Exhibitions

Barbara Cole | BEAT
July 9-23, 2022 | Opening Saturday, July 9, 1-3 PM, Artist in Attendance
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto

Barbara Cole’s new series, BEAT, brings together an ensemble of figures who elicit ethereal conversations about the movement of bodies and water. Guided by the weightlessness of Cole’s signature underwater photography, each figure, donned in white, independently investigates what it means to move in what is both an insulated and changeable space. These figures speak to the extreme experiences of isolation these past few years and the body’s recovery underwater, where movement and time are slowed down to reveal their essential beauty. BEAT is a manifestation of the body celebrating itself as it moves back freely into the world.

Barbara Cole is an award winning Canadian photographer who is known for her timeless aesthetic. Cole is extensively collected by both public and private institutions. 

The artist lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

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IMMERSED | Group Exhibition
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
July 9 - 23, 2022

The artists in our group exhibition Immersed are inspired by the life-giving element of water. Their works celebrate its shapeshifting, buoying and calming qualities in a myriad of ways. In our busy lives, these images entice us to give in to the ability of water to slow us down, to urge us to contemplate, be led in unexpected directions, and become more aware of our inner rhythm and quietest thoughts.

Nicole Katsuras | Summer Hours
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
June 4-16, 2022

This new body of abstract work by Nicole Katsuras is a reflection on learning to live more lightly, freely and joyfully, while looking forward to future adventures, big and small. Through her experimentation with paint, Nicole's works have evolved into highly textured, full-spectrum surfaces that explore femininity and reference cartography, Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Ukiyo-e. 

Artist statement:

The title ‘Summer Hours’ sparks an emotional response to contemporary life, evoking times or moments of celebration from personal experiences, as well as memories of carefree and joyful times.  There is also a universal anticipation that accompanies the words “summer hours” – they suggest a period that is an accepted ‘break’.  Summer hours are synonymous with beaches, parks, backyards, road trips and adventured-to, faraway exotic lands. It is in these moments of unplugging, recharging and reconnecting with nature that we increase our appreciation for our personal paths and our loved ones.  

My process involves pushing and dragging the paint around on the canvas, and allowing it to dry into satisfying, detailed globs and blobs of stratified, marbled colours on the surface. These suggest landscapes, tapestries and floral elements in thick impasto.

-Nicole Katsuras
2022

Virginia Mak | Countenance
June 18-30, 2022 
Opening Saturday, June 18th, 1-3PM | Artist in Attendance
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto

Bau-Xi Gallery is thrilled to present Countenance, a solo show by Toronto based photographer Virginia Mak. The photographer’s soft focus and light values have become characterizing elements of her unique visual language. Mak conducts a creative exploration process about the every-day, the inner world that individuals carry with themselves, and dreams.

The compositions that Virginia Mak presents project harmony and tension, oscillating between the real and the illusion; the dreamy and the objective elements of ourselves. Her latest work focuses on the human face as a symbol of identity. This series of work is continuously obscured through a blur that merges analog photography with pictorial elements creating nostalgic atmospheres.

Born in Hong Kong, Mak received her Philosophy Degree from the University of Calgary and her BFA in Photography from the Ontario College of Art. Her work has been written about in prominent national publications and featured in magazines such as Prefix and PhotoLife.

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Kim Keever | Underwater Photography
June 4-16, 2022
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto

American photographer, Kim Keever will be exhibited at Bau-Xi Photo this June with a selection of artworks from both his abstract and landscape series. Keever is known for his colourful large-scale abstractions, which he creates by pouring paint into a 200 gallon tank of water in his studio.  He then uses a large-format digital camera to capture the resulting clouds of colour as they swirl into different forms and diffuse themselves through the water.
 
Keever’s moody landscape photographs are an illusion to the eye, in this earlier series by the artist, an artificial atmosphere of fog and misty rivers are created over miniature terrains. By submerging these fabricated landscapes in the tank in his studio, Keever has created dreamlike worlds reminiscent to the monumental paintings of the Hudson River School art movement.

Until the mid 1970’s, Keever worked as a thermal engineer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at which time he became a full-time artist. His previous vocation continues to inform his work today, lending scientific methodology and investigative process to his artistic process.
 
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Vicky Christou | The Gradient Gaze
May 19-31, 2022
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto

Christou’s sculptural paintings are constructed using gradient layers of acrylic paint. Her angled grid compositions allude to an ethereal light source and inject a dynamic and organic energy into the paintings. By merging a textile applicative process with her personal colour sensibility, Christou’s paintings marry a beautiful ambiguity of old and new.

The artist’s colour palettes are inspired by daily walks where she observed the subtle gradients of the atmosphere and how light grazes upon the natural elements. Christou noticed these gradient patterns are also common in technology and print media, mimicking the natural environment. Her palettes are evocative of nature and pleasurably reference a promising futuristic ambience.

The exhibition title, The Gradient Gaze, subtly highlights the underlying feminist premise ever-present in Christou’s work. As textiles and handicrafts have traditionally been associated with women, they historically have been considered a lesser artform. Christou sees these paintings as material symbols of a reclamation of our gaze; drawn away from the female figure towards the female artistic practice.

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Whitney Lewis-Smith | Biophilia
May 5-28, 2022
Opening Saturday, May 7, 2022 | Artist in Attendance, 12 PM-3 PM
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present, Biophilia, an inagural exhibition by the photographer Whitney Lewis-Smith.

Using 8 X 10 glass plate negatives, Lewis-Smith documents her highly detailed set constructions exploring the nuanced ways plants, animals, and people interact within the context of contemporary globalization. Having previously worked in ecological fieldwork, her staged tableaus are layered with scientific, historic, and cultural chronicles.

Born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1985, Whitney Lewis-Smith completed her Diploma in Photography at The School of Photographic Arts, Ottawa, in 2011. She is now based in Mexico City and Jordan River, BC.

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Steven Nederveen | Golden Glimmer
May 5-17, 2022
Opening: Saturday, May 7, 2022, 12 PM-3 PM
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Toronto-based artist Steven Nederveen in the solo exhibition, Golden Glimmer. The exhibition is a showcase of Nederveen’s signature practice, capturing the serenity of northern landscapes, the passage of time through the forest and the spirit of an ocean wave. By blurring the lines between photography and painting, Nederveen develops a magical realism that inspires us to see the natural world with new eyes.

Q&A with the Artist:

Could you speak to the power of color in your work and how it changes/inspires the narrative within a piece?

I’m deeply affected by colour and I am quite specific with it. Colour is a very subjective thing and I rely heavily on the intuition that colour takes us places. They are emotional journeys, specific to each of us but somehow universal as well.

It was Mark Rothko’s work that really influenced me in this regard. His big colourfields are so luscious while also inducing the viewer into transendental states. I experienced his Seagram paintings at Tate Britain when I was in my twenties, backpacking around Europe (as one does after University). Flashback to 1996, sitting in the stillness of the Rothko room, surrounded by huge colourfields that transported me to a profound and lasting feeling of peace unlike anything I had ever experienced. I bring this into my own work with the intention to create a place of solace. Immersed in the darkness of the ocean sky or dancing in the vibrant colours of trees, we are taken to a place where we can reflect.

 
Many viewers respond to the ethereal light in your work. In a way, it feels as if the light represents a presence or arriving of something mystical. Can you talk about what it means to you?

For me, personally, these golden glows have to do with the healing that comes through being in contact with nature. You don't get to be several decades old without a few bumps along the way, and finding ways to unburden ourselves is key. I find something wonderful happens when I'm walking through the woods or standing at the waters edge, there is an opening of my heart and mind. A significant event unfolds, the letting in of something new and letting go of something old. It is burning the old to come out anew. And so the light is just that. A burning, a letting go and a golden glow of setting free.

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