Author: artoronto

The Light Keepers

November 17 – December 11, 2011
Opening:  Thursday, November 17, 6 -9 pm – Artist in attendance
Thompson Landry Gallery
The Distillery District
55 Mill Street, Building 5, #102
& The Cooperage Building #32
Toronto, Ontario, M5A 3C4
Tel: 416-364-4955
E-mail:info@thompsonlandry.com
www.thompsonlandry.com
Hours: Tues – Sat 11-6, Sun 12-5

On November 17th, the Thompson Landry Gallery invites you to experience Feedback, a solo exhibition of high-realism oil paintings that instantly catch the eye of viewers as their incredible closeness to reality approaches a visual illusion.
 
The hands are one of the most expressive parts of the human body. Zekoff has mastered the ability to capture what is the mood of his subject by simply portraying the hands. Their imaginative positions have an incredible emotive power and can conjure a range of states of mind such as anxiety, concern, protection and love.
 
The artist is a master chiaroscurist, using the effect of bright lights and dark shadows to create such strong depth that the subjects seem to reach out of the canvas towards the viewer.  The simplicity and purity of these stimulating images exude a soothing calm as they contradict the overwhelming influx of images that saturate and convolute our everyday lives in modern society.

November 8 – 27,  2011
Opening, Saturday, November 10,  7-10 pm
HANG MAN GALLERY
756 Queen Street East (at Broadview Avenue)
Toronto, ON M4M 1H4
T: 416-465-0302
hangmangallery@gmail.com
www.ArtistsNetwork.ca.
Hours: Tues to Sun 12 – 5 pm

Hang Man Gallery is proud to announce CHINA’S DESIGNER WARRIORS, Margie Kelk’s photo based images depicting ancient Chinese warrior Zhong Kui, a spiritual guardian of high valued goods, as a modern-day Beau Brummel sporting designer duds in a world where fashion makes a man.

World over, designer fashions are social status identifiers in the public’s conscious. The perceived winners of China’s fashionable consumer class are chasing these ideals to become the new breed of warriors.

Kelk’s adjunct mix of iconic labels and classical figure is humorously poking at the paradox of the rising warrior class acquiring power for the status markings that its own underclass counterfeits.

This is an antidote to any hangover from Toronto’s fashion week event.

Highway 69 Construction Cutline, Killarney, Ontario, 2008

November 3 –  26, 2011
Opening: Saturday, November 5, 2-5pm
STEPHEN BULGER GALLERY
1026 Queen Street West
Toronto, Ontario M6J 1H6
T: 416.504.0575
E: info@bulgergallery.com
www.bulgergallery.com  

The gallery is pleased to present our first solo exhibition of work by Joseph Hartman.

“The Road North” features work from Hartman’s two recent series “Highway 69” and “Collins and Heron Bay”, both of which explore notions of memory, the environment and our relationship to the landscape. Hartman’s “Highway 69” examines the interaction between humans and landscape, and the influences each has on the other. This work was inspired by the artist’s connection to this particular region as a result of travelling through it his whole life. Hartman documents this landscape in transition as it goes through a state of deconstruction and reconstruction via the longstanding expansion project of the highway.

“Highway 69” is also the first leg of a journey that leads to two small native communities in Northern Ontario, Collins and Heron Bay, where Hartman spent the first three years of his life. Although he had no real memories of those early years, his first conscious memory being the day his family moved from the north to the house that his family still inhabits in southern Ontario, he did have images of those early years in his mind.

Hartman’s first year psychology course at Laurentian University, taught him that the mind has the ability to create personal memories from stories heard repeatedly, and that these memories feel as genuine as a memory created from an actual experience. He felt that the images in his mind’s eye of those early years in Collins and Heron Bay were most likely created after listening to the stories that his parents told over the years.

Floating through his thoughts just like concrete memories, made it hard to distinguish fabrications pasted together from stories and old photographs, with other memories and thoughts from his subconscious. Hartman’s series “Collins and Heron Bay” culminated out of a trip to the area 30 years after having left, to determine if his memories were fictional or concrete. Hartman made photographs of places that felt familiar to him, places that he had no doubt passed through 30 years earlier, yet he had no memory of having been there before.

After receiving a Master’s degree in Kinesiology at the University of McMaster in 2004 and being accepted into Medical School, Hartman decided to pursue a career as an artist. He is a self-taught photographer and apprenticed with Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky for over five years.

October 30 – November 23, 2011
Opening: Sunday, October 30, 12:30-2:30pm
YORKMINSTER PARK GALLERY
1585 Yonge Street,
Toronto ON M4T 1Z9
(at Heath, N of St Clair Avenue, on E side)
Enter YP Centre door.
T: 416-922-1167
www.yorkminsterpark.com
 Hours: Mon  -Fri  10 – 2, Sat 12 – 4pm 
 
 
Dierlam & Dierlam – A Legacy features the work of the late Howard C. Dierlam and his daughter Lois.

Both artists have focused their works on traditional landscapes in oil, acrylic and watercolour. Mentored by her father, Lois typically works in acrylic, with smaller paintings in watercolour. Lois is well known as an artist and arts educator, as was her father, who served as the first Director of Art for the Toronto Board of Education. 

 The exhibition shows  of works by both artists. It is a sale of some works too.

November 2 – 13, 2011
Opening: Thursday, November 3,  7 pm  
Panel discussion Wednesday, November 9, 7pm
GALLERY 1313 Main and Process Gallery
1313 Queen Street West,
Toronto, ON M6K 1K8
T: 416 – 536-6778
E mail: director@g1313.org
www.gallery13131.org
Hours: Wed – Sun 1- 6

Gallery 1313 is pleased to present, THE MESSAGE, an exhibition of new media artists who explore the effects of technology on popular culture and society. The exhibition is also a celebration of the legacy of Marshall Mcluhan.

Curated by Gallery Director, Phil Anderson and is sponsored by Highland Park  Single Malt Scotch Whiskey. We would like to thank Highland Park Single Malt Scotch Whiskey for their generous support. 

There will mix of installation, video works and  photo based works. The exhibition will take place in the Main and Process Galleries.

They Live Small, photo based image from Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman

There will also be panel discussion Wednesday, November 9, 7pm which will address the future and effects of technology in artistic practise and society in general.  Panelists are to include Ed Slopek, Program Director for the New Media Option (Ryerson University), School of Image Works, Johanna Householder, Chair of Criticism and Curitorial Practice (Ontario College of Art and Design) and Judith Doyle, Chair of Integrated Media (The Ontario College of Art and Design) . The panel will be moderated by writer and cultural commentor, Russell Smith.

 Participating artists include:

Zeesy Powers http://zeesypowers.com/   

Jenn E . Norton http://jennenorton.blogspot.com/

Myfanwy Ashmore http: http://www.myfanwy.ca/

 Robert Lendrum http://www.robertlendrum.com/index.php?/bio/

 Daniel Borins & Jennifer Marman http://www.marmco.com/

 Matthew Williamson http://www.matthew-williamson.com/

 Nicholas Stedman http://www.nicholasstedman.com/

Senza Bussola (No compass), 2011, 3×4 feet, acrylic on canvas

November 2 – 13, 2011
Opening: Thursday, November 3,  7 pm  
GALLERY 1313 Cell Gallery
1313 Queen Street West,
Toronto, ON M6K 1K8
T: 416 – 536-6778
E mail: director@g1313.org
www.gallery13131.org
Hours: Wed – Sun 1- 6

Riconciliazione: molti anni di limbi (Reconciliation: many years in limbo)

Works by Zoraida is a Colombian-born Canadian artist with little  formal art training. She has studied at Les Arts Décoratifs (Paris), and The Art Students League of New York (NY).

 This body of work attempts to deconstruct the negative nuance attached to the experiences felt in the unreal state and place called the limbo.  The structure of the limbo seems to be founded on the notions of directionless, nothingness and hopelessness. These, however, do not have to be bad encounters.  

Does it not feel good to experience the reconciliation of opposing forces like the not here but not there …. not heaven but not hell…not right but not wrong?  These could be the points of reconciliation between oneself and the world.

Thus these paintings hope to turn the limbo into a positive state and place where one can discover:  the free zone which is one’s own sacred space and it can be anywhere.    As well, the viewer could meet the still point which is known as the moment that changes us.

November 2 – 26, 2011
Opening Thursday November 3, 6 – 9 pm
THE RED HEAD GALLERY
401 Richmond St. W., Suite 115.
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
T:  416 504-5654.
Email: art@redheadgallery.org.
www.redheadgallery.org.
Hours: Wed – Sat 12 – 5 pm

Edmonton artist Dana Holst, in her solo exhibition, explores multiple feminine themes of ego, blossoming love, anxiety and self-loathing.   
Sometimes Rainbows are Black is a retrospective exhibition including works from Prey and True Romance, two past Holst exhibitions.  As well there are new paintings, drawings and a fibre-based installation.
 
The installation, Sometimes Rainbows are Black features a large rainbow rug in shades of mourning.  Made of antique wedding dresses painted black, then cut into thin strips, the silk was entirely hooked by hand using historical methods.  Monotonous, laborious, ominous, the black rainbow hangs on the wall flanked by June and April, two cut out drawings of girl heads, guardians of hope on a journey to the otherworld.
 
Paintings in the show focus on fate as it befalls the lives of young girls caught in the transformation to womanhood.  For example, in Self-Loathing an adolescent girl stands with her back to the viewer on her stained and bare mattress, silently contemplating the wallpaper pattern, emanating feelings of loneliness and despair.
 
Poignant and theatrical Holst’s new work looks at hope and desire as filtered through destiny and human cruelty/weakness.
 
A catalogue for  Sometimes Rainbows are Black will be available the 1st of December 2011.  Contact Dana at info@danaholst.com to request a copy or visit www.danaholst.com for further information.