DiQuinzio makes enigmatic paintings and objects that develop over time. Slowly built narratives of atmospheric paint are evident in their sensual surfaces. A mood of mystery and humour carefully constructs an intuitive and theatrical relationship between each work. The paintings depict nightscapes, forests and campfires inhabited by animals, disembodied faces and ghost-like forms. The effect evokes a feeling of fear, nervousness and curiosity. Accompanying fabric assemblages and objects function as an extension of these painted landscapes, speaking to a practice that goes beyond the canvas. Old painting rags, clothes, blankets, nails, furniture and mirrors are used to facilitate the painted narratives as well as speak to the process of making.
In this show, entitled Knock, Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood, a tone is set through the title that is simultaneously part superstition, part joke, part invitation. This exhibition presents elusive relationships between paintings and the objects and fabrics that have “picked up” paint around DiQuinzio’s work space.
A native of Nova Scotia, DiQuinzio has resided in Toronto for the last ten years. She studied painting and film at York University and has formal training in theatrical costume construction. Her work has been shown at Katharine Mulherin Gallery, Toronto, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa and The Khyber Center for the Arts, Halifax. She received an OAC Emerging Artist Grant in 2011 and in 2012 she held a summer residency at VSVSVS, Toronto. Her work has been featured in the artist publication Hunter and Cook and in 2013 she had a solo exhibition at ESP Gallery, Toronto.
Ryan Park works across a variety of media and subjects, his projects reflecting the material and poetic possibilities suggested by a subject’s salient characteristics.
For his exhibition at G Gallery, Park presents recent video works that use projected light as subject and material. In the video installation Dark is the night (Voyager), a wind-up emergency radio/flashlight is used to play back a signal of the entire Voyager Golden Record – the record of Earth sounds and music attached to the Voyager space probes and launched into deep space in 1977. The broken radio battery no longer holds a charge, requiring a constant exertion of activity in order to both receive the signal, and materialize it through sound and light. The video, Rabbit, tracks the 20-minute lifespan of a shadow puppet. Light, shadow, visibility, transmission and physical exertion become elements in works that meditate on the drive to transmit and receive signals; the lifespan of cultural creations; limitations of the human body; and as an evocation of communicative labour within a dark, vast universe.
Ryan Park is a Toronto based artist who makes artworks using mostly video, photography, and manipulations of found material. His work has been shown across Canada, the USA, and Europe.
Ryan Park gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.
“These are the first works I have accomplished that actually empty the viewers mind. Acknowledging that seeing can be separate from the analytic, deductive mind is difficult, but actually experiencing it is remarkable. Intuition has its own way of connecting us to numbers, geometry, love and reality.”
Bornowsky creates eccentric abstract paintings. Each body of work builds on the ideas and experiences of the previous. His trajectory is one of careful, intuitive reinvention; an evolving formal language arrived at through the experience of making. This exhibition will present a collection of discrete relief assemblages. Each shaped surface is mounted with wooden spheres, painted and drawn with gouache and marker. The works take unusual cues from a diverse art historical repertoire. For Bornowsky “there is something to be gleaned in almost every Art.” In this case he cites artists like Guston and Tuttle, but also Renaissance painting, Islamic rugs, tantric art, free Jazz and electronic music. Bornowsky will also present a site-specific collection of artist “frames” made specifically for this installation.
Born in Alberta Canada, Eli Bornowsky received his BFA in Visual Arts from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver (2005) and is an MFA candidate at Bard College, New York. In 2007 his paintings were shown in the group exhibition Gasoline Rainbows at the Contemporary Art Gallery and he began working with the Blanket Gallery with solo exhibitions in 2007, 2008 and 2011. In 2009 his work was included in the exhibition Enacting Abstraction at the Vancouver Art Gallery and in 2010 he exhibited Walking Square Cylinder Plane, a solo exhibition at the Western Front. His critical texts have appeared in Fillip Review, C Magazine, Pyramid Power and artist catalogues. The label Rundownsun has released a limited edition cassette of his experimental audio projects. He has curated exhibitions for the Or Gallery including, Making Real (2008), After Finitude (2012), and the ongoing Clamour and Toll, a series of experimental music and performances. He currently resides in Vancouver.
Céline Condorelli is an artist who works with architecture, combining a number of approaches from developing structures for ‘supporting’ (the work of others, forms of political imaginary, existing and fictional realities) to broader enquiries into forms of commonality and present urgencies, resulting in projects and/or exhibitions merging installation, politics, fiction, display, public space, sound, and writing.
We just came to say No is a film installation which confronts and intermingles two separate histories of injustice, a plot taking place in fascist Italy is set against Charlemagne’s wars against the Muslims, and both are performed by puppets, who exchange the roles of stage and audience and intervene in each other’s stories to cheer on or disagree.
We just came to say No follows Silvestro on one screen, who beset by feelings of hopelessness, decides to travel to his native Sicily; he encounters a number of characters along the way, as a series of allegorical representations of the time. The play is an adaptation of Conversations in Sicily by Elio Vittorini, a novel written as a poetic allegory in order to bypass fierce censorship in the midst of an ‘abstract rage’ against of 1938 fascist Italy.
This puppet show has an audience on the other screen, amongst which puppets from the traditional Carolingian trilogy (which forms the basis of all Sicilian puppetry), play an unruly public, enacting a second play. Incensed by the seeming passivity of the characters on stage, by their failure to revolt against fascism, puppets in shining armour – who have much experience of popular revolt, warfare and injustice – mock and refuse this version of their future by calling for rebellion “Mora! Mora!” (Die! Die!) Double play with puppets conceived by the artist and originally staged with puppeteers Fratelli Napoli in Modica, Sicily.
Knowles is motivated by a discursive approach that seeks out particular elements from art history and popular culture while subjecting these elements to questions about consumption, cultural distinction and representation, resulting in an inter-media based artistic practice.
This exhibition is about painting and art’s subsumption into the capitalist city. The paintings that preceded the paintings in this show were meant to be a private pursuit made with a pre-determined protocol, all for the strict purpose that other tangential activities might emerge in the studio. In a sense, they were “make-work” artworks without end. They did not signify the traditional pursuit towards either A) transcendence or B) the void, and they were far too small to be confined into the rubric of the sublime. The paintings were meant to provide a path leading to more (possibly unrelated) “projects”. Now, a year later, we have this exhibition, which is an about face to those original stated aims. The heroicism of monochrome painting continues to be downplayed and the paintings are still put to work in honour of something more casual, but here they are deliberately not conceived of as “make works” and Knowles has actively stolen time from his other art related activities in order to resist the pulverizing melancholy of computer based post-studio production.
With these paintings, raw and sometimes gessoed canvas and linen have been uniformly misted with hundreds of layers of diluted acrylic polymer in primary colours. First a yellow, then red, finally blue. This triad of misty washes is administered over and over, ad infinitum until it reaches a near black. Over the course of this process, the coloured water partly evaporates, but much of it is absorbed into the painting support. So on and so forth, over and over etc. Concentration leads to absorption, which then leads to saturation. Saturation invariably leads to distraction. As distraction emerges, this sometimes signals a state of completion. Other times, notions of ‘perfection’ pervert the process, and so the painting must continue. Here, process and system are a form of low-level consciousness that seeks to break into a form of total contingency, and possibly negation and critique.
Also presented at G Gallery are a series of in-situ sculptures made with found building materials and obsolete musical audio equipment which are harvested locally and contained in contractor bags. These bags are then placed atop of used humidifyers. The artist has mixed mushroom spores into the debris. This work derives from his collaborative experiments of Knowles Eddy Knowles.
On the G Gallery website, Knowles presents screengrabs taken while perusing images of Facebook’s Analog Research Lab, a collective art studio located at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Facebook staffers are photographed after studio sessions where they have been invited during work hours to express themselves by using screenprinting technology.
This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Toronto. Knowles’ recent solo exhibitions include Blood Oranges at Galerie Laroche/Joncas and Mixed Misuse at the Darling Foundry. Knowles has participated in exhibitions at The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Düsseldorf Kunstverein, Pavilion Projects, Cooper Gallery (Dundee Scotland), Eyelevel Gallery, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Dalhousie Art Gallery. In 2010, Knowles organized (along with Vincent Bonin) Blooming Flowers on the Coffee Table. In 2012, Knowles collaborated with Lorna Bauer on a simultaneous, two-city exhibition at Convenience Gallery and La Vitrine. As a member of Knowles Eddy Knowles he has produced commissions, performances, and exhibitions for TENT, Portikus, Apex Art, Presentation House Gallery, FormContent, Fabrica del Vapore, Centre de Recherche Urbaine de Montréal, Museo Studio del Tessuto, The Store/Vitamin Creative Space in Beijing. For late 2013 early 2014 Knowles will present upcoming projects at Vox Centre de l’image contemporaine, Dazibao (again in collaboration with Lorna Bauer), Leonhardi Kulturprojekte, as well as a new commission for an exhibition organized by Vincent Bonin and presented at Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery.
For their exhibition at G Gallery, Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens present works that share a common concern with bringing abstract systems to materiality, particularly as they are confronted with the human body. Through a combination of archival research, diagrammatic drawings, sculpture and performance, the works explore non-goal oriented action and counter-productivity a tactics for subverting the economisation of life. A pivotal piece in the exhibition is a new video work consisting of a series of performances realized in an empty office building in Glasgow. Centred on the intricate alliance between the body (labour, manpower) and the soul (affects, language) in post-industrial economies, Real failure needs no excuse (2012) explores the transgressive potential of non-productive action and its relation to labour, work and invention. By literalizing metaphors like ‘equilibrium’ and ‘balance,’ Models for the Monologue of Reason (2011), a series of small sculptural pieces produced with household materials, renders scientific forms into makeshift models while The Revolutions of Capitalism(2011) uses diagrammatic drawing to underscore how familiar structures – from express-lane supermarket checkouts to airport security – shape not only our way of moving and doing things but our relationship with spaces and objects. Other works in the exhibition open up the idea of what research can be, approaching it as a performative act in itself while also examining the possibilities for movement to initiate a collective process of physical, intellectual and political transformation. The title of the exhibition is taken from the 1930s jazz standard Body and Soul, written by Johnny Green and made famous by Billy Holiday, amongst others. Richard Ibghy &Marilou Lemmens are based in Durham-Sud, Quebec. Their work has been presented at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; the 10th Sharjah Biennial, UAE; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; the European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück, Germany; and Trafó, House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest. Recent solo exhibitions include Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2012); 221a, Vancouver (2012); and Galleria Alkovi, Helsinki (2011). Their artistic projects and writings have been published in Le Merle, C-magazine, New Social Inquiry, and Pyramid Power. Their first book, Tools that Measure the Intensity of Passionate Interests was published by Horse and Sparrow Editions in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, and Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto, in 2012.
Mark Dion, General Idea, Jens Haaning, Adam McEwen, Rachel Harrison, Tania Kitchell, Scott Lyall, Josephine Meckseper, Jonathan Monk, Derek Sullivan, Zin Taylor
