Pearl Van Geest at Robert Langen Art Gallery

Better late than never...this exhibition closed last week, but for the record:

January 4 - February 11, 2012

Pearl Van Geest's exhibition "INTO PLACE" includes an interactive video projection and is linked to the Department of Philosophy at Wilfred Laurier University. Van Geest worked with Dr. Gary Foster and  presented a lecture for his course, The Philosophy of Sex, Love and Friendship. "INTO PLACE" explores concepts surrounding the human relationship to the physical and natural world. Through this interactive piece Van Geest invites viewers to  participate as collaborators in the creation of a large work that reflects ideas around love and desire and the potential consummation of this longing.

Some views of the installation follow:

An Interview with Moira Clark

An interview with artist Moira Clark about the role that craft plays in her practice.

Dagmara Genda and Jay Wilson: Jan 12-Feb 19, 2012

               KWT contemporary is proud to present two solo exhibitions of new work

by Jay Wilson and Dagmara Genda

                                     

                                    opening reception with artists present:
                                Thursday, January 12, 2012 from 6 - 8 p.m.

Lower Gallery

Jay Wilson: "Yes. Yes. Try Less."

Jay Wilson, "Sterling Mountain 2",  2012: solid sterling silver,  approx. 9" x 9",

"This show of recent work consists of both labour-intensive toothpick pieces as well as graphic, colour-field, wall-mounted foam and aluminum abstractions. The work is at once obsessively detailed while being approachable in both colour and materialiality.

The toothpick works depict herds of elk with typographic declarations held high in their antlers that vaguely announce sentiments such as Above All Else and Reckless Abandon, spelled out with twigs and safety matches respectively. For me, these declarations are not only words to heed but also evocations of both optimism and hope in a non-hierachical battle of suggestion vs. meaning.

Contradictions abound in the exhibition. Hand-pencil-crayon-coloured toothpick elk pairs read YesYes, or Try Less, while assuming push-me-pull-you configurations. Ordinary toothpicks are re-envisioned as cast sterling silver toothpick structures; one a Tatlin-esque sketch, the other a facetted mountain. The pieces speak of a process that is both highly structured and the developmentally random.

Other works entitled Patternpattern are inclusive collisions of pattern and colour. A decade ago, I saved orange peels that I had peeled all in one piece, the results of which have been enlarged and laser cut in aluminum. Each silhouette is mapped with colourful sheets of craft foam. The resulting topographies resemble islands but more importantly to me, are simple, almost gestural declarations of two structures overlapping and informing one another."                     

 -Jay Wilson (January 2012)

Jay Wilson is an artist/educator from Toronto, Canada. He is a full-time professor of Design in Art and Art History, a joint program between Sheridan College and the University of Toronto, Mississauga. He has shown both internationally and locally and served on the Board of Mercer Union, Toronto and Oakville Galleries, Oakville. He was the inaugural recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize.

He would like to acknowledge the support of Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

Jay Wilson is represented by KWT contemporary.

Mezzanine and Upper Gallery

Dagmara Genda: "Tracing Tomorrow"

 Dagmara Genda, "Palace with Apartments", 2012 (detail). ink and acrylic on paper,  29.5" x 73"

"Tracing Tomorrow is the latest iteration of my interest in the production of space and identity. I explore these notions through tracing lines to make new territories, surfaces, definitions and objects. I'm interested in one line in particular, the historically problematic and shifting division between East and West. I make use of this blurry division by tracing Soviet architecture that bears an uncanny resemblance to American capitalist buildings. These structures, so pregnant with the promise of a better tomorrow in their time, are drawn together to form perversely patterned spaces that lack a centre of gravity.

Yesterday's future and how it might leave us wanting today, is a common idea in post-communist and Eastern European scholarship. A post-communist world is often described as a terrain of broken promises, nostalgia, competing narratives and instability. Increasingly this description applies to the so-called Western world. The global financial crisis, coupled with environmental crises and the persistence of war, has not only fuelled doubt in a system that was to mark the "end of history" but has brought up the question of what sort of system, what kind of tomorrow, awaits us?

Tracing Tomorrow tries to delineate, through a literal act of tracing, what the future might look like but not as a futuristic, identifiable territory. Instead it highlights the problem of producing a totalizing vision of a future space. This act of delineation is the main problem I wish to address in my drawings. To delineate is to define, to mark a territory or to create a space-how we do so is informed by a myriad of factors. My drawings are made from a complex system of tracing that starts from traced architecture and ends with traced paint strokes. Forms weave in and out of each other, mixing foreground and background, delineating features and dissolving into nothingness. The way we identify things is tentative, always hovering at the edge of non-existence. This formal aspect of the drawings is a way for me to find new ways of identifying what we see while also pointing our attention to the very contingency of our sightlines."                 

 -Dagmara Genda (January, 2012)

Dagmara Genda was born in 1981 in Koszalin, Poland, and now lives and works in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Western Ontario. In addition to her studio practise, Genda is active as an arts writer and is Director at AKA Gallery, an artist-run centre in Saskatoon. Genda has received many awards and honours, including most recently, the 3rd Ward Artist in Residence, Brooklyn, NY (2011).

Dagmara Genda is represented by KWT contemporary.

KWT contemporary
624 Richmond Street West
Toronto, ON
M5V 1Y9
tel. 416-646-2706
gallery hours: wed-sat 12-6

www.kwtcontemporary.comwww.kwtcontemporary.com

Media inquiries:
Aurelie K. Collings, Ph.D.
Director and Curator

Kieran Brent: "New Paintings" extended to Oct. 15

 

Kieran Brent (left) with "Will": 2011, oil on canvas, 48"x48"

and (you guessed it!) model Will (right)

Virtual tour of the exhibition:

 

Paola Savasta: Winner of 11th Annual William Huffman Award

Huffman Award Exhibition Reception: Thursday July 7 from 5 to 7 pm at KWT contemporary

The faculty of the Art and Art History Program - a joint BA offered by the University of Toronto and Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning - is pleased to announce Paola Savasta as the 2011 recipient of the William Huffman Award for Excellence in Studio Practice. Savasta explores relationships and systems between people and their treatment of space. She is a recent graduate of the Art and Art History Program. Savasta will present a new body of work in a solo exhibition entitled "Couches for the Liberated" at KWT Contemporary.

Curator and arts administrator William Huffman created this award in 1999 to recognize an especially gifted student graduating from Art and Art History. Huffman has had an extensive involvement on both local and international cultural fronts and has worked with a number of arts organizations such as Blackwood Gallery, Arts Toronto, The Power Plant, A Space, Canadian Art Foundation and Art Gallery of Sudbury. He is currently Associate Director with Toronto Arts Council, a post he has held since 2004. Huffman is a 1991 Art and Art History Program alumnus.

Since its inception the award has recognized Sebastian Koever (2010), Jessica Vallentin (2009), Jaclyn Quaresma (2008), Marko Bursac (2007), Alison S. M. Kobayashi (2006), Tejpal Ajji (2005), Carolyn Tripp (2004), Jared Carlson (2003), Tannis Nielsen (2002), Erin Finley (2001), Amie Tolton (2000) and Heather Robinson (1999).

 With "Couches For the Liberated",  Savasta has created an installation of 69 minitare paintings of Ikea products, primarily depictions of couches and shelving units, for her exhibition at KWT contemporary. Savasta's installation is a smart and serious exploration of consumer culture and acquisitiveness, but is not without an underlying wickedly quirky sense of humour (talk about turning the dreaded "sofa painting" trope on its head!). We'll have installation shots posted later in the week.
Her statement follows below:

"The culmination of these 69 pieces is a result of four series of panel paintings that I have been working on – each series toying with my growing concern with the location of power in consumer culture. Each series function as proposals or “solutions” for maximizing the potential of a living space. (I would also like to note that my humour is in equal parts with my concerned and suggested analysis). I work with selected images from Ikea catalogues, where I model and manipulate the existing domestic structures. I transfer my constructed images on medium-density fibreboard, which references the material that most Ikea furniture is made of. I use couches in my first two series, as I find them to be most iconic of the living room furniture. My latter series use shelves as a way to employ excess, indecision and possibility.

My first series is a set of 3 tiered black couches, each in a different configuration, with negative space left to suggest the ability to plug in or accommodate existing living room fixtures (such as plants, windows, or television sets). This series explores a Do-It-Yourself aspect of customizing and maximizing the seating space of a living room to a point of absurdity. The shelving in my second and third series depict different configurations of the same subject – each pushing further ideas of combinations and the freedom of decision. My fourth series (the second couches series) allows for colour and pattern and leans towards the consumers and their lifestyles. It again pulls on the availability of too many possibilities and suggests consumer excess and perhaps even boredom or indifference."

Dignan Painting Selected by Canada Council Art Bank

 

Paul Dignan's painting, "Cota 1", has been purchased for the permanent collection at the Canada Council's Art Bank. There were 1875 submissions to the collection this year, with a mere 52 selected. 

Congratulations, Paul!

(Our Summer Group Show, opening Thursday, July 7, will contain Dignan's recent work, as well as work from an earlier period, making for an interesting comparison in his evolution as a hard-edge abstractionist.)

McCall and Britton: Exhibitions Opening Sat. April 2, 2011

                      

  Kai McCall: "The Weightlessness"

"Like characters in a work of fiction, the figures in my paintings confront challenges and conflicts as they navigate a variety of enigmatic situations and settings. I think of them as semi-autonomous individuals whose poses evolve as I paint them, and who become defined by the eventual actions that they assume in a composition. However, despite the recognizable imagery and actions of the figures, the overall meaning of the work eludes us. The paintings read more like a work of fiction with the concluding chapters missing; we are conscious of a conflict developing yet the resolution remains suspended in time, the outcome ambiguous." McCall (2011) 
 
Kai McCall received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Western Ontario. He is a three-time recipient of Canada Council Grants and  has works in numerous private and corporate collections across Canada, the United States, the UK and France. This is his second solo exhibition at KWT contemporary.  He is lives and works in Montreal.


Kelvin Britton : "That and This"

In his first solo exhibition at KWT contemporary, Britton plays with hi/lo references to icons of 50's visual culture. Vintage toys float, leer, gloat and giggle on gorgeously painted abstract expressionist backgrounds.  Britton states: "The act of painting takes the form of a conversation, a unique experience, a journey. A new dialogue is engaged in with each new approach to the work, new layers of discovery are revealed, realms of consciousness, otherwise inaccessible become apparent. The different stages/aspects/ layers of the painting represent a record of a dreamlike encounter. Looking at the evolution of the paintings feels like an archaeological expedition through time and space, through interior and exterior realms, through form and feeling."

Kelvin Britton was born at the Covered Wagon Trailer Park in Fort Garry, Manitoba. After studying Philosophy at University of Victoria, he attended Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he studied painting under Gerald Ferguson.  He lives and works in Toronto.

***Our new website is under construction, but we have posted images for McCall and Britton on our old  site, here ***
                     

Liz Parkinson at Benedicta Art Centre, Minnesota

Above image from an installation of Liz Parkinson's "Popular Nature Project",  earlier last year at Visual Arts Centre, Clarington.

We recently posted about Paul Dignan's exhibition at the Benedicta Art Centre at the College of St. Benedict/University of St. John in Minnesota. By a strange co-incidence, Liz Parkinson, also a KWT artist is exhibiting there, at the same time, in the Gorecki Gallery. (Note to Paul, Liz and Pearl: try to find a warmer place next time...Minnesota, Banff...brrrr! It's cold enough here in Toronto! )

Liz Parkinson's "Popular Nature Project" is an ongoing accumulation of images that aspires to completion as a collection. Each twelve-inch unit, although an independent composition, is seen as a possible component of the larger taxonomic entity: Popular Nature. Overall the project explores relationships between "natura" and "nature inspired" objects and systems of understanding. The portable scale of individual panels enables them to be worked on while traveling, as such acquiring aspects of the souvenir. Often, added to in the studio and inserted into the logic of the growing collection, the gathered information changs as it is influenced by surrounding references. Each addition and reorganization of the collection presents a revised understanding of what is meant by "nature". And like most collections, it may never be complete nor, like nature, its meaning fully explored.

These small mixed media works are a painterly departure from Parkinson's more traditional printmaking practice, but incorporate familiar techniques and media, including Japanese Paper, Rag Paper with litho, drypoint, relief, gold leaf, flocking, encaustic, plaster, and acrylic painting. Parkinson is widely respected as a master printmaker, but we love this new direction too, and we understand she plans to continue with it in a much larger format in the near future.



You can see images of Parkinson's earlier work (from the "Morphology" series at KWT) here.