Exhibitions

Michelle Nguyen | Water Features
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
October 16 - 30, 2021

"Water Features", Michelle Nguyen's fourth show with Bau-Xi, uses human and animal bodies in varying states to explore notions of identity, existence, historical erasure and ecological grief. Her canvases are populated by elegant, humorous or even grotesque figures, in conjunction with carefully selected vegetation and objects – all often iterations of classical motifs - that appear to be part dream, part nightmare, struggling with the dissolution of self. Nguyen uses vividly coloured oil paints to conjure worlds dense with magical realism, symbolism, and narrative, prompted by her own experiences and observations as a child of Vietnamese refugees. 

Sheri Bakes | Sunset Garden
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
October 2 - 14, 2021

Sunset Garden reflects Sheri Bakes’ ongoing interest in wind and breathwork, and how to make visible, with paint, the often invisible life force that courses through the natural environment and our connection to it. The Vancouver Island based painter currently lives on a 50 acre farm and the meadows, forest, lake, and pastures that surround her offer up ever-changing vistas for inspiration and source imagery. The stippled dabs and strokes of colour and light that have become representative of the artist’s signature style reveal Bakes’ interest in referencing the atmospheric particles that weave and cycle between and through us.
Sheri Bakes states:
When I walk through landscape, I dissolve. You become the environment that you are walking through and your separation from the environment no longer exists. There is a distinct feeling of wholeness and I attempt to re-create this in my work.
On a more personal level, this show is painted for and dedicated to the artist’s mother Frieda Bakes, who passed away earlier this year. Frieda passed on her awe of sunsets to her daughter and the artist would observe her seeking refuge in her own garden through difficult times and failing health. Sunset Garden celebrates these shared moments where human bonds and receiving solace in nature become inextricably intertwined. These windswept, light and hope-filled landscape paintings, with their pronounced ebb and flow, are equal parts evocation, elegy, and an invocation to joy.

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Isabelle Menin | Natural Order
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto
October 2-16, 2021

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present Natural Order, an exhibition of photographs by acclaimed Belgian artist Isabelle Menin.

Menin weaves digital configuration and her eye for radiant colour to masterfully compose images that suggest both form and distortion.

The flora within these realms, which Menin describes as “disordered landscapes”, are individually documented, each flower carefully lit, and painstakingly captured as part of the artist's eye for intricacy. These powerful symbols act as the mode for Menin's signature mark-making — abstracted and revolved, their petals and stems become a means to enact the artist's disembodied gestures. 

Drawing connections to "nature's strange complexity" and that of human nature, Menin's photography is caught in a state of perpetual transformation. Transcribed with playful artifice and hybridized through her distinct aesthetic "hand", Menin subverts our understanding of her subject matter, unraveling their contextual meaning to render them anew.

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Erin Armstrong | Don’t Hold Too Tightly To The River Bank
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto
September 11-25, 2021

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present Don’t Hold Too Tightly To The River Bank, a highly anticipated exhibition by Toronto-based painter, Erin Armstrong.

Motivated by the polarizing state of the world that has resulted in a shared experience of isolation, this new body of work presents figures existing in suspense and wait. Through their disorienting surroundings and stolid gazes, Armstrong encapsulates the fleeting moments of “in-between’, relatable anticipation for future plans of which we have more recently recognised the value. Fresh lemons, plucked apricots, blooming and wilting flora, are poignantly positioned in Armstrong’s paintings as symbols of the temporal and fleeting cycles in which we exist.

Lush dripping gardens, brightly patterned clothing, and exotic landscapes feature heavily in the artist’s dynamic exploration into a world of familiarity, yet surrealist daydreams. Drawing from personal experiences, and identifying the collective conscience associated with these recent histories, the Armstrong looks with optimism at the lessons learned and the strength gained from being present.

Erin Armstrong is an emerging figurative artist working and living in Toronto. Using quick and decisive gestural markings over acrylic-based images, Armstrong creates unique distorted figures and portraits in an expressive dream-like world. Juxtaposing the everyday with surrealistic imaginings, Armstrong captures hidden emotions often lost in human experience. Her concern is not to recreate reality as it exists, but rather to evoke an atmosphere that transports the viewer into a world of interpretation.

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Bratsa Bonifacho | Celebration
3045 Granville Street
September 4 - 25, 2021

Acclaimed painter Bratsa Bonifacho returns to form with new vigor in his latest series, Celebration. Reflecting on his decades-long career and his past bodies of work, Bonifacho breaks new ground in his ongoing engagement with semiotics and iconography with his exploration of gridwork and negative space layered over brilliant colour.

The result is a visually fresh textural effect, and a new pictorial lexicon: an abstracted "language" system of characters and symbols that ingeniously references the connecting thread between ancient scripts and modern digital cipher.

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Sheila Kernan | Everything We See
3045 Granville Street
August 7 - 21, 2021

In Everything We See, Calgary-based artist Sheila Kernan’s most recent body of work, the artist reflects upon ineffable moments in time that exist beyond description. Told through the visual conduit of Kernan’s mixed media process and shaped by her own understanding of nature's transience, the artist deconstructs the storied Canadian landscape tradition to offer a new recounting of “everything we see”.

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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.

July 10-24, 2021
350 Dundas Street West, Toronto

In Appearances, Cole attributes her dreamlike photography to “portraits” of anthropomorphized flowers. As the title of the series suggests, these images ask what it means to possess a form (human or otherwise) and what is considered worthy to be the subject of an artist’s attention. This exploration into transformation, nature, and beauty is marked by Cole’s exquisite use of water as a medium that naturally reshapes form.

By anthropomorphizing these flowers with stunning finesse, flitting between what we perceive as photography and painting, Cole expands the possibilities of the photograph and the act of empathy altogether. Isolated like all of us during lockdown, Cole began this series out of necessity but also as an exercise in connection. Each flower is given a human name, imbuing them with personalities which, especially during a time of isolation, remind us of personalities we have all been longing to reconnect with.

By alluding to traditional representations of flowers through her unique contemporary lens, the photographs in Appearances embody a timeless sensibility that likewise further expands Cole’s prolific body of work.

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