected defiance, affecting and exposing the fragility of expectations. Muffled audibility and blurred visibility requires attentiveness in order to hear or a straining in order to see. The self-reflexive nature of these strategies provides an avenue to critique the demands of consumerism and high performance culture.


---


_¹ Adorno, Theodor. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein, 
98-106. New York, New York: Routledge, 2001.


² Verwoert, Jan. “Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform.” In Art Sheffield 08: Yes No and Other Options, 89-112.
Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum, 2008.


Liza Eurich completed her BFA from Emily Carr University in 2010 and her MFA from Western University in 2012. She co-publishes the online project Moire and recently participated in international residencies at Acme Studios, London and Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Glasgow. Represented by MKG127 in Toronto, her work has also been exhibited at Neutral Ground, Hamilton Artists Inc., Plug-In ICA, McIntosh Gallery, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and the Power Plant Gallery. She has a forthcoming solo show at Open Studio.


Tegan Moore received a BFA from Emily Carr University in 2008 and an MFA from Western University in 2014. She has exhibited at Helen Pitt, Access Gallery, 221 A, Equinox, and CSA Space in Vancouver, Cooper Cole and MKG127 in Toronto, and participated in residencies at Flaggfabrikken Centre for the Arts, Bergen and Faucet Media Arts, New Brunswick. She has a forthcoming solo show at CSA Space in June 2016. She lives and works in London, Ontario.


Kara Hamilton	March 18 – April 23, 2016
Organized by Beth Stuart Exhibition title by Angie Keefer

Madeline Albright, former US secretary of state, has a collection of brooches she would choose from depending on her mood and her diplomatic position. There is a story about her being in talks with Syria and Israel and when reporters asked her what was going on she pointed to her mushroom pin: “sometimes talks, like mushrooms, do better in the dark for a little while.”

Kara Hamilton makes jewelry. While this is certain, it is often less certain whether the jewelry she makes is an adornment for a human body, or an architecture, or something more elusive: an ideology, an encounter, a space in time, an idea of self? While we might understand jewelry to have a determinate relationship with desire, the objects Kara makes fluster this determinacy, determinately. There is no fixed relationship to the language of commodity, or design, or to contemporary art. The objects that she makes gesture toward functionality, wearability. They gesture to architectures and languages we can own and understand: our bodies, our homes, our galleries, our celebrities, our poverty, and relationally, to a reflection on the possibilities and failures of desire. You might want to put that necklace on? You could try and put that necklace on, but be careful, it might cut you.

Here, Hamilton has made a constellation of objects that yesterday she called jewelry for the Kremlin. Their material is all pilfered from the waste of architecture and industrial fabrication. She calls them prototypes for stolen artifacts. They are bright and sharp and they speak many languages. They talk about street fashion and iconoclasm at the same time whispering about the trade show and the showroom. They talk about gaudiness and luxury. There may be a thing that looks like Cyrillic. Or maybe it is bubble letters. It is also reminiscent of the most refined modern Swiss typography. Is the space a hotel lobby, or a living room? Is it a furniture store, or a teenager’s basement bedroom? In fact, I think it might be an alien version of the Situation Room. You might not fully know what the voices are saying, but “sometimes talks, like mushrooms, do better in the dark for a little while.”

Kara Hamilton studied architecture at the University of British Columbia and art at Concordia University and Yale. She has shown extensively in North America and Europe, is represented by Salon 94 in New York City, and comprises one half of the curatorial team that is Kunstverein Toronto.

Helen Cho	November 5 – December 19, 2015
Organized by Ella Dawn McGeough

“Of the streetlights that are lined up in front of Pyonghwa Market,

the eighth one from the east is not lit. 

And of the windows on the sixth floor of the Hwashin Department Store,

light was visible from only from three.”[1]

There is a man who feeds pigeons daily in an unused lot behind a pizza place near Spadina and Harbord. 
There are four irregular clusters of rocks arranged along the sidewalk near Dundas and Dufferin. 
There is a small paper bag placed outside the front door of G Gallery, in the alleyway that runs parallel to Ossington.

See Object Paper Hesitation features ongoing projects by Helen Cho, developed upon her return to Toronto after living abroad for over a decade. The exhibition at G Gallery results from Cho’s efforts to re-familiarize herself with a city tentatively called home, wandering Toronto’s streets and absorbing its mundane details as if they offer up a hidden language. Centred on Cho’s video Tai Lam: Memory of Hunger Finds its Form and the installation-performance 21 Objects for Hesitation, See Object Paper Hesitation re-imagines the everyday matter of city life and its potential for reflection, transformation, and quiet generosity.

Featuring an essay by Daniella Sanader.

Helen Cho is an artist based in Toronto. She received a MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK). Her artworks have been exhibited at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Kunstverein Wolfsberg, Wolfsberg; Kumho Museum, Seoul; National Musuem of Contemporary Arts, South Korea; Artspeak, Vancouver; Articule, Monteral; Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam; and Galerie Magnus Müller, Berlin, among others. She has participated in artists-in-residences at Ssamziespace, Seoul; the Banff Centre, Banff; and European Ceramic Work Centre, Oisterwijk, the Netherlands.

[1] Helen Cho, Reimagining as a poem: A conversation between Kim hyeong and Ahn hyeong from Kim Seungok’s short story “Seoul 1964 Winter.”

Jennifer Chan, Adrienne Crossman, Lorna Mills, Jacqueline Mabey	September 11 – October 31, 2015
Curated by Jacqueline Mabe

All three artists appropriate images from popular culture and through their isolation and repetition, transform the arsenal of rehearsed, gendered poses of romance, suggesting other modalities of being.

Jennifer Chan’s P.A.U.L. (2013) draws mainly from yaoi, or Boy’s Love genre of anime. Remixed with dance music and the description of an ideal date, the work plums the mobility of desire. Adrienne Crossman’s Workout Series (2013) is sourced from exercise videos, cultural products intended to make bodies conform to gender-normative models of attractiveness. In a gesture of liberation, she transforms these bodied into fantastic, pan-sexual entities. Lorna Mills gathers together similar gestures; here, tongues and licking. Their isolation and preponderance, set in the infinite loop of the animated .gif, makes them darkly absurd.

In collaboration with InterAccess, G Gallery will host an exhibition tour and .gif-making workshop. Curators Amber Christensen (InterAccess) and Jacqueline Mabey/failed projects (G Gallery), alongside Ella Dawn McGeough and Daniella Sanader, will co-facilitate a discussion about the connections between two neighbouring Ossington Street exhibitions: There Should Be Gardens at InterAccess and Carnival of Sorts at G Gallery. We will meet at InterAccess at 1:30 p.m. and proceed to G Gallery at 2:15 p.m. to discuss queer/feminist politics and new media practices in relation to the artists’ work and curatorial strategies at both spaces. After the discussion at G Gallery, we will return to InterAccess at 3 p.m., where artist Adrienne Crossman will lead a casual and collaborative .gif-making workshop. Please bring your own laptop with Photoshop, or laptops to share will be available.