Exhibitions

Image: George Byrne, "Ling's #2," Archival Pigment Print Mounted to Archival Substrate, Framed in White with Plexiglass, 33.75 x 41.75 inches. Edition of 5.

Bau-Xi Photo is excited to present an exhibition of works by Los Angeles-based Australian photographer George Byrne. This body of work has never been exhibited in Toronto. 

Known for his brightly coloured large-scale photographs of Los Angeles and Miami architecture, Byrne centres his practice around the documentation of the urban everyday. From parking lots to gas stations, billboards and graphic façades, Byrne meticulously frame’s his subject, almost distilling it down to a series of interlocking shapes. 

Byrne borrows from, and references, the Modernist and New topographics movements. While operating in different periods, Byrne seamlessly incorporates the banal, man-made, subject matter of the New topographics with the graphic simplicity the Modernists employed in their works.

The artist began photographing Los Angeles with a medium format camera in 2010. Byrne’s close-crop photos, often taken from the middle of the street, show careful attention to the geometric fragments of his urban surroundings revealed in the subtle line and unexpected shadow which cut across pastel walled surfaces, and divide soft sky from gritty stucco, plastic and concrete. Byrne’s work encapsulates not only the spirit of his adopted city’s unique and diverse cityscape, but an aesthetic sensibility that has come to be ubiquitous with our globalized visual culture influenced by equal parts art history and Instagram.

Cori Creed | Envision
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
May 8-22, 2021

In Envision, celebrated painter Cori Creed continues her years-long exploration of the nature of visual storytelling.
 
Informed by her personal history and lived experience with the West Coast landscape, Creed crafts illusory depth within her canvases then layers richly textured brushstrokes and abstract mark-making to render dynamic surfaces that both recede into the distance and approach to meet the eye.
 
Part unconscious experimentation and part deliberate gesture, Creed’s application of medium, which incorporates spray, staining, and washing techniques, serves to enrich the painted “text” and break the fourth wall, disrupting the three-dimensional picture space of Creed’s compositions.
 
With a self-reflexive consideration of her own practice and a keen awareness of the viewer and their unique ways of seeing, Creed questions the assumption of that which is “plainly there in front of us”, rendering these boundaries between the objective and subjective truths indistinct.

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Michael Wolf | Street View*
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto
May 1-31, 2021
*Presented as a Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Feature Exhibition

Bau-Xi Photo is pleased to present Street View, an exhibition of works from Michael Wolf’s Street View series, including Paris Street View, Manhattan Street View, Street View Portraits, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. Through these bodies of work, Michael Wolf redefined street photography.

Architecturally, Paris exists in a vacuum. The city’s historic core sits relatively unchanged since Haussmannization, and as a result, leaves little room for contemporary photographic reinterpretation. Moreover, photographers such as Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau and Ronis have left little space for further exploration. 

In the mid to late 2000s, Michael Wolf and his wife relocated to Paris from Hong Kong. This move signalled a massive shift in Wolf’s work as it was not only his home for over a decade, but the site to some of his most prolific series.

Upon their relocation, Wolf used Google Street View to navigate his new home. At the time, Google Street View was infantile—launched in 2007—and had introduced its organic navigation and full screen capabilities in 2009. Wolf recognized this new technology as a new digital medium.

Mounting his camera on a tripod positioned directly in front of his LCD screen, Wolf rephotographed Google’s readymade. Rephotography is not a new concept. Wolf’s Street View series most notably follows Sherrie Levine’s, After Walker Evans. Both Levine and Wolf photograph their readymades, place them in a new context, and present them in a different form. 

Wolf’s body of work also discusses surveillance and a person’s right to privacy. Paris Street View was created during the French government’s attempt to regulate street photography. This contrasts with France's 2007 decision to triple the number of video surveillance cameras by 2009, and Google’s unauthorized photographic mapping system.

After Paris Street View, Wolf revisited this concept several times, producing A Series of Unfortunate Events, Street View Interface, Manhattan Street View, Fuck You, and Street View Portraits. In 2011, A Series of Unfortunate Events was awarded Honourable Mention at the World Press Photo for Contemporary Issues—a controversial decision that re-defined photojournalism. 

Bau-Xi Photo’s exhibition Street View is a culmination of works from Paris Street View, Manhattan Street View, Street View Portraits, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. This curated selection of photographs includes works that are both self referential—recalling tropes from Wolf’s Architecture of Density, Transparent City, and Tokyo Compression—and externally referential, referencing photographs by Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Michael Wolf’s Street View series have most notably been exhibited in Paris, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam. Paris Street View, Manhattan Street View, and A Series of Unfortunate Events have not been exhibited in Canada.

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Mel Gausden | Campfire Stories
May 15-29, 2021
340 Dundas Street, Toronto

We are thrilled to present Campfire Stories, an emotive new body of work by emerging artist, Mel Gausden. This new series, comprised of oil paintings and works on paper, is a compilation of memories, moments and short stories characterized by the artists unique approach to Canadian landscape through the use of bold mark-making and brightly hued accents. Inviting, lush, and often unsettling, Gausden contemplates the extended isolation and discomfort of the past year and offers a hopeful reverence on past and future relationships.

Gausden’s process is significantly determined by the length of time in which her source material is transformed by time into nostalgic images; a process that can take years. Once memories are bound to her images, the narrative emerges and is rendered in paint.

Mel Gausden earned her Bachelor of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2009. She lives and works in Toronto.

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Ted Fullerton | Re-Imaging: The Four Seasons
April 10-24, 2021
340 Dundas Street, Toronto

This Spring, Ted Fullerton presents an exhibition of oil paintings, mixed-media drawings, and sculpture in Re-Imaging: The Four Seasons.

Borrowing its name from the eponymous violin concerti by Antonio Vivaldi, Fullerton’s painted series is deeply motivated by Max Richter’s bold re-composition and reinterpretation of this familiar score. Working from his studio in the forests of central Ontario, the artist’s visual language engages with this music, exploring the intersection of music with nature, which materializes in a discerning and optimistic portrayal of Vivaldi’s four characters: Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring.

As an audience, we experience Ted Fullerton’s immersive exhibition as a combination of narrative and reinterpretation. Alongside Fullerton’s painted works that were five years in the making, is a new series of mixed-media collage and drawings based on the notion of the Dithyramb, an ancient Greek hymn sung in dedication to the god of wine and fertility, Dionysus. Steeped in rich symbolism and mythology, the viewer absorbs the drama beautifully expressed as a culmination of Fullerton’s fascination with the intrinsic link between music and nature.

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Steven Nederveen | Quietude
April 10 – 24, 2021
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto

In Quietude, the latest exhibition by Toronto artist Steven Nederveen, the artist explores the sensation of calm and reflection instilled through true solitude. Informed by his own practice of meditation, Nederveen navigates our recent acquaintance with seclusion that is both shared and personal. Depicting the Muskoka and Northern regions of Ontario, Nederveen’s distinctive mixed-media process develops a magical realism that insists on new perspectives on the otherwise familiar landscape. Rustic islands, dense with trees and shrubbery, maintain the idyllic Canadian wilderness while offering a place of private retreat, removed from the activities of dense cities.

Steven Nederveen's work is featured internationally in galleries, art fairs, magazines, and many private collections. He studied fine art at Medicine Hat College and went on to receive a Bachelor of Design from the University of Alberta in 1995. His studio is currently based in Toronto.

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Jamie Evrard | Wilderness Year
March 13 – 27, 2021
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver

In Wilderness Year, the latest exhibition by Vancouver-based painter Jamie Evrard, the artist traverses a new path on her return to the landscape genre.

Looking back on the experience of past travels, Evrard, informed by and moving away from earlier bodies of work, embraces the challenge of this source material to explore notions of wilderness both within the context of her subject matter and as it relates to the creative process itself. 

Over the course of a year spent in relative isolation, "wilderness" also came to represent "a bewildering situation" or "the state or quality of being solitary". Navigating this terrain, Evrard enacts a telling through the extension of her brush, to delve further into illusory depths of the picture space, and by extension her painting practice.

Evrard devises new techniques for her West Coast surroundings by layering her reference imagery and superimposing multiple compositions to evoke a visual exchange, a call and response between herself and the canvas. This gesture of resurfacing and overlaying traces the recall and elaboration of memory, and likewise echoes the natural movement of water reflections and old-growth canopies.

Interpreted through Evrard's hand, the soaring forests and rugged shorelines of the Pacific North West become new inspiration for mark-making and complex draftsmanship. Wilderness Year, offers an account of the artist's journey toward the realization of a singular vision.

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Kathryn Macnaughton | Into the Groove
March 13 – 27, 2021
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto

Bau-Xi Gallery is thrilled to present Into the Groove, a dynamic solo exhibition by Toronto-based painter Kathryn Macnaughton. Recognized for her geometric abstraction and Romantic expressive mark-making, this exciting new body of work is a spirited portrayal of movement and rhythm, connectivity, and hopeful outlooks. Through interwoven forms that allude to feminine silhouettes, floral motifs and decorative elements, Macnaughton’s bold canvases reveal a transformative return to the artists background as an illustrator. The thoughtful and balanced compositions are defined by a juxtaposition of broad and thin strokes, inviting further investigation into the intuitive washes of the base layers of the paintings.

A graduate of OCAD, Macnaughton has exhibited in both Canada and abroad since 2010. Recent collaborations include Kit and Ace, Collective Arts Brewery, and The Gardiner Museum.

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