Exhibitions

Casey McGlynn | The Journey the Meeting the Destination
May 4-18, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4, 2019, 2-4 PM

The Journey the Meeting the Destination is a visual open journal by Canadian interdisciplinary artist Casey McGlynn, whose latest body of work is a rueful meditation on the past 20-odd years of his life and career. Featuring the artist's distinct and multilayered horse studies-cum-interior cartography, this exhibition also marks the McGlynn’s return to his herd series, the frequent subject now imbued with renewed symbolic potency.

At once a personal reckoning with the inevitable passage of time and his own reluctant maturation, McGlynn’s canvasses also function as fragmented musings on our contemporary anxieties and the intense precarity of our crisis-ridden times. The understated poignancy of “Leaving Toronto After 25 Years” succinctly captures the artist's critical stance, as McGlynn dwells on eras ended and pasts to be lost, and documents his own attempts to navigate the uncertain present with humor and stylistic verve.

With a recurring pantheon of characters and motifs from McGlynn’s ever-growing, pop-culture-influenced personal mythology — extant forms of his youth at play with spectres of a more immediate past — McGlynn narrates our collective coping. Forcefully expressive, profoundly honest, and wildly irreverent, the raw poeticism of McGlynn’s compositions honor the trials and tribulations of lived experience and evoke a visual catharsis, as he casts a perversely hopeful eye to the future at hand.

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Katrin Korfmann and Jens Pfeifer | BACK STAGES 
A Featured Exhibition for the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival

May 1-31, 2019
350 Dundas Street W., Toronto 
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4th, 2-4pm.

Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present Back Stages, a new photographic series created by fine art photographer Katrin Korfmann and sculptor Jens Pfeifer. Back Stages documents the underappreciated world of manufacturing that is nonetheless essential to the making of artworks and culturally important objects.

Fascinated by the facilities where fine art and culturally important objects are created, the artists traveled the world over three years capturing scenes such as a bronze foundry in the Netherlands, a stainless-steel workshop in China, an archeological excavation site in Turkey, and a functioning 11th century tannery in Morocco. By foregrounding these facilities, Korfmann and Pfeifer draw attention away from the romantic notion of a solitary artist in their studio and shift it to a broader network of labour. Every step of the artistic process, from planning to execution, is wrought with artistic meaning, and is integral to the final piece of art. Back Stages emphasizes the significance of manufacturing and materials in the world of art and culture.

Back Stages was selected as a Featured Exhibition for the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and will be on view at our photography location for the entire month of May. 

Katrin Korfmann is an Amsterdam-based photographic artist, known for her large-scale aerial images examining human interaction in public spaces. Jens Pfeifer bases his artistic practice out of Amsterdam; he is a visual artist working mainly in sculpture, whose work explores how human beings deeply identify with images of the natural world.

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Alex Cameron | Big Dipper, Polaris North
April 6-20, 2019
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 6, 2-4 pm. Artist in Attendance

Bau-Xi Toronto is pleased to present Big Dipper, Polaris North, a dynamic body of work by renowned Toronto-based artist, Alex Cameron.

In his latest series, Cameron continues his exploration of the night sky in a distinctive style that has defined his work for over 40 years. His thick, painterly application lends lively sculptural form to the energetic landscapes he creates. Not only bold and bright, Cameron’s colours are unconventional, inverted, and built up in linear “ropes” of paint, often applied straight from the tube, that make his surfaces hum with life.

Cameron was introduced to New York City’s Abstract Expressionist movement in the 1960s. He witnessed concurrent and equally powerful experiments in abstraction back home in Toronto, where he worked as a studio assistant for the late Jack Bush in the mid-1970s. Cameron's subjects—the varied 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.
 
Alex 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.

Virginia Mak | Composed
April 6-20, 2019
350 Dundas Street W., Toronto 
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 6, 2019, 2-4 PM. Artist in attendance. 

This April, Bau-Xi Photo is pleased to present Composed, a new series by Toronto-based photographer Virginia Mak.  In this latest body of work, Mak is interested in capturing the creative spirit in visual form. In Composed, Mak’s signature soft-focus solitary figures reveal themselves through a veil of superimposed hand-painted motifs, alluding to a certain artistic sensibility. The resulting image shifts from portrait to poetic character study. The delicate process pushes the medium of photography beyond its conventional limits, marrying the photographic surface and experimental, painterly effect.

Virginia Mak was born in Hong Kong. After graduating with a Philosophy Degree from the University of Calgary, she studied Photography at the Ontario College of Art. Mak's photographs can be found in public and private collections in North America and Hong Kong.

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Jeffrey Milstein | AERIALS
March 9-23, 2019
350 Dundas Street W., Toronto 
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 9, 2019, 2-4 PM

This March, Bau-Xi Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by acclaimed American photographer Jeffrey Milstein. The show will feature the latest works in his ongoing series, AERIALS. Shot from a helicopter, these meticulously composed and highly detailed images offer a unique view of iconic sites such as the Palace of Versailles and the Empire State Building. 

Join us on Saturday, March 9 from 2-4pm to celebrate the exhibition opening. 

Jeffrey Milstein is an acclaimed American photographer who has won numerous awards for his aircraft photography and mesmerizing aerial landscapes. His photographs have been published in Men’s Vogue, TIME Magazine, European Photography, American Photo, Eyemazing, Die Zeit, Wired, PDN, Esquire and Conde Nast Portfolio. His acclaimed series “Aircraft: The Jet as Art” was exhibited in a year-long solo show at the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC from November 2011 – November 2012. Born in Los Angeles, where he frequently returns to shoot at the International Airport, Milstein makes his home in Woodstock, NY.

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Erin Armstrong | The Burden Of Broken Silence
March 7-21, 2018
340 Dundas Street W, Toronto

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 7, 6-8 pm, Artist in Attendance.

Juxtaposing the everyday with surrealistic imaginings, painter Erin 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. 

In The Burden of Broken Silence, Armstrong depicts figures representing how it feels to be alive in today’s world. The collection encourages the viewer to question and examine the metaphorical masks we wear, the environment we occupy, and our awareness of our surroundings.  

Armstrong's work is sold internationally and has been exhibited in Canada, the US, Australia, Sweden and the UK. In 2014, she was selected by Saatchi Art as their "One To Watch" and by Saatchi Art's chief curator, Rebecca Wilson, as one of "20 Emerging Artist in the World to Follow." Designlines Magazine named Armstrong one of Toronto's "Six New Art Stars" and blogTO counted her in their "Top 10 Most Talked About Painters In Toronto." In 2018, Armstrong completed an artist residency in Los Angeles at ESXLA.

The artist has recently collaborated on projects for The Drake Hotel, Nike, Kit + Ace, Saatchi Limited. She has upcoming exhibits in Toronto, Australia, Stockholm, Edinburgh, London, Oslo, Miami and NYC.

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Gallery Artists | Mixed Media 
February 9 – 23, 2019
340 & 350 Dundas Street West, Toronto 

This February, we are excited to present ‘Mixed Media,’ a group exhibition celebrating and highlighting the artistic conversations that occur when painting and photography are featured in the same space. The exhibition will span both of our locations on Dundas Street West, and will include a curated selection of work by Barbara Cole, Janna Watson, Joshua Jensen-Nagle, Kathryn Macnaughton, and Robert Marchessault, amongst many others.

Image details:
Left: Barbara Cole, Underpainting. Right: Kathryn Macnaughton, Fluid.