Painted images are stand-ins for words and sentences. The meaning of a painting is created through the relationship between forms and symbols as in written language. These paintings are constructed by filtering words/sentences/titles through a personal vocabulary of symbolic imagery and associative references. Much of the imagery represents modes of representation: writing, diagrams, illustrations and symbols. Spray paint and stencils are used to create abstractions, looking towards graffiti’s collapsed delineation between words and form.
Deirdre McAdams is a visual artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. She is a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2008), and the Victoria College of Art (2003), where she studied painting. She was awarded an Honourable Mention in the 2011 RBC Painting Competition, as well as a prize in 2010 from Canadian Art Magazine for her writing on contemporary art. Her recent exhibitions include group shows at Unit/Pitt Projects, Field Contemporary, Wil Aballe Art Projects, Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in Brooklyn NY, and a solo show at CSA Space in Vancouver. Upcoming exhibitions include a group show at the Elissa Cristall Gallery in Vancouver.
Nadia Belerique, Mark Clintberg, Kristie MacDonald, Mungo Thomson
May 15 – June 13, 2015
Curated by Jon Davies and Kristin Weckworth
Mark Clintberg’s fading hair models provide a handy starting point as they foreground the face/head/self, but are on their way to oblivion as they continue to fade in the light. Mungo Thompson’s flicker-fast video of Time magazine covers turns the faces of history into a stream of shifting identities that moves too rapidly to assess. Both artists destabilize identity and in doing so overlap with Kristie MacDonald’s replicas of paper detritus that are indistinguishable from the originals. Which leaves Nadia Belerique’s installation of copper pipes and metal footprints as the final piece of the puzzle. However, I suppose I’d be ruining the fun if I told you how it all added up.
Toronto-based artist Faith La Rocque and Denver-based artist Jaimie Henthorn have been working collaboratively, at a distance, since 2009. Their disparate locations have always been a defining characteristic of their collaboration and thus, communication within the artistic process is a major consideration. On April 23, 24, and 25 G Gallery will present their current project, The Divers, which explores communication through artwork – first as a collaboration tool, and subsequently as a form of investing and conveying meaning.
Recently, the artists have been working on a series of pencil drawings generated by the Dadaist methodology of “exquisite corpse” exchanged via post, which has yielded an unexpected depth, unachievable with the extensive verbal planning that usually scaffolds collaborations. The drawings have been exhibited at Denver’s Groundswell Gallery (2013) and at De Luca Fine Art in Toronto (2014).
In The Divers, La Rocque and Henthorn apply this anachronistic methodology to the topic of transformation, desired or otherwise. These potential transformations may be gradual or sudden, generated by force or passivity. G Gallery will host art objects, installations, video works, and a continuous live performance by La Rocque accompanied by Henthorn via live web stream.
Jaimie Henthorn and Faith La Rocque met in 2004 in the M.F.A. program at the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland, and began working collaboratively in 2009. They first showed the performance/installation “Massage Portal” at the Concertina Gallery, Chicago in 2010. They then embarked on a multi-faceted project based on the legends of the “she-wolf,” exhibiting works in Japan, the U.S., and Canada. Faith La Rocque’s work focuses on the use of alternative health practices and products as both material and subject matter in order to convey ideas about human behaviour, the body, emotions and senses. Recent solo exhibitions include chisel to carve light thoughts at De Luca Fine Art (2014) and High Acceptance at YYZ Artists’ Outlet (2013) in Toronto. La Rocque has received several grants and prizes, including the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize (2010) awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Henthorn works with the moving body as performance, or photographing and video works, most often looking at the relationship of the body to built space. She has recently completed a PhD in Creative Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, U.K. Past performance venues have included the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and Mies van der Rohe Carr Chapel in Chicago and Henthorn has worked with various other artists including Gelitin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Oscar Tuazon, and Ei Arakawa.
This exhibition has given me the opportunity to reframe some of my earlier works. Stills and text from Antonioni’s films and works by Andre Jodoin become a shifting link between most of the works in the exhibition.
The exhibition has two centres around which works are gathered. Film director Michelangelo Antonioni is the first centre. There are four works that refer obliquely to his work: Plots and Themes, which uses a still from L’Avventura; Meaningful Work, in which the text is a phrase taken from the same film; The Newspaper, which uses a film still from The Red Desert; and A lovely article on colour, in which the text is a critic’s statement about Antonioni.
The second centre considers framing as structural issue. The works gathered around this idea are fig.1, in which a work by Andre Jodoin is reframed by me; Function, in which Andre reframes Daniel Buren’s article of the same name; and Plots and Themes, which includes a frame from the film L’Avventura and pieces of actual frames with no attachment to their conventional role in the display of photographs and paintings.
Portrait of My Mother, By My Father, By Myself relates to fig. 1 in that it has also been reframed, but here the frame is conceptual rather than literal.The work is a print with my mother’s name printed from a block of lead type that was made by my father. Below her name is my father’s signature, photographically reproduced, and below that is my own written signature.
As you enter the gallery the exhibition itself is “framed” by a work titled NON (Didactic Panel). This work is based on the didactic panel that introduced the work in my survey show Sum Over Histories from 1992-94. I made each statement about my work and myself that was in the original panel into a negative by the addition of the word “not”. -Janice Gurney
Alexandre David with Yam Lau, Amy Wong, Ashley Culver, Shane Krepakevich, Kevin Rodgers, Haley Uyeda, Yvonne Lammerich, Michelle Mcgeean, Josh Thorpe, Emily Smit-Dicks, Miles Collyer
January 23 – February 21, 2015
Organized by Yam Lau
Montreal artist Alexandre David will install a site-specific architectural structure at the G Gallery. This structure will be available for potential “use” by twelve artists.
Alexandre David is an artist based in Montreal . Yam Lau is an artist and writer based in Toronto.
Shadows Mirror Shadows brings together new lens-based works of mountain and subterranean landscapes. Including a large double-sided standing lightbox, photographs on metallic paper, a projected photomontage, and a large drawing on photograph, these works respond to Pavel Florensky’s theories of the plane that both divides and unifies dualistic realms of the material and immaterial, as ‘ontological mirror images’. In imagining the permeability of rock walls through manipulations of photography and light, Dragan’s works evoke Florensky’s notions of piercing the plane, ‘turning’ time and bodies ‘inside out’. Her use of color as materialized light that acts upon us, is just one example of Dragan’s use of a perspectival reversal that overturns the dominance of the anthropocentric viewer, invoking a transcendent experience of the real as holistic unification of both sides of the plane.
Miruna Dragan was born in Bucharest, grew up in New York and Los Angeles, and was largely itinerant before moving to Calgary in 2009.Her site-responsive work reflects themes of dispersion and transcendence through photography, drawing, collage, montage, fresco, and temporary interventions. Her works have been shown in national and international venues, including recent exhibitions at Museo de la Ciudad in Queretaro, Mexico (2009 & 2012), the Calgary Biennial (2012), the Esker Foundation, Calgary (2013), the Alberta Biennial (2013), Integral House, Toronto and The Tetley in Leeds, UK (2014). This is her first solo exhibition in Toronto.
Camoufleurs is an exhibition of new work by Kathleen Ritter that explores forms of encoded communication, camouflage and subterfuge. The project weaves together research into intersecting histories of war, avant- garde movements in art and poetry, the advent of photography and cinema alongside women’s suffrage and feminism in the early half of the twentieth century. From this body of research, Ritter has excavated notable patterns and abstract forms, film footage and auditory cues, and writing systems a century old, to explore the sensory residue of history, bringing forward material from a distant past as potential ciphers for the present.
Kathleen Ritter is an artist based in Vancouver and Paris. She was an artist in residence at La Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 2013. Her art practice broadly explores questions of visibility, especially in relation to systems of power, language and technology. Working across mediums of video, sound and print, Ritter investigates relationships between politics and aesthetics, between specific histories and contemporary experience, and between the space of the museum and the street.
Image credit: Women’s Camouflage Corps At Work (detail), July 13, 1918, Western Newspaper Union Photo Service
Room for Improvement: In every club or school court in the country, games are taking place all the time between players who are doing their best. And yet any experienced coach watching one of these games for five minutes could very easily find some quite elementary piece of advice for each of the two players which, if acted upon, would improve their respective games tremendously.
It might be something very simple; for example one player might be watching the front wall when the ball is behind him, while the other never returns to the centre of the court after playing his stroke. It might be something technical; one player keeps missing his backhand shots, because he is trying to change his grip and cannot do it in time, while the other is unable to get the ball out of the back corner, because he moves in reverse towards the wall and has no room to ‘lever’ the ball out. It might be something tactical; one player might always be playing a particular kind of shot from the same position in the court, while the other is continually hitting the ball too hard, so that both are easily forcastable.
Whatever the errors, they are things that the players have forgotten or have never learned. The vast majority of players in this country have not had any real coaching, and it is not easy to pick up tips for your own game by watching top-class matches, interesting and helpful thought this is. Consequently, I want to feel that anyone reading this book has come to do so because he would like to ask questions about how to improve his game, but does not really know what is wrong, what questions he ought to ask or where to begin.
-R.B. Hawkley
Patrick Howlett is an artist living and working in London Ontario. Patrick studied at Concordia University, and at The University of Victoria, receiving an MFA in 2006. Recent exhibitions include How Hummingbirds Choose Flowers at Susan Hobbs Gallery in Toronto in 2012, and Part Time Offerings is on view at Museum London until August 17th. Patrick teaches in the Department of Visual Art at Western University and is represented by Susan Hobbs Gallery.
Consisting of works produced between 1974 and 2010, the exhibition emphasizes Lebredt’s importance as an artist who combined rigorous critical thinking with the production of objects and images.
Not To Be Reproduced is an attempt to articulate the complex ideas around reproduction, reproducibility, and appropriation that appear as consistent concerns within Lebredt’s practice. Central to the exhibition at G are two works that reconstruct spectral objects, Lebredt’s facsimile of Robert Smithson’s Enantiomorphic Chambers and Outers, a video from 1983 that addresses impossibility of representing the “Bayview Ghost,” an unfinished and vacant building that overlooked the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto for over two decades.
Enantiomorphic Chambers (1965) was a sculpture by Robert Smithson that was either lost or destroyed. In 1982, Lebredt submitted an exhibition proposal to YYZ (Toronto) titled l to r: to (from) Robert Smithson and (to) Paolo Uccello, which was to include the reconstruction of Smithson’s sculpture. Although the proposal was not accepted, Lebredt produced his version of the Enantiomorphic Chambers regardless, and this effort, and the ideas surrounding it, expanded over many years of work, culminating in the publication of Afterthoughts: A monologue [to RS] (YYZBooks, 2008), a text addressed to Smithson that acts as the philosophical ground upon which Lebredt’s facsimile can be seen.
Lebredt thought of Outers as a “counterpoint to the difficulties I was having writing a script around Chambers. An audio-visual ‘round-trip,’ it marked an attempt to rewrite Smithson’s site/non-site dialectic, an operation that involved the superpositioning of two incompossible localities based on a reading of the game of fort:da recounted by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).” In this sense, Outers can very much be seen as occupying the same ground upon which Lebredt’s facsimile Enantiomorphic Chambers are situated, an earlier draft of the philosophical concerns discussed in Afterthoughts. Indeed, much of Lebredt’s work functions this way, sustaining rigorous intellectual engagement with ideas over time, each work an attempt at solving a problem that persists, only to be challenged and taken up again.
Gordon Lebredt (1948–2011) was born in Winnipeg and studied at the University of Manitoba, both in the Faculty of Architecture (1967–1970) and the School of Art (1972–1976). Before relocating to Toronto in 1980, Lebredt executed a number of important site-specific installations at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the newly opened Plug-In Gallery. He exhibited extensively in Canada during his long career and was included recently in Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980 (an exhibition that travelled across Canada between 2010 and 2012) as well as Get Hold of This Space: A Geography of Conceptual Art in Canada at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris (2014). Gordon Lebredt: Nonworks 1975–2008, a collection of Lebredt’s unrealized proposals, was published in 2011 by Plug In Editions and the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art.
G Gallery wishes to thank Lin Gibson, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and Hart House (University of Toronto), Micah Lexier, Brian Groombridge, John Goodwin, Mercer Union, and C Magazine for their invaluable assistance in helping to make this exhibition take place.
