Exhibitions

2017 Salt Spring National Art Prize | Winners Exhibition
3045 Granville Street - Upper Floor
November 4 -18, 2017
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 4, 2:00 - 4:00pm

Bau-Xi Gallery is honoured to showcase winning works by the seven recipients of the 2017 Salt Spring National Art Prize (SSNAP) in the Upper Floor Gallery. Initiated by the Salt Spring Arts Council, recipients of the second edition of the prize were chosen by David Garneau, Denis Longchamps and Naomi Potter from 1,227 artists who submitted from across Canada. The winning artists include Judy Anderson, Garry Kaye, Jan Little, Katherine MacNeill, Peter McFarlane, Dave Parsanishi, and Diana Thorneycroft.  

The intent of SSNAP is to encourage artists whose practice demonstrates originality, quality, integrity and creativity—resulting in significant work with visual impact and depth of meaning.

Barbara Cole | Figure Painting
Bau-Xi Photo, 350 Dundas St West, Toronto
November 4 -18, 2017
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 4, 2:00 - 4:00pm.  Artist in attendance.  

Photographer Barbara Cole’s latest series Figure Painting extends, with renewed subtlety, the artist’s long affair with her preferred mediums: water, light and the figure. Like a painter, Cole mixes and layers, blends and builds her compositions into ethereal portraits rich with rhythm and dimension. Inspired by the painting techniques cited in their names, these figures—Alla Prima, Underpainting, and others—are like beautiful ghosts: barely outlined by the dance of light across skin; so near the surface and somehow just out of reach. Cole’s camera lens—a tool which for the artist does not “capture” her created worlds but rather brings them into existence—plucks her ethereal subjects as though from a dream, granting them each a moment of stillness and mystery.

Figure Painting will be on preview at Art Toronto at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, October 27-30, 2017

VIEW THE COLLECTION

 

Shi Le | Colour of Fall
October 12-28, 2017
3045 Granville Street - Upper Floor Gallery
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 12th, 6-8 PM

Shi Le’s latest series of paintings, on display in the Upper Gallery from October 12^th to 28^rd, captures the ever-changing shades of Autumn, as the season transforms dense forests, placid creeks, rustling leaves, still waters and swaying trees. Le’s practice follows the longstanding tradition of seeking enlightenment through the study of nature, evoking collective experiences of natural space with poetic movement, masterful palette knife technique and luminous impasto surfaces.

Sketching from photographs taken on his solitary walks, Le develops his compositions by drawing on deeply resonant imagery, deriving inspiration from an intimate connection with nature. Le depicts the Ontario woodlands with softened focus and hyper-saturated hues, with particular focus on the riotous colours of the burnished landscape, synthesized through the distillation of personal recollection. Reflecting on the changing states of nature and the cyclical pattern of seasons, Le’s layered acrylic daubs describe minute shifts in light, filtered through the canopy to set the undergrowth alight with deep crimsons, burnt oranges and warm ochres. His marking making creates a time-lapse of ephemeral moments —a painting that is both a static image and a temporal document infused with the breath of the sublime.

VIEW THE COLLECTION

 

Cori Creed | Shift
October 12-28, 2017
3045 Granville Street - Main Floor Gallery
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 12th, 6-8 PM

At the forefront of contemporary west coast naturalism, Cori Creed continues her investigation of temporal and material process in Shift, her new exhibition at Bau-Xi Vancouver. 

Creed adopts fresh techniques in her ongoing exploration of the landscape: loose brushwork, expressive movements, heavily layered paint in unexpected bold colours, and fractured compositions. Creed challenges traditional perspective as she experiments with collapsing the illusion of depth with flatness.

In Shift, the artist looks back at the history of painting with its trajectories and trends. Creed combines naturalism and abstraction to create multi-layered compositions in her nod to Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh and contemporary painters Alex Kanevsky and Peter Doig. Creed’s broad, valiant brushstrokes disrupt the surface of the canvas, marking the presence of the artist’s hand in rendering an otherwise “real” space of illusory depth. Creed yields to the paint, lending a loose hand to the brush that allows the landscape to emerge brimming with painterly fullness. Creed’s signature mark-making and use of spray paint hints at the human presence in the natural environment: evidence that the landscape is never untouched but always constructed and re-constituted by humankind.

Cori Creed has been represented by Bau-Xi Gallery since 2011. Shift marks her seventh exhibition at Bau-Xi.

VIEW THE COLLECTION

Cara Barer | Letters and Landscapes 
350 Dundas St. W, Toronto
September 9 - 23, 2017
Opening Reception: Saturday September 9, 2-4pm.  Artist in attendance.  

Bau-Xi Photo presents Letters and Landscapes, a new body of work by Houston artist, Cara Barer.  Using sheet music reminiscent of her childhood and travel photographs from the artist’s own collection is “a natural next step” for Barer that combines process with personal ephemera. The resulting patterned, abstract compositions are powerful simply in their pictorial poignancy, but each image is also a layered object with a history, one that for Barer “hints of its origins, and culminates in a picture of my pictures of the world.”  

Cara Barer has exhibited in solo and group show throughout the US and Canada since 1994. Her work has been featured extensively in such publications as New York Magazine, The Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, The Boston Globe and The New Yorker; and can be found in the collections of Bloomingdale’s, Saks, Lehigh University, Nordstrom, United States Embassy, Kyiv, Ukraine, VISA and Wells Fargo Bank and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is based in Houston, Texas.

VIEW THE COLLECTION 

READ Q & A WITH CARA BARER HERE

 

Sheri Bakes | Wind Songs
September 9-23, 2017
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 9, 2-4 pm 

Bau-Xi Gallery presents Wind Songs, a new body of work by Vancouver painter Sheri Bakes.

At the core of Sheri Bakes’ painting practice is an interest in evoking the grace of nature: “My work stems from a place of alignment with nature. Nature is the tuning fork. It keeps everything in tune.” In her latest suite of oil paintings, Bakes harkens to the site of community gardens abundant with vegetation. As a metaphor for the resilient spirit in nature, the community garden is at once an anchor and respite.

With its many life-affirming and nurturing associations, the garden offers endless variations in texture and tone for Bakes, whose paintings draw parallels between music and visual art, fusing compositional elements of rhythm, harmony, melody and lyric.

VIEW ARTWORK BY SHERI BAKES HERE



Michelle Nguyen | Of Tristia, Forlorn! 
September 9-23, 2017
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 9, 2-4 pm 

On display in the Upper Gallery this September is ‘Of Tristia, Forlorn!’, Michelle Nguyen’s debut exhibition at Bau-Xi Gallery.

Stemming from a childhood fascination with death, ‘Of Tristia, Forlorn!’ explores the symbiosis between life after death, and death after life. Heavily influenced by poetry and cultural superstition, Nguyen examines these themes through the surreal, macabre, erotic and oftentimes humorous subjects in her oil and pastel canvases.

The imagined figures of Nguyen’s compositions demand second looks and closer examination, their anonymous bodies at once monstrous and personable, singular and homogenous, familiar and strange. Nguyen’s depictions explore the poetics of the masses, empowering the figure of the other through unabashed nudity and the plurality of the crowd - to challenge the dynamic between subject and audience.

The stripped-down mythology and folkloric elements of Nguyen’s work upends traditional narratives while questioning internalized values and assumed truths, and exploring the ephemerality of the conjured moment. Nguyen paints an open-ended memento mori, which provokes reflection on personal mortality, keeping a door ajar for the unfathomable elements of the living world and inviting a dialogue on the unspoken.

VIEW ARTWORK BY MICHELLE NGUYEN HERE

Bau-Xi Photo, Toronto
August 12-31, 2017

Join us this August for our group exhibition, which focuses on work by Virginia Mak. Fostered through a deep-rooted fascination with fictional characters, Virginia Mak infuses her photographic work with poetic references to icons from classic literature, folklore and mythology. By staging scenarios around illustrious story lines and characters, Mak aims to visually depict familiar figures and re-interpret the narrative. Known for its soft focus and minimized light values, her work disrupts the boundary between painting and photography.