Exhibitions

Janna Watson | Patterns of Up and Down
June 9-23, 2018
340 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 9, 2:00 - 4:00 pm, Artist in Attendance

The Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto will be presenting the newest body of work from painter Janna Watson, in a solo exhibition entitled ‘Patterns of Up and Down’. Janna Watson's compelling abstract compositions use colour, line, and energetic brushstrokes to evoke emotion in the viewer. Her work possesses an elegant and powerful energy, created with a carefully balanced pairing of loose painting and gestural mark-making. Watson's paintings are altogether honest and confident, vulnerable and evocative portraits of colour, texture, space, and movement.

Watson’s work can be found in several significant collections including the TD Bank Financial Group, CIBC, Nordstrom, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the HBC Global Art Collection in New York. The Toronto-based artist has exhibited across Canada and internationally.

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Artist Statement | Patterns of Up and Down 

Over the past several months, I've been painting in my studio and contemplating the act of being versus the act of doing. "To be" is to have a conscious existence whereas "to do" is the act of performing. In other words, getting up and lying down is something that we all do in our day-to-day, and being up and being down is inside the emotional daily pattern of our lifestyle. These actions have been internalized then externalized through Patterns of Up and Down, and each painting can be seen as a part of me. I like to look at these pieces individually as daily entries of my aesthetic-journal.

I recently visited the AGO to see Mitchell/Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation. I was inspired by one particular work by Joan Mitchell where she wanted to convey the feeling of a dying sunflower. Like this flower, my painting is mutually linked to life's ups and downs, and so too are my titles; they are equally a part of me as the visual work itself. From moments where my acupuncturist said Eating Flowers is Good For Eyesight (particularly chrysanthemums) and realizing how painting Upside Down is a Whole New Way of Seeing, I am conveying my inner world and sharing my reality through abstracted forms.

Toronto was affected by the longest winter which got us all down. I walked to my studio in the April ice storm thinking about Mitchell's way of seeing and along these lines I painted Late Spring Feels Like Being Buried Alive. She changed the way I interpret light, colour, and emotions. Mitchell said “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me – and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would more like to paint what it leaves with me." Reading this was comforting. I hope that my interpretation of nature affects my viewers though their own unconscious realities.

Janna Watson, 2018 

 
Gallery Artists | PLAY
June 9 - 23, 2018
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto

This month, Bau-Xi is pleased to present a group exhibition titled Play, showing works by gallery artists such as Jeffery Milstein, Barbara Cole, Joshua Jensen-Nagle and Katrin Korfmann.

From Jeffrey Milstein's striking aerial shots of Disneyland, to Katrin Korfmann's composed scenes of children playing against brightly coloured backgrounds, this exhibition is curated around themes of recreation and playfulness. The bright colour palettes that characterize these works also impart a sense of joy; pops of pink and turquoise can be found along the shorelines of Joshua Jensen-Nagle's sandy beaches, and the primary hues of Barbara Cole's Petit Prince works are reminiscent of the simplicity and joy of childhood.

Visit Bau-Xi Photo from June 9-23 to see this incredible exhibition. Click here to view the photography collection. 

Joshua Jensen-Nagle | Endless Summer
Bau-Xi Gallery Vancouver
May 5 - 19
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 24, 2-4PM

In his acclaimed series Endless Summer, Canadian photographer Joshua Jensen-Nagle continues to­­ capture aerial images of sunbathed beaches around the world, transforming crowds of people into toy-like figures set against sublime natural backdrops.

Approaching the medium of photography as a “means to evoke emotion rather than document a reality”, Jensen-Nagle’s beach-goers in repose evoke a collective reminiscence, sparking personal associations that might resemble the artist’s own nostalgia for a “childhood spent on the shore… memories of never-ending days floating in the water, jumping waves.”

Jensen-Nagle’s bird’s-eye view and immersive, large-scale format disturbs one’s sense of depth and perspective to abstract these familiar sites of leisure; dramatic visual patterns emerge from the photographic surface: colourful umbrellas form recurring motifs, swimmers afloat become the material of choice for the artist’s mark-making, poised between the painterly washes of sand and surf demarcating these compositions.

Beyond their evocative potential and arresting imagery, Joshua Jensen-Nagle’s scenes inspire a dialogue revolving around the nuanced spatial history of the beach. The effect of this imaging is multifold, a study of topographical and ecological tensions between the boundaries of land and sea; a liminal space between nature and civilization, the familiar and unknown. Situated in this intersectional space, Jensen-Nagle examines the ways in which humanity inhabits these environments at the furthest reaches of the earth; ruminating upon the nature and evolution of leisure and its place in the breakneck pace of our everyday lives.

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Vicki Smith |  A Theory of Relative Happiness
May 12-26, 2018
340 Dundas St West, Toronto
Closing Reception: Saturday May 26, 2:00 - 4:00pm, Artist in Attendance

A Theory of Relative Happiness was inspired by a note written by Albert Einstein. In 1922 he wrote, “A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.”

For many years my paintings have been a dedicated effort in providing a calm and modest space.  A place of quiet and stillness.  If for a moment we allow ourselves to enter into that stillness our natural happiness will present itself. It’s already there. Our happiness. It just needs a quiet moment to be experienced. – Vicki Smith

Vicki Smith, a sought-after Canadian painter, is known for her paintings of female figures that explore the possibilities and limitations of gravity.  Often shown suspended in dark air or rippling water, twisted and upside-down, falling into and out of the picture plane, these figures are often so precariously placed upon the canvas that they threaten to slip away or dissolve. Though rarely grounded, they are always balanced.

Vicki Smith studied fine art at the Ontario College of Art. She lives and works in Toronto.

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Cori Creed | Strata
April 14-28, 2018
340 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday April 14, 2:00 - 4:00pm - Artist in Attendance

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by celebrated Canadian painter, Cori Creed. Inspired by her travels to coastal locations around the globe, Creed continues to capture the Canadian landscape with joy and vitality.

At once fascinated by her subject and by the process of painting itself, Creed's work focuses on the subject and the creator, with thick brushstrokes and marks of vivid colour reminding us of the artist's creative process. The newest vistas fracture and dissolve, allowing the viewer to oscillate between the depth of the scene and the two-dimensional nature of a painting's surface.

Cori Creed studied Fine Art at Simon Fraser University and Design at Capilano College. She lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

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Andre Petterson | brand
April 14 – 28, 2018
3045 Granville St, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 14, 2:00 - 4:00pm

Advertising logos pepper tapestries of billboards, street signage and bus banners across urban landscapes in cities and rural villages all over the world. Branding, an essential tool for marketing and identity construction in late capitalism, serves as a mode of communication rife with meaning about access, possession, and consumption. In brand, Vancouver-based artist Andre Petterson explores themes of globalization and cultural homogenization through the dissemination of visual ephemera in marketing campaigns of large western corporations such as Disney, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks.

Best known for his work blending painting and photography, Andre Petterson exposes the breakdown of traditional distinctions between high and low, real and fake, old and new, urban and rural through cutting, collaging and painting. brand destabilizes the significance of recognizable cultural signifiers as they are re-contextualized and re-configured in different contexts; sometimes reinforcing wealth or status, other times receding to obscurity to the point of ironic absurdity.

brand is presented as part of the 2018 Capture Photography Festival.

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Barbara Cole |  Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival 
April 17-May 31, 2018
First Canadian Place Gallery, 100 King Street West, Toronto 
Artist reception: Thursday, May 10, 5-7pm, with a collector’s preview at 4:30 pm

Bau-Xi Photo is proud to present a retrospective of photographer Barbara Cole’s work at First Canadian Place Gallery, as part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. The exhibition features works from Cole’s four most recent series; Duplicity, Miroir d’eau/Meditations, Falling Through Time and Figure Painting. Join us at FCP Gallery, 100 King Street West, on Thursday, May 10 from 5-7pm for the opening reception, and to hear the artist discuss her work. Please RSVP at photo@bau-xi.com to attend the collector’s preview at 4:30 pm.

Barbara Cole is an award-winning Canadian artist who is known for her distinct underwater photography. Cole’s artwork is extensively collected by both public and private institutions and has been exhibited worldwide in venues such as the Canadian embassies in Washington, D.C. and Tokyo, Japan. 

Click here to view Barbara Cole's work 

Michelle Nguyen | Anatomical Venus
March 24 - April 7, 2018
340 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday March 24, 2:00 - 4:00pm

"Anatomical Venus explores how women occupy both physical and theoretical spaces, as both artist and subject throughout art history, and how we ascribe them power, or the lack thereof. " - Michelle Nguyen 

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to debut new work by emerging artist Michelle Nguyen. The memento mori figurine, Anatomical Venus (created by Clemente Susini in 1780) is Nguyen's inspiration for this exhibition, which draws on art historical role of the female form as a projection of desire and power.

The idea that this figure is at once alien and familiar, science and art, life and death, fascinates Nguyen and encourages her to continue to explore the themes of the women-art-power triad in her paintings.

Nguyen hails from Toronto and currently lives and works in Vancouver. She holds a Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of British Columbia.

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