Exhibitions

Mel Gausden | Future Museums
July 11-31, 2024
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin, Main Floor Gallery 
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 11th, 5-8 PM | ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE 

Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin is thrilled to announce the captivating new solo exhibition Future Museums by Ontario-based artist, Mel Gausden. With this new collection, the artist commemorates the treasured natural environments of her life - now forever changed by climate disasters and human destruction. Through the artist's vibrant oil paintings of the Canadian landscape at dawn and dusk, Gausden poses the question: Are we at the point of no return to save these precious environments? Or is it a slow beginning with the potential to create real change that mitigates the climate crisis?

Artist Statement:

“This series of paintings is a record of and ode to the forests and lakes that have played a major role in my life. Unfortunately, most of these places have already undergone significant changes, and some have disappeared altogether due to disasters such as wildfires, emerald ash borer, oak wilt, and urban sprawl. These paintings celebrate the fact that the forests were here; they were lyrical and wild and deserved much more respect than we gave them.

Compositionally, the paintings are set in the middle of the forest, surrounded by trees. This is an acknowledgment of the direct relationship we have with the ecosystem. There’s no longer a facade that we are apart from the consequences of climate change. No one gets to stand back on a vista and look on from afar. For all of these pieces, I chose to paint using early morning light or evening light. This is a metaphor for the state of the environment. It asks; are we at the end? Has corporate greed and inertia condemned the climate? Or is it a slow beginning where we create real change that mitigates the climate crisis? I hope it’s the latter, but if not, I’m grateful for being able to connect and learn from the forests while they were still here.” 

Mel Gausden obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2009. In 2016, she received a grant from the Georgian Bay Land Trust. Her artwork has been published in Where Vancouver Magazine and Create! Magazine. She is represented by Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto and Vancouver.

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Steven Nederveen | The Universe Dreams With Us
June 6-27, 2024
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin, Upper Floor Gallery 
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 8th, 3-5 PM | ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE 

Bau-Xi Gallery is thrilled to present The Universe Dreams With Us, the enchanting new solo exhibition by Toronto-based artist, Steven Nederveen. In this newest series, the artist transports the viewer to a dreamlike world that inspires us to connect with nature and the universe. By using his hallmark techniques, the artist develops a magical realism that insists on new perspectives on the landscape genre.

Artist Statement:

“This body of work brings us into a liminal space between the vastness of our ocean and the timeless power of the sublime. A dreamlike world, connecting nature and the ethereal realm. The Universe Dreams With Us brings out a world of colours and warm glows to give us a more personal and compassionate version of the universe, one that is in union with us. 

I intentionally draw from the Abstract Expressionists in this work to use similar signifiers like Mark Rothko’s framing of colour blocks and Barnett Neuman’s ‘zip’ lines. Both artists were interested in the transcendent experience as well.” 

Steven Nederveen's work is featured internationally in galleries, art fairs and magazines, and is part of private and public collections including Air Canada, the House of Armani, and the Canadian embassy in Iceland. 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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Janna Watson | Speaking In Tongues 
June 6-27, 2024
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin, Main Floor Gallery 
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 8th, 3-5 PM | ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE

Bau-Xi Gallery is thrilled to present Speaking In Tongues, the alluring new solo exhibition by Toronto-based artist, Janna Watson. In this newest body of work, the artist explores the artform of language and the ways in which it can manifest outside of us. For Watson, this is the abstract language of painting that is used to communicate self discovery, emotion, and thought without speaking a word. 

“’Language is not a tool we have, it is a shapeshifter, a being that lives with us, walks and talks with us and has its own business and intentions.’ - Anne Carson

Part of the exhilaration I acquire from painting is being able to see shifts within myself manifested into a physical reality. The most truthful form of expression I have found in my life this far has been the abstract language of painting.  Self discovery is fluid and when I am painting I can see worlds within myself taking shape across their varied surfaces. When the act of looking creates optical overload the viewer is led back to the concrete realities of colour, pigment and the relief of negative space. Fields of watery pigment-stained panels have been created as open-ended experiments that unify the unfinished process of creation. The paintings speak on their own emotional terms that evade logic and invite limitless interpretations.

Raised in the 80s in a rural area without internet or tv, I had little exposure to foreign languages. My father was a Pentecostal pastor and my earliest memory of a “foreign” language was the speaking of tongues. I was taught that praying in tongues was a way to bypass the mind and communicate a divinely inspired language with an utterance of the spirit. This early understanding of using language to bypass words has been deeply imprinted on me and it has since manifested itself in new ways, influencing my abstract expression.”

Watson’s paintings circulate regularly at international fairs, including the Toronto International Art Fair, CONTEXT Art Miami, and in Seattle, where they were featured by Artsy in its list of “10 Works to Collect at the Seattle Art Fair.” Watson’s work has been covered by publications such as The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, NOW Magazine, and House & Home.

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Cori Creed | The Story and The Telling
June 8-22, 2024
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception Saturday, June 8, 2-4pm

Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents a new solo exhibition by established BC landscape painter Cori Creed. In her signature energetic style, the artist continues to pay tribute to the untamed beauty of the landscape of British Columbia, capturing its richness and diversity. Creed aims to encapsulate the literal and metaphorical non-linear journey of traversing both these landscapes and life. 


Artist's Statement:

This body of work, more than any, has made it evident just how looping the path can be. Retracing and pushing out in different directions, moving forward and then retreating - sometimes a jubilant exploration and sometimes a battle. My work continues to be a translation of an experience, in this case of our landscape - forests, mountains and coastlines. A balance between representation and mark making, the story and the telling. I have always considered how our own filters show us each a unique perspective of the world, but while painting this show I have also been very aware of how much outside events and forces impact and alter our own outpourings. The wind fills and empties our sails and we find a way to keep moving. With many of these pieces I found it necessary to ease off my search for more abstraction, and instead of chasing the essential forms, pick up my smaller brushes and pull details out of the washes and staining in the underpainting. Questing for the mediation found in the memories made while moving through our ancient places. 

- Cori Creed 2024

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Group Exhibition | A Light Exists In Spring
May 11-25, 2024
Main Level
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday May 11, 2-4pm

Taking inspiration from the famed poet Emily Dickinson, Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents A Light Exists in Spring, a group exhibition featuring new thematic compositions replete with the vibrance and optimism of the season. Dickinson's poem by the same title sings the praises of springtime's light and colour in words; artists Erin Armstrong, David Alexander, Vicky Christou, Cori Creed, Katrin Korfmann and Isabelle Menin each offer their unique perspectives and relationships with colour and form which evoke spring's characteristic energy of new life. 

Andre Petterson | Halcyon
April 20-May 4, 2024
Main Level
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday April 20, 2-4pm
Artist In Attendance

Andre Petterson turns his lens onto floral motifs for his new solo exhibition, Halcyon, proudly presented by Bau-Xi Vancouver. This series contrasts riotous, layered superblooms of flowers with the calm and focused refinement of singular blooms in architectural settings. Adding a further sense of calm, the collection includes several coastal landscapes with long pieces of driftwood to emphasize the linearity of the horizon meeting the water’s edge.

In these new works, Petterson embraces chance occurrence, letting paint organically land in unexpected places on the panel and intermingle with the photographed floral elements. The effect both disrupts and harmonizes with these elements, giving Petterson’s signature mixed media style a new sense of looseness as he creates varied and novel ways to experience florals.

Artist statement:

My new work is largely floral, still life and landscape, and is much more painterly than anything I've done in the recent past. It is an exploration and contrast of real and abstract, hard edges and softness, natural and man-made. I have been dabbling with floral and nature works throughout the decades; If I were to make floral works again, I felt I had to bring something new to the subject that I hadn't yet explored. Incorporating architectural elements added a sense of play and, to some degree, a sense of revisiting some of the early collages that I made years ago. I get to build things again.   - Andre Petterson 2024

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Tom Burrows | Into That Good Night
April 4 -25, 2024
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 4, 5-7 PM | ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE

Bau-Xi Gallery is thrilled to present Vancouver-based artist Tom Burrows' new solo exhibition Into That Good Night, his first show for Bau-Xi Toronto since 2019. The latest chapter in The Curve of Time series, this collection is comprised of exceptional polymer resin sculptures on which he writes:

"The electricity has just returned after a vicious Christmas day southeaster wreaked havoc on this side of Hornby. A heavy panel of tempered glass that sheltered the entrance to the house was sent cartwheeling thirty feet, shattering on the paving stones by the gate. When we returned by the light of a cell phone from Christmas dinner with friends at a home -- luckily, on the island's northwest shore -- we were greeted with what seemed like myriads of diamonds on the path.

It's been reported that the Salish Sea is warming faster than the greater North Pacific.

After the flu pandemic and an era of factional politics and market manipulation, M. Wylie Blanchet’s decade-long family travelogue commenced its nautical passages in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression. Simultaneously, fascism gained a stranglehold throughout Europe and Northern Asia, in the lead-up to another world-shattering conflict.

In 2024, we find ourselves emerging from a pandemic, but now the curve of time and space is compressed. In the ever-tightening vortex of mega-corporate media, we teeter on the lip of recession and fascism flourishes with the proliferation of populist demigods.

Hopefully, a voice will transmit a true journal of their family’s voyage; that anyone receives.

“Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I have appropriated Dylan Thomas's lines, hoping to transfer rage from the death of the self to the demise of a global ecosphere that supports human existence.

“Hope is the highest form of art.” Gerhard Richter.

“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” Francisco Goya.”"

Tom Burrows' work is held in private, corporate, and public collections across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The artist's polymer resin works were acquired for the permanent collection of Canada House in Trafalgar Square, London, and the HBC Global Art Collection in New York. Tom Burrows lives and works between Hornby Island and Vancouver.

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Kyle Scheurmann | Split My Full Moon Heart
April 4 -25, 2024
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 4, 5-7 PM | ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE

Bau-Xi Toronto is proud to present Split My Full Moon Heart, the newest solo exhibition by accomplished painter and climate-activist Kyle Scheurmann. The artist has created seventeen captivating pieces that stem from his experiences spent in nature and under the light of the Full Moon.

The artist states:

"I paint in my head the fastest when walking at night under a Full Moon.
When I think of the forest, it is most often at night while lit up with a Full Moon.

After several years of staying at communal camps, I’ve learned that the most magic nights are when we all turn off our flashlights and let the Full Moon drape the forest with colour. The light is made for us.

Even when walking trails I know well, I’m more prepared to find new paintings when under a Full Moon.

This has become a very useful visual tool in my actual paintings. I’m sure you've noticed this in several paintings - not just when painting people under a Full Moon, but by treating other things in the painting as a Full Moon too - such as a flashlight, or fire. 
The final days of large paintings are most often an effort to ‘paint the light’. Or to 'be the light.’ Or to ‘make the light.'

Or to ’be the Moon.’

Anything can happen under a Full Moon.

----

From Brisbane to Belfast, I’ve watched infinitely-large bodies of water transform under the Full Moon. Millions of litres sloshed around by a glowing orb in the sky.

So if the moon can have that kind of effect on the water in the oceans, what’s it doing to the water in my body?

When writing about my paintings from camp, Chickweed noted: “I think about drinking from one stream for 6 months until realizing that if my body is mostly water, then now my body is mostly Axe Creek."

60% of me (at that moment) was Axe Creek too.

The idea that “we are our surroundings” or “we are the forest” or “we are the water” has been in my work for a while. Figures in transitional spaces, about to plunge into a river or wade into the brush. Figures collecting or harvesting offerings from the forest in order to eat, drink or heal. These are painted metaphors for the split between where we end and where nature begins. 

Chickweed’s realization about Axe Creek has helped clarify a lot of this transitional imagery for me. It’s plain language to a complex feeling.

As much as we are water, we are the ocean too. 
The moon pulls on us too. Even if just a little. It’s enough to feel a difference.

My heart is bigger when under a Full Moon. 

For better or worse, I become more empathetic, more at the mercy of my surroundings. I feel more, and I have more energy to give to those feelings. 
I become a swelling ocean.

----

By the time I came home later that summer, we had visited several unbelievable “water in transition” places; 
Waterfalls that flowed into other waterfalls.
Rivers that flowed into lakes.
Rain that turned into dew as we hiked into the clouds.
A river flowing through a cave (and then out of the cave and into a waterfall!).

I collected so many drawings and photos from those places. My new paintings grow out of those experiences.

But the clarity with which I am finishing this exhibition comes from witnessing a different kind of transition happening in the forest. 

…And it split my heart in two.

----

June 5, 2023:

This past weekend, for the first time, I stood in an active cutblock that used to be an ancient forest I had protected with my own body. Just last summer while I was at Sassin Camp, it was lush with old-growth cedar taller than you could ever imagine…

----

With hindsight, I know for certain that standing in that clearcut didn’t ‘break’ my heart like I thought it did in the moment. Because ‘break' implies lots of little pieces. It suggests some kind of end or finality.

Instead, that moment Split my heart. 

Doused in the smell of gasoline and sawdust, a transition was happening in how I think about my responsibilities to my work and the environment. As my heart split wider with each minute in the clearcut, I thought about the dualities I had already been occupying in life and painting; Intentionally riding several lines between journalist and advocate, commercial artist and protest painter, Forest Protector and fundraiser. 

I was in two pieces:

I was full of rage and coursing with anger. 
I was focused and calm.

I was an activist, thinking about driving straight to the last active blockade and getting back to work with direct action. 
I was a conservationist, measuring stumps and taking careful documentation, thinking about legislation and who I needed to call first when I got back to cell service.

I was living in my truck on the side of a Vancouver Island logging road, taking notes like a journalist. 
I was living on the walls of fancy homes in Toronto, showing my research in cobalt and cadmium.

I was worried about myself, thinking about my own comfort and future. 
I was worried about humanity, terrified for us as a whole…

In that hot and decomposing clearcut, I was the water in transition. 
Dozens of litres sloshed around by a glowing orb in the sky.

The moon wasn’t at its fullest until later that night - but by 5pm, it was already giving me a good pull.

It split my heart.

Split My Full Moon Heart."

Since 2019, Scheurmann has kept studios in remote, wooded locations to document the incremental approach of climate change while simultaneously working on conservation and activism efforts.

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