Exhibitions

Nicole Katsuras | Sky Maps and Daydreams
3045 Granville Street
July 3-15, 2021

In Sky Maps and Daydreams, Toronto-based painter Nicole Katsuras continues her exploration of the intuitive process of image-making and expressive potential of the oil medium.

Drawing inspiration from a diverse history of non-representational art, from prehistoric drawings to expressionist painting, Katsuras layers her signature extruded mark-making technique and dynamic brushstrokes to create dimensional surfaces that allude to the landscape genre.

A visual record of the artist's creative process, Katsuras' canvases become a frontier for her compositional world building as peaks and crevices of colour, gestural lines and massed forms span the picture plane.

Katsuras' reimagined topographies, with their soft palettes, jewel tone accents, and shifting perspective points evoke a sense of placeless familiarity and a quality of the picturesque ideal to present a vision of the paradisiacal abstract.

Vicky Christou | Elemental
3045 Granville Street
July 3-15, 2021

In this new body of paintings, Vicky Christou has symbolically interpreted and expressed a color system associated to and inspired by the five classical elements traditionally categorized as water, earth, fire, air and ether (the void).

The characteristics within these elemental systems are factors which simultaneously embody simple explanations of nature, and the complexity of all matter observed by our five senses.

The platform of the grid allows for a minimal purity in which each element can be associated, such as water seen as a patterned wavelike formation or light grey to be symbolic of air or stone (earth), each element pared down to its essence.

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ART CARES 2021 
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
June 22 - July 2, 2021

Art Cares was founded in May 2020 by Bau-Xi Gallery in an effort to give back and support the cities that we have called home for over 50 years. The digital charitable exhibition's first edition featured works from over 40 gallery represented artists, with over $57,000 CAD raised at the close of the inaugural programme.

Art Cares donates 100% of the listed artwork value from each piece sold, in support of Food Banks Canada. All marketing, advertising and transactional fees are covered independently by Art Cares. Art Cares 2021 closes on July 2 at 11:59 PM PST.

As essential organizations, food banks continue to support food insecure Canadians. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have been met with uncertainty, seeing a loss in financial support and support staff, and an increase in demand. Food Banks Canada has been supporting provincial food bank networks through their coronavirus response efforts, securing food, finances, and volunteers.

Vicki Smith | You Are The Sky. Everything Else Is Just Weather.
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
June 5-19, 2021

The motivation and title for the artist's new collection of paintings was inspired by Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun and principal teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, who wisely stated, 'You are the Sky. Everything Else is Just the Weather.'

The artist states:

This quote helps to remind us that we all have a cloudless and clear sky within us. The daily fluctuations of thoughts, emotions and worries create the weather that can cloud our sky. Engaging with art mindfully is a practice that clears thoughts and brings us back to our cloudless sky with a sustained sense of wellbeing. The more mindful we are the more we realize that the weather is just passing by. The clouds may come and go, but the sky is constant, ‘You are the sky’.

Rendered in finely textured impasto, luminous, jewel-toned palettes, and layers of expressive brushwork, Smith's bathers, afloat in changeable waters, speak to a distinct sense of interiority. Transposed onto her canvases, the sunlit ripples and shaded caustics of Smith's source imagery become the medium through which the artist explores the great heights and depths of feeling. 

Vicki Smith's paintings articulate this elemental movement to reveal an underlying quality of stillness fundamental to the artist's practice. With trademark warmth and insight, Smith invites the audience to immerse themselves in the act of viewing and into a state of grace.

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Adrienne Dagg | Nesting Grounds 
June 5-19, 2021
340 Dundas Street, Toronto

We are thrilled to present Nesting Grounds by Adrienne Dagg, a dynamic new body of work marking the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition at Bau-Xi Gallery. Through surrealist sensibilities, Dagg creates other-worldly narratives through the dissection, deconstruction, and reconfiguration of antiquated ideologies still prevalent in contemporary society, which affect the physical and mental spaces of women today. The result is a form of collage, utilising differing painting techniques to alter visual symbols, textures, and spaces, whilst depicting scenes that are simultaneously both familiar and alien.

Domestic interiors are featured heavily as backdrops in Dagg’s painted scenes, and figures are modeled in unconventional positions, juxtaposed against outdated furniture and relics. Each narrative is constructed by incorporating real and invented scenarios, positioning the figure within a space that is both unnerving and stoic. Dagg’s female protagonists are often characterised in a way that suggest the removal or untethering of something that had once provided guidance and order.  

Born in Toronto, ON Canada, Adrienne Dagg is our newest addition to the Bau-Xi Gallery roster. A recipient of the prestigious Elizabeth Greenshields Award for figurative art, she graduated with a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 2011 and received her MFA from the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 2020. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and the United States and is held in many private collections. Adrienne Dagg currently lives and works from her studio in Edmonton, Alberta.

Janna Watson
May 15-29, 2021
340 Dundas Street, Toronto

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present a highly anticipated exhibition by contemporary abstract painter, Janna Watson. Best known for her contemporary interpretation and approach to automatic painting, this new body of work combines Watson’s previously separate painting and rug practices, exploring the interactions of art and design through the artist’s feminist and Neo-Bauhaus point of view.

Taught at a young age by her late grandfather, Watson’s dynamic compositions are manifestations of emotion and energy as described through the artist’s distinctive treatment of colour, line and mass.

Inspired by her grandfather, who never found a market in rug making but exposed his granddaughter to the effort, artistry and time behind the scenes that goes into creating a rug, her work aims to challenge the value of both craft and high-art.

In this exhibition, Watson brings both of her practices together, questioning the attitudes associated with ‘craft’ — an art form that has been devalued by its domestic associations.

With a nod to the Bauhaus movement — a radical utopian art school that pushed for the unification of art and design in the material world and was the only place that openly accepted women into its program — Watson’s choice of medium consciously aligns with the crafts of textiles and ceramics that were allowed to be practiced by women at the time.

The artist's contemporary Neo-Bauhaus approach is inspired by and honours artists such as Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt and Gertrud Arndt, who challenged the notion of domesticity.

Cori Creed | Envision
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
May 8-22, 2021

In Envision, celebrated painter Cori Creed continues her years-long exploration of the nature of visual storytelling.
 
Informed by her personal history and lived experience with the West Coast landscape, Creed crafts illusory depth within her canvases then layers richly textured brushstrokes and abstract mark-making to render dynamic surfaces that both recede into the distance and approach to meet the eye.
 
Part unconscious experimentation and part deliberate gesture, Creed’s application of medium, which incorporates spray, staining, and washing techniques, serves to enrich the painted “text” and break the fourth wall, disrupting the three-dimensional picture space of Creed’s compositions.
 
With a self-reflexive consideration of her own practice and a keen awareness of the viewer and their unique ways of seeing, Creed questions the assumption of that which is “plainly there in front of us”, rendering these boundaries between the objective and subjective truths indistinct.

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Michael Wolf | Street View*
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto
May 1-31, 2021
*Presented as a Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival Feature Exhibition

Bau-Xi Photo is pleased to present Street View, an exhibition of works from Michael Wolf’s Street View series, including Paris Street View, Manhattan Street View, Street View Portraits, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. Through these bodies of work, Michael Wolf redefined street photography.

Architecturally, Paris exists in a vacuum. The city’s historic core sits relatively unchanged since Haussmannization, and as a result, leaves little room for contemporary photographic reinterpretation. Moreover, photographers such as Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau and Ronis have left little space for further exploration. 

In the mid to late 2000s, Michael Wolf and his wife relocated to Paris from Hong Kong. This move signalled a massive shift in Wolf’s work as it was not only his home for over a decade, but the site to some of his most prolific series.

Upon their relocation, Wolf used Google Street View to navigate his new home. At the time, Google Street View was infantile—launched in 2007—and had introduced its organic navigation and full screen capabilities in 2009. Wolf recognized this new technology as a new digital medium.

Mounting his camera on a tripod positioned directly in front of his LCD screen, Wolf rephotographed Google’s readymade. Rephotography is not a new concept. Wolf’s Street View series most notably follows Sherrie Levine’s, After Walker Evans. Both Levine and Wolf photograph their readymades, place them in a new context, and present them in a different form. 

Wolf’s body of work also discusses surveillance and a person’s right to privacy. Paris Street View was created during the French government’s attempt to regulate street photography. This contrasts with France's 2007 decision to triple the number of video surveillance cameras by 2009, and Google’s unauthorized photographic mapping system.

After Paris Street View, Wolf revisited this concept several times, producing A Series of Unfortunate Events, Street View Interface, Manhattan Street View, Fuck You, and Street View Portraits. In 2011, A Series of Unfortunate Events was awarded Honourable Mention at the World Press Photo for Contemporary Issues—a controversial decision that re-defined photojournalism. 

Bau-Xi Photo’s exhibition Street View is a culmination of works from Paris Street View, Manhattan Street View, Street View Portraits, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. This curated selection of photographs includes works that are both self referential—recalling tropes from Wolf’s Architecture of Density, Transparent City, and Tokyo Compression—and externally referential, referencing photographs by Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Michael Wolf’s Street View series have most notably been exhibited in Paris, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam. Paris Street View, Manhattan Street View, and A Series of Unfortunate Events have not been exhibited in Canada.

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