Exhibitions

Year In Review | A Focus on Photography
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto
December 4-18, 2021

This December, Bau-Xi Photo presents Year In Review, a curated selection of photographic artworks received and exhibited throughout the course of 2021. Featuring works by Isabelle Menin, Barbara Cole, Richard Barnes, Kim Keever, George Byrne and Joshua Jensen-Nagle among other gallery artists.

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Steven Nederveen | Home
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
November 20 - December 2, 2021

Steven Nederveen reframes the grandeur of the Canadian landscape to reflect the essence and lifeforce of Home. By interweaving the mediums of photography and painting, Nederveen conjures a magical realism that brings forth new perspectives on the landscape genre.

Artist’s Exhibition Statement:

During the period of covid in which travel was difficult and we were all stuck at home, I got to thinking what “home” is to me. Home, it turns out, is many things - friends, family, connection, inner peace, playing with my kids. I decided to focus on home as an internal place of stillness and quietude, a place of reflection and contemplation. I have imbued images of island coastlines with these traits. I spent a lot of time as a kid sailing with my family around these islands and have felt the deep sense of peace that speaks through the water and the land. Small islands, distant shores, the open horizon - these take on the feeling of sacred ground, of places to protect. Home is just that: a cherished space with its own life and vitality, each one different and unique. 

Joshua Jensen-Nagle | Dreams I Never Forgot
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto
November 6-20, 2021

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present Dreams I Never Forgot, an exhibition of photographs by acclaimed artist Joshua Jensen-Nagle. 

Exploring his perspectives on the past year and a half, Jensen-Nagle explains;

"Travel is my lust.  It is not my love.  Love is passion and compassion.  I have no compassion for travel.  Airports, customs, carnets, delays, planes, trains, boats and helicopters.  All complications in my world.  Headaches and time.  Delaying me on my journey.  Once at my destination though, it all clears away.  Focus and determination set in.  Anxiety and excitement take over as my subject matter is now before me.  Now to work – Light – Angles – Composition – Waiting – Waiting – Waiting.  The right moment will appear.  It does.  Relief, confidence and exhilaration wash over me, but it’s fleeting.  Time to move again… more travel. 

Over the past 18 months, I haven’t been able to travel.  The world seemed to invite stillness as the pandemic took hold.  I slowed.  Our studio shut down briefly.  We stayed home more.  I made pizza, baked bread, played chess, drank wine, had fires in my backyard, rehomed a puppy, retreated to the beach along Lake Erie, rehomed a second puppy and was grateful that I never became sick.  Nor did my loved ones.  Travel was no longer a part of my normal everyday life.  Reflection on travel was still there.  Unsure how it now made me feel.

These works were photographed pre-pandemic.  Never worked on.  Looking back at them and the memories they filled me with was like a big hug.  Showing this collection has made me rethink how I feel.  TRAVEL.  Maybe, I do love you.

And so, that is what this body of work is to me.  It’s our passion and compassion.  It’s our lust for faraway places that exist in our memories and dreams.  It’s the beauty of us connecting with other people and nature.  We all need this connection and it has been awhile since we could experience it in the same way we used to.  Time will tell if “normal” will ever return, but for now, we have these photographs to remind us of Dreams and Love and Lust… and TRAVEL."

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Michelle Nguyen | Water Features
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
October 16 - 30, 2021

"Water Features", Michelle Nguyen's fourth show with Bau-Xi, uses human and animal bodies in varying states to explore notions of identity, existence, historical erasure and ecological grief. Her canvases are populated by elegant, humorous or even grotesque figures, in conjunction with carefully selected vegetation and objects – all often iterations of classical motifs - that appear to be part dream, part nightmare, struggling with the dissolution of self. Nguyen uses vividly coloured oil paints to conjure worlds dense with magical realism, symbolism, and narrative, prompted by her own experiences and observations as a child of Vietnamese refugees. 

Sheri Bakes | Sunset Garden
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
October 2 - 14, 2021

Sunset Garden reflects Sheri Bakes’ ongoing interest in wind and breathwork, and how to make visible, with paint, the often invisible life force that courses through the natural environment and our connection to it. The Vancouver Island based painter currently lives on a 50 acre farm and the meadows, forest, lake, and pastures that surround her offer up ever-changing vistas for inspiration and source imagery. The stippled dabs and strokes of colour and light that have become representative of the artist’s signature style reveal Bakes’ interest in referencing the atmospheric particles that weave and cycle between and through us.
Sheri Bakes states:
When I walk through landscape, I dissolve. You become the environment that you are walking through and your separation from the environment no longer exists. There is a distinct feeling of wholeness and I attempt to re-create this in my work.
On a more personal level, this show is painted for and dedicated to the artist’s mother Frieda Bakes, who passed away earlier this year. Frieda passed on her awe of sunsets to her daughter and the artist would observe her seeking refuge in her own garden through difficult times and failing health. Sunset Garden celebrates these shared moments where human bonds and receiving solace in nature become inextricably intertwined. These windswept, light and hope-filled landscape paintings, with their pronounced ebb and flow, are equal parts evocation, elegy, and an invocation to joy.

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Isabelle Menin | Natural Order
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto
October 2-16, 2021

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present Natural Order, an exhibition of photographs by acclaimed Belgian artist Isabelle Menin.

Menin weaves digital configuration and her eye for radiant colour to masterfully compose images that suggest both form and distortion.

The flora within these realms, which Menin describes as “disordered landscapes”, are individually documented, each flower carefully lit, and painstakingly captured as part of the artist's eye for intricacy. These powerful symbols act as the mode for Menin's signature mark-making — abstracted and revolved, their petals and stems become a means to enact the artist's disembodied gestures. 

Drawing connections to "nature's strange complexity" and that of human nature, Menin's photography is caught in a state of perpetual transformation. Transcribed with playful artifice and hybridized through her distinct aesthetic "hand", Menin subverts our understanding of her subject matter, unraveling their contextual meaning to render them anew.

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Erin Armstrong | Don’t Hold Too Tightly To The River Bank
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto
September 11-25, 2021

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present Don’t Hold Too Tightly To The River Bank, a highly anticipated exhibition by Toronto-based painter, Erin Armstrong.

Motivated by the polarizing state of the world that has resulted in a shared experience of isolation, this new body of work presents figures existing in suspense and wait. Through their disorienting surroundings and stolid gazes, Armstrong encapsulates the fleeting moments of “in-between’, relatable anticipation for future plans of which we have more recently recognised the value. Fresh lemons, plucked apricots, blooming and wilting flora, are poignantly positioned in Armstrong’s paintings as symbols of the temporal and fleeting cycles in which we exist.

Lush dripping gardens, brightly patterned clothing, and exotic landscapes feature heavily in the artist’s dynamic exploration into a world of familiarity, yet surrealist daydreams. Drawing from personal experiences, and identifying the collective conscience associated with these recent histories, the Armstrong looks with optimism at the lessons learned and the strength gained from being present.

Erin Armstrong is an emerging figurative artist working and living in Toronto. Using quick and decisive gestural markings over acrylic-based images, Armstrong creates unique distorted figures and portraits in an expressive dream-like world. Juxtaposing the everyday with surrealistic imaginings, Armstrong captures hidden emotions often lost in human experience. Her concern is not to recreate reality as it exists, but rather to evoke an atmosphere that transports the viewer into a world of interpretation.

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