Exhibitions

Sheri Bakes | The Company of Stars
October 15-29, 2022
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday October 15, 2-4pm - Artist in attendance

In her signature stippled style with a continuing focus on nature, Sheri Bakes presents a collection of landscapes inspired by a dear friend’s experience hiking from California to BC. Bakes captures the characteristic vegetation along this long route, depicting the changes in landscape, weather and atmosphere evident in the received photos taken along the journey northward.  Bakes’ ever-present indication of movement, breath and life-force - the unseen made visible - connects all her images, inviting quiet contemplation and offering momentary sanctuary from a busy and relentless world.

Artist Statement:

This recent body of work is inspired by a friend’s six-month solo thru-hike along the Pacific Crest Trail and the photos she shared with friends and family along the way. 

Jennifer Szabo entered the Pacific Crest Trail on April 8, 2022, at Mile 0 in Campo, California, and by the time this show opens, she will have finished in Manning Park in BC, sometime in September. 

The Pacific Crest Trail is approximately 2,650 miles and is listed as one of the top five most challenging thru-hikes in the world. Wildfires prevented Jennifer from hiking two sections of the trail, approximately 362.6 miles. 

Building this show was challenging and also gratifying from the start of the process to the finish. It provided a way for me to accompany my friend on her journey from the studio, and to accompany her mom (who is also a good friend) on her own journey of emotions while her daughter was out on the trail, while simultaneously experiencing my own paint-focused journey through the work.

This show is in celebration of my friend Jennifer, her incredible accomplishment in solo thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, and also in celebration of her wonderful, very dedicated and supportive family, Peter, Nancy and Emily. 

-Sheri Bakes 2022

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Robert Marchessault | Resilience
October 1-13, 2022
Upper Gallery
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver

Robert Marchessault is a well-established Canadian painter with an extensive exhibition history. His poetic landscapes focus on space, light, atmosphere and distance. Marchessault’s new works explore one of his beloved subjects - the anthropomorphic presence and emotional impact of a single tree standing amidst wide open plains. Viewing and contemplating the collection in its entirety evokes a sense of tranquility and timelessness. 

Artist statement:

My landscape paintings are made from memory, not from on-site drawings or photographs. 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.

In considering this group of new paintings, I see a continuation of my love for iconic trees. These tree paintings are about more than beauty; in them I try to celebrate natural resilience. It excites me to see abundant flowering and green growth emerge in spite of stress and hardships. Tree spirit and energies show outwardly through shape, colour and textures; I mark these onto the surface with my brushes.  These qualities inspire me. The act of painting is my way to respond positively to the way life overcomes hardships. This often begins in a wordless moment of shifted perception.   -Robert Marchessault, 2022

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Sheila Kernan | Real Places, Imaginary Spaces

August 20 - September 1, 2022

3045 Granville Street, Vancouver

Canadian artist Sheila Kernan’s new solo exhibition, Real Places, Imaginary Spaces, highlights a collection of West Coast Canadian landscapes. Developed from a magical expedition, wandering through both the old-growth forests and the surrounding coastal beaches, the paintings include many upland habitats with an abundance of intertidal life.

Utilizing photographs, sketches and memories, Kernan carefully composes scenes based on real places. Her distinctive aesthetic is evident within the many layers found within her paintings. With bold forms, captivating colour combinations, and soft and textured brushstrokes, her approach to transcribing nature is undeniably one to see in person. 

Artist Statement:

I was enchanted by the expansive biodiversity within a small geographical region, both when investigating and exploring the old-growth forests of the Port Renfrew area and also the hundreds of species of plants and animals, not to mention rock formations, within Botanical Beach on Vancouver Island.

Finding beauty in these locations, reflecting upon the enduring trials and tribulations that each region faces, I was reminded of a quote I heard in a podcast: “Creativity has the power to look pain in the eye and to decide to turn it into something better.”

I find absolute beauty in the various stages of decay found in the forest - the smell of cedar and the colours of lichen blanketing the bark that is crumbling off some of the oldest trees on our planet.

This is representative in the many layers of paint I used within this collection. From thin washes where the paint is breaking down to pigments that pixilate into dots or watercolor washes, to thick, textural globs that are emblematic of icing on a cake, each brushstroke within my paintings works together to create a pattern of drama and variety.

It is abundantly clear that nature thrives within the tide pools on Botanical Beach, even though here they face some of the harshest conditions. I was captivated by the distinctive traits and many varieties of life forms found in each. Robin's egg blue, rosy pinks, brilliant greens, and oranges, set alongside and juxtaposed with muted rock formations and navy blue waters. It was immediately clear that I could spend a lifetime cataloguing and painting this small area. Each kilometer I walked, the colours, shapes and textures of the rocks morphed as the light shifted and changed from direct and bright to overcast and moody.

Art has the power and ability to take you somewhere, and I hope this collection showcases the effervescence of the West Coast. Each piece is from a real place, but became an imaginary space.    - Sheila Kernan 2022

Nicole Katsuras | Summer Hours
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
June 4-16, 2022

This new body of abstract work by Nicole Katsuras is a reflection on learning to live more lightly, freely and joyfully, while looking forward to future adventures, big and small. Through her experimentation with paint, Nicole's works have evolved into highly textured, full-spectrum surfaces that explore femininity and reference cartography, Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Ukiyo-e. 

Artist statement:

The title ‘Summer Hours’ sparks an emotional response to contemporary life, evoking times or moments of celebration from personal experiences, as well as memories of carefree and joyful times.  There is also a universal anticipation that accompanies the words “summer hours” – they suggest a period that is an accepted ‘break’.  Summer hours are synonymous with beaches, parks, backyards, road trips and adventured-to, faraway exotic lands. It is in these moments of unplugging, recharging and reconnecting with nature that we increase our appreciation for our personal paths and our loved ones.  

My process involves pushing and dragging the paint around on the canvas, and allowing it to dry into satisfying, detailed globs and blobs of stratified, marbled colours on the surface. These suggest landscapes, tapestries and floral elements in thick impasto.

-Nicole Katsuras
2022

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. 

Sheri Bakes | Open the World
Bau-Xi Gallery Vancouver
September 8-22, 2018
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 8, 2-4PM

Open the World is a body of work inspired by a farm on Vancouver Island. 

The title stems from a painting that was made upon arriving to this farm and depicts a heavily abstracted opening of light through a forest of trees along a fleshy coloured rain soaked muddy path. 

Marshall McLuhan wrote, "I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." 

Part of the interest in making this show has been to explore and trace out an opening; a light-line thread of hope through McLuhan's thoughts on art as a 'distant early warning system.' 

These works are simply meditations on light, movement and somatic, tactile experience in nature. 

VIEW THE SHERI BAKES COLLECTION

Opening Reception: Saturday August 10, 2-4 pm

The horizon — the focus of Steven Nederveen’s upcoming exhibition Light Play —is at once both the line where the earth and the sky appear to meet and the limit of a person's mental perception or experience. Engaging with this semantic duality, Nederveen’s panels, too, presents a horizon: the boundary at which the artist and audience make contact.

A measure of scale, time, and distance, the horizon traces a perspective path to meet the eye, marking the level at which the world intersects with the viewer’s gaze. In this body of work, Nederveen subverts this visual formula, displacing the viewer to provoke a deeper scrutiny of the material surface in order to resolve one’s own relation to the picture plane.

As part of his ongoing exploration of the natural environment and the landscape tradition, Nederveen’s evolving practice incorporates photographic technique, painterly brushstrokes and gestural mark-making. The artist’s multi-layered process explores these sites of exchange with in-depth studies of water, panoramic vistas of sky, and immersive scenes of the liminal space between.

The fraught interplay of crashing waves, sea spray, atmospheric dust and refracted light, set against billowing clouds and washes of mountains and coastlines in the distance — is at once mystical and material, static and dynamically changeable, fleeting yet constant. Nederveen’s treatment of his subject matter lends itself to this contextual tension, distressing to transform, obscuring to reveal, and abstracting the representational to invoke the timeless power of the sublime, each painting an invitation to look to the horizon and bear witness to this elemental play.

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Joseph Plaskett | A Centenary
July 7 - 28, 2018
Running Concurrently at Bau-Xi Vancouver & Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday July 7, 2-4 pm, Upper Gallery

"The art that I make and that I see others make confirms the miracle of being alive. Almost every day I live in a state of exaltation." - Joseph Plaskett

To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Joseph Plaskett’s life, Bau-Xi Vancouver and Toronto are pleased to present A Centenary, concurrent exhibitions of select works from the estate of Joseph Plaskett, on view from July 7^th to July 21^st.  

A consummate bohemian, masterful painter and a prolific artist until his passing, Plaskett dedicated his practice to the intimate expression of everyday life: fruits and vegetables artfully scattered about, arrangements of potted plants and fresh flowers, portraits of the artist and his friends, interiors of his Paris apartment and landscapes of his Suffolk garden.

“The word I choose to describe the quality of a still life is intimacy. I am closer and closer to the small world surrounding me and its surroundings. I make constant discoveries.” - Joseph Plaskett

Despite the enduring subject matter throughout Plaskett’s oeuvre —the domestic scenes and humble artifacts of his immediate surroundings — the artist’s treatment of light, colour and form was continually evolving and ever exploratory, shifting from the dramatic contrast and painterly realism of his earlier works to the brightly saturated, graphic forms of his later years, lovingly rendered and infused with warmth and humanity of the artist’s hand.

During his lifetime, Joseph Plaskett became well established for his contribution to Canadian art historical canon, and was awarded The Order of Canada for excellence in the field of visual art and inducted as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art. Bau-Xi Galleries are honoured to share this special collection of works with admirers and collectors in celebration of Joseph Plaskett’s art, life, and legacy.

 VIEW THE COLLECTION