Exhibitions

Michelle Nguyen | There's Always More Show
January 12th - 26th, 2019
3045 Granville Street
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 12, 2:00 - 4:00pm

‘There’s Always More Show’ presents the latest work of narrative painter Michelle Nguyen, whose dramatic tableaux have captured the attention of critics and collectors alike. In a loose gestural style characteristic of the artist’s work to date, ‘There’s Always More Show’ collapses the hierarchy between high and low culture with references as far reaching as art history to TV, Greek mythology to reality show kitsch - all brimming with allegorical meaning.

Borrowing its title from animated TV show Bojack Horseman, Nguyen wields her powerful storytelling style for her own ever-evolving serial cast of characters. Recurring leitmotifs of birds, fruit, insects and smoke pepper Nguyen’s scenes, creating delightful openings for viewers to interpret and project personal meanings. Unfinished faces and half-formed languid, recumbent bodies hint at themes of metamorphosis and change embodied more concretely by serpents and half-creature/ half-human beasts Medusa and Leda.

The enigmatic subjects and contexts in Nguyen’s vignettes are never fully reconciled, rather they are absorbed in a continual process of morphing, changing and becoming as they pop up here and again from scene to scene, canvas to canvas. Far from linear, their journey through self-discovery and redemption is winding and arduous, as symbolized by tigers and screaming figures.

VIEW THE MICHELLE NGUYEN COLLECTION

Darlene Cole | Velvet 
December 1-15, 2018
340 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 1, 2-4 pm. Artist in Attendance.

In her latest exhibition, Velvet, Darlene Cole pulls inspiration from the sensual, warm, and theatrical associations with the luxurious fabric. Cole revels in the velvety textures of water, which is presented full of emotion; either invitingly calm or full of fury. Rendered with confident gestural marks, her spirited figures unravel and meld into the surroundings. The delicate yet powerful works evoke emotion, as Cole navigates the viewer through time and memory.

Cole's work is extensively collected across Canada and internationally. Notable public collections include: The Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Tom Thomson Art Gallery, the K.F. Preueter Collection of Canadian Art, Royal Bank of Canada, CIBC, OCAD University, Fairmont Hotels (Toronto, Montreal, Banff), and Manulife Financial. 

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Chris Shepherd | Incomplete Architectures 
December 1-15, 2018
350 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception + Artist Talk: Saturday, December 1st, 2-4 pm. Artist in Attendance.

"One is continuously encountering construction when walking, cycling, or driving in the city. It seems like new projects are always underway, and the bigger the place, the more prolific the process. Demolition and rebuilding are part of a perpetual cycle that plays out on every street; construction is the life blood of the city, the respiration of urbanity. 

This boundless development is intrinsic to city life; it blends into the day to day and becomes almost invisible. Hundreds of building sites are planted in our subconscious, where they live quietly like the autonomic functions of the body. Like the vital acts of breathing, or the beating of our hearts, construction is an essential part of the life cycle of a city.

Incomplete Architectures uses materials, process, building and development to study ideas of change and impermanence, and the effect they have on us.  It attempts to arrest the endless activity of the city and capture small moments of stillness, sandwiched between the immediate past and the near future. These moments are stunningly beautiful and remarkably affecting in their simplicity. They are traces of what has occurred, and what will be."

Chris Shepherd is a Toronto-based artist known for his use of the photographic medium to document the ever-changing urban landscape. His work has been exhibited across North America, and is included in major corporate collections in Canada. Most recently a number of his works were acquired by the HBC Global Art Collection in New York. 

Cori Creed | Tapestry
November 15-December 1, 2018
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 15, 6-8 pm, Artist in Attendance

In her latest exhibition, painter Cori Creed draws inspiration from the textural quality and patterning found in textile arts. Tapestry deftly interweaves the West Coast landscape tradition with the artist's ongoing engagement with the materiality of the oil medium.

The atmospheric depth and painterly abstraction of these canvases present a constantly shifting warp and weft — lushly layered brushstrokes, threaded through with the artist's distinctive gestural mark-making, emerge from the paint surface and part to reveal swathes of vibrant colour and pictorial space.

In this series, Creed unravels her ever-evolving practice to be repurposed as material, deconstructing source imagery from previous bodies of work as the apparatus for the application of new techniques. Through this process, disparate temporal realities and spatial elements become stitched together and re-fabricated, with new understanding of the subject matter, to evoke the complexity and richness of the natural environment.

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Robert Marchessault | The Lorax Dreams 
November 10-24, 2018
340 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 10, 2-4 pm, Artist in Attendance

David Restivo, three-time winner of Pianist of the Year from the National Jazz Awards, will be playing during the Reception.

The Lorax Dreams is being held to honour the 30 years since Bau-Xi Gallery first began representing Robert Marchessault’s career. We look forward to celebrating this momentous occasion alongside the artist with an Opening Reception on Saturday, November 10^th, 2-4pm.

Robert Marchessault’s newest body of work evolves from his continued interest in the contemporary, sublime landscape, with a renewed focus on texture and abstraction. The series seeks to reveal the artist’s emerging understanding of the non-duality of nature through the depiction of the sole-standing tree. Marchessault’s preferred subject has gone through a range of artistic treatments since they were born in the 1970s; seeing a shifting approach to space, light, textures, atmosphere, and distance. Marchessault’s trees are created from memory, as opposed to en plein air drawings or photographs. He states “I use memory as a filtering agent to remove nonessential visual elements. When a work is successful, it has a poetry that presents some aspect of my understanding of who I am."

VIEW ROBERT MARCHESSAULT FULL COLLECTION HERE

David Burdney | Ephemera
October 13-27, 2018
350 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening reception: Saturday, October 13, 2-4pm

Bau-Xi is pleased to present Ephemera, a solo exhibition featuring all new works by Canadian artist David Burdeny. These photographs represent two ephemeral landscapes in China; an ancient mountain landscape, set within the Anhui Provence of eastern China, and a temporary construct of ice in the northern city Harbin.  Separated by geography and climate, these landscapes are spatially and culturally different, yet remarkably similar on a fundamental level.  Both landscapes are born from their environment, exist within it, and then ultimately decay back into it with the natural processes of time. The icy city of colour will melt come spring, run down the banks of the Songhua River and return to whence it came, while the diffuse mountain views of Haungshan fade in and out of sight as airborne vapor makes it's way up from the valley below. In both cases, there is an infinite exchange of energy between the land and its environment as water turns to gas, then to liquid, then to solid, and we are left to admire the beauty and complexity of it all.

David Burdeny is an acclaimed Canadian photographer whose travel-inspired landscapes are characterized by unusually long exposures that result in detailed images and soft colour studies.

Burdeny describes his photography as ‘discovery-driven’ and has traveled to places including Antarctica, Iceland, Brazil, China, France, Italy and Cambodia in pursuit of his work. Influenced by notable photographers such Michael Kenna, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Fay Goodwin, David deliberately photographs in poor light and near darkness. He uses unusually long exposures to see that which our eyes cannot. Moving beyond the literal, his images have been described as ominous, haunting, beautiful and meditative.  

Burdeny’s work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions.  He is the recipient of many notable photography accolades, including Photographer of the Year in the Nature Category at the International Photography Awards. Burdeny’s work has been extensively collected and is included in both private and corporate collections. Most recently, editions of his newest works have been acquired by the HBC Global Art Collection in New York.

VIEW COLLECTION HERE

George Byrne | Block Colour
October 13 - November 4, 2018
3045 Granville St, Vancouver
Artist's Reception: October 18th, 6-8 pm, Artist in Attendance

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to introduce Sydney-born, Los Angeles-based photographer George Byrne to our artist roster. Byrne’s inaugural exhibition at Bau-Xi Vancouver, Block Colour explores the graphic simplicity of architectural form and light across different neighbourhoods in Los Angeles.

Byrne started photographing Los Angeles with a medium format camera in 2010. Mostly devoid of human presence, the photographs in Block Colour capture the serendipity of the everyday urban experience stripped down to its bare elements. 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 subtle line and unexpected shadow which cut across pastel walled surfaces, and divide soft sky from gritty stucco, plastic and concrete.

From afar, Byrne’s vibrant compositions resemble abstract paintings. His reduction of architectural form to their purest elemental shape and block of colour harken to Henri Matisse’s cut-outs. His flattened cityscapes recall the modernist paintings of Richard Diebenkorn with their clean lines and flat, formal components. Soft-hued and complementary colour combinations evoke playfulness and lighthearted humour, punctuated by not-so hard-edge lines, slabs of concrete and peeking palm trees. 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.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

George Byrne was born in Sydney, Australia in 1976 and graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2001. He has exhibited internationally in Italy, India, Australia, and New York. In 2010, Byrne relocated to Los Angeles, California where he continues to live and work today. 

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Mel Gausden | Short Stories
September 8-22, 2018
340 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 8, 2-4 pm, Upper Gallery

Mel Gausden is an emerging Canadian artist who explores themes of personal and cultural identity through traditions of self-portraiture and landscape painting. Her work combines symbols and markers of Canadiana with painterly gesture, mark-making and bold highlights. Neon silhouettes add a contemporary freshness, and highlight the inherent distortion of personal narratives. Gausden’s manipulation of oil paint varies from sculptural—bending and piling thick layers of paint into matchsticks of textured impasto—to painterly— diluting paint until it drips with controlled precision.

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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