Exhibitions

Casey McGlynn | Everyone I've Never Met
December 5-19, 2020
340 Dundas Street W., Toronto | Upper Gallery 

We are thrilled to present Everyone I’ve Never Met, a dynamic solo exhibition by Casey McGlynn. Using a combination of techniques working on raw plywood with mixed-media including pen, ink and pencil crayon, the artist embarks on an adventurous and satirical documentation of the faces of each person remembered from his life. With a focus on chronicling his artist contemporaries, and informed by the recent passing of Katherine Mulherin, a key figure in the Toronto arts scene, McGlynn views this new body of work as an autobiographical contribution to Canadian cultural history.

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Steven Nederveen | Infinite Possibilities
November 7- 21
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto

We are pleased to present a new body of work by Toronto-based artist, Steven Nederveen, in a solo exhibition aptly titled Infinite Possibilities. Through a continued exploration of movement articulated in the swirling eddies and crashing falls of water, Nederveen’s compositions capture a singular moment, encompassing a meditative rhythm and intensity, in a time that calls for stillness and reflection.

Through Nederveen's mixed-media process, a two-fold mirroring takes place: the paint material adopts the qualities of water as fine sprays and heavy pours while textured pools obfuscate the underlying image. The artist's hand, too, becomes the means through which the momentum of the wave is enacted, its force wearing away at the photographic emulsion even as it builds up the artwork surface.

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David Alexander | Embedded in the Ideas of Lands
November 7-19, 2020
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver

Renowned Canadian painter David T. Alexander’s latest exhibition, Embedded in the Idea of Lands marks the artist’s return to the coastal landscape, comprising a visual record of the three year period he spent travelling along the gulf islands and north toward Alaska. In this body of work, Alexander traces the footsteps of a former self to enact a personal paleography, an excavation of the painterly language of his past practice.

Through this process, the terrain of the Pacific Northwest becomes activated as a mnemonic device, an entry point to the artist's own lived experience and the locus of collective histories, site-specific narratives, and cultural memory.

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Alex Cameron | Crashing Rocket
November 7-21, 2020
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto

The 40 year career of Alex Cameron has been defined by a celebration of texture and colour, and an unapologetic expression of powerful Canadian wilderness. In his most recent body of work, Crashing Rocket, the artist’s palette is rich and application is controlled, with an impossibly tactile three-dimensionality that is a hallmark of Cameron’s energetic canvases and complex visual lexicon.

The artist's subjects—the varied and animated landscapes of Canada observed during his regular coast to coast travels—are not merely captured or recorded in paint, but rather honoured for their complexity; they are organic, total, and magical environments that live and grow.

Cameron’s paintings have been collected extensively in Canada and abroad. Notable collections include the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Bank of Canada, and The Queen’s Silver Jubilee Art Collection.

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Sheri Bakes | Breathe
October 3-17, 2020
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver

Breathe, West Coast Canadian painter Sheri Bakes' latest body of work meditates on the vulnerability of respiration within the context of recent events. Working with a renewed awareness of the physiological process — a throughline in her practice — the artist considers what it means to breathe and the various metonymies of the expression: to absorb and expel, to speak softly, to create an impression, to inspire action, to give relief, to be alive.

Translated from the world of the mind through her distinct visual language, Bakes' consideration of breathing takes root in the physical realm of Bakes' source imagery, drawn from the scenes around her Vancouver Island home. The windswept imagery of Bakes' abstract landscapes become subject to an emphatic force, its atmospheric motion adopting an intensity of movement while the delicate brushwork of her impressionist style coalesces with sweeping momentum. 

These formal shifts at once signal a personal reflection while offering a sensitive account of the times in which we live. Within the space of canvas surface, Bakes posits the potential of a way to breathe through.

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Vicki Smith | Matter and Memory
September 12 - 26, 2020
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto

This September, we are thrilled to present Matter and Memory, the highly anticipated solo exhibition by Toronto painter, Vicki Smith. 

When speaking about her inspiration for the newest body of work, Smith explains;  "Matter and Memory is my continuing fascination with how art can trigger an involuntary memory. A memory that is deeper than the recognition of the image. Art acts as a catalyst that can prompt a spontaneous release of emotional memory that may never become fully cognitive, but will present itself as a lingering sensation and a wordless knowing. The fascination and awe that people feel for a certain piece of art is deeply rooted in their personal memory."

Matter and Memory marks Smith's 10th anniversary with Bau-Xi Gallery. Join us from September 12 - 26th at our Dundas Street West location to view the full collection. 

Vicki Smith is a Canadian painter known for her paintings of female figures that explore the possibilities and limitations of gravity.  Often shown suspended in 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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Chris Shepherd | Prophecies 
September 12 - 26, 2020 
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto

Bau-Xi Photo is pleased to present a selection of new photographs by Toronto-based photographer, Chris Shepherd. Walking city streets for consecutive hours, Shepherd captures the mundane, ordinary, and passed-over with a sense of isolation. In Prophecies, Shepherd photographs the beauty of everyday objects and architecture as they stand still during this unexpected reality.

Shepherd’s 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. 

"The signs are all around us. Never explicitly pointing, never overtly positive or negative. It’s not all doom and destruction or love and laughter, because nothing is ever that simple. Harbingers speak, and those interested interpret. Visions don’t care whether we crave them or cower in fear from them. Portents aren’t reserved exclusively for seers and they don’t always get delivered to those who can read them.  And who really wants to know the unknowable future anyway?

To foretell what might happen requires reflection on the past and an understanding of the present. As a result, the future predicted will be a mirror of our yesterdays and todays. It’s all very confusing.

Prophecies are there for us to read and use, or to pass by and ignore.

The choice is ours."  - Chris Shepherd

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Vicky Christou | Continuum
September 9 - 22, 2020
3045 Granville St, Vancouver

Vicky Christou’s new body of work, titled Continuum, the artist's work with the post-modernist form of the grid explores visual themes of infinity and domestic crafts.

This motif – her commitment to which has become a performative record of her mark-making and painting history – has become an integral platform for her personal visual metaphors; a structured framework in which architectural silhouettes are entwined with spontaneous brushwork, the order and rhythmic patterns of which echoes visually to create the illusion of a woven image.  
Working on a larger scale, these bas-relief sculptural compositions adopt a newfound physicality, unfolding into spaces through which the viewer is able to glimpse partially hidden interiors made of light washes of subtle colour. 

The application of the overlayed grid is at once a protective cloak and a formal pattern that defines and secures the impasto lines of paint. The tension between this held enclosure is at once limiting and liberating in its repetitive, continuous patterning – duality ad infinitum.

Christou invites the viewer through the portal of her paint surface into an illusory environment of rich interiority, contemplative stillness, and vast depth, one with no beginning or end; within the shifting subtleties of Christou's grid complex dwells a profound and resonant sublime.

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