Exhibitions

Janna Watson | Suspended in Time
February 9 – 23, 2019
3045 Granville Street
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 9, Artist in Attendance

Suspended in Time is a new body of work by acclaimed painter Janna Watson. The exhibition is inspired by the artist’s late grandfather Arthur Bonnet, a seasoned artist who turned away from landscape painting in the 1940s and moved towards abstraction after studying at Pratt Institute in New York as Expressionism was making its way to Canada.

The legacy of Arthur Bonnet is present throughout Suspended in Time. From early painting lessons to exciting trips to the art supply store, Arthur was a pivotal influence on the artist throughout her artistic career. Over the years, Janna has incorporated lighter washes of paint across wood panel, preferring the birch wood surface to canvas for its ability to absorb paint like watercolour paper.  As Arthur taught Janna the fundamentals of painting, he also urged her to develop her own voice and encouraged her to paint wildly. “I love things harmoniously ugly", Arthur would declare. This sentiment now largely informs Janna’s choice of colour, line and stroke as she lays down each bold, intuitive mark, delicately suspended in time and space. The artist explains, “When I feel a painting is nearly complete, I like to use oil stick and ink as the final step to help ground the work. It’s a personal reminder to paint wilder! These scribbles are my exclamation marks that finish each sentence”.

Suspended in Time is Watson’s ode to the late Arthur Bonnet, a suite of paintings created with painterly fervour in honour of the hundredth anniversary of Arthur’s life.

Gallery Feature | George Byrne
January 12-26, 2019
350 Dundas St West, Toronto

Bau-Xi Photo is thrilled to open the year with a group exhibition, featuring the work of Los Angeles-based artist George Byrne. Internationally recognized, Byrne is known for his large-scale photographic works that depict architectural surfaces and urban landscapes as painterly abstractions. He borrows from the clean, vivid clarity of modernist painting, and also references the New Topographics photography movement via a subject matter firmly entrenched in the urban every day.

George Byrne was born in Sydney, Australia in 1976 and graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2001. He has exhibited internationally in Italy, India, Australia, Los Angeles and New York. In 2010, Byrne relocated to Los Angeles, California where he continues to live and work today.

CLICK HERE TO READ Q&A WITH BYRNE

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Michelle Nguyen | There's Always More Show
January 12th - 26th, 2019
3045 Granville Street
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 12, 2:00 - 4:00pm

‘There’s Always More Show’ presents the latest work of narrative painter Michelle Nguyen, whose dramatic tableaux have captured the attention of critics and collectors alike. In a loose gestural style characteristic of the artist’s work to date, ‘There’s Always More Show’ collapses the hierarchy between high and low culture with references as far reaching as art history to TV, Greek mythology to reality show kitsch - all brimming with allegorical meaning.

Borrowing its title from animated TV show Bojack Horseman, Nguyen wields her powerful storytelling style for her own ever-evolving serial cast of characters. Recurring leitmotifs of birds, fruit, insects and smoke pepper Nguyen’s scenes, creating delightful openings for viewers to interpret and project personal meanings. Unfinished faces and half-formed languid, recumbent bodies hint at themes of metamorphosis and change embodied more concretely by serpents and half-creature/ half-human beasts Medusa and Leda.

The enigmatic subjects and contexts in Nguyen’s vignettes are never fully reconciled, rather they are absorbed in a continual process of morphing, changing and becoming as they pop up here and again from scene to scene, canvas to canvas. Far from linear, their journey through self-discovery and redemption is winding and arduous, as symbolized by tigers and screaming figures.

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Chris Shepherd | Incomplete Architectures 
December 1-15, 2018
350 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception + Artist Talk: Saturday, December 1st, 2-4 pm. Artist in Attendance.

"One is continuously encountering construction when walking, cycling, or driving in the city. It seems like new projects are always underway, and the bigger the place, the more prolific the process. Demolition and rebuilding are part of a perpetual cycle that plays out on every street; construction is the life blood of the city, the respiration of urbanity. 

This boundless development is intrinsic to city life; it blends into the day to day and becomes almost invisible. Hundreds of building sites are planted in our subconscious, where they live quietly like the autonomic functions of the body. Like the vital acts of breathing, or the beating of our hearts, construction is an essential part of the life cycle of a city.

Incomplete Architectures uses materials, process, building and development to study ideas of change and impermanence, and the effect they have on us.  It attempts to arrest the endless activity of the city and capture small moments of stillness, sandwiched between the immediate past and the near future. These moments are stunningly beautiful and remarkably affecting in their simplicity. They are traces of what has occurred, and what will be."

Chris Shepherd is a Toronto-based artist known for his use of the photographic medium to document the ever-changing urban landscape. His 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. 

Cara Barer | Opening Reception and Book Launch 
November 10-24, 2018
350 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception and Book Launch: Saturday, November 10, 2-4 pm. Artist in Attendance.

Join us on Saturday, November 10 from 2-4pm for the opening of Cara Barer's latest exhibition, Scrapbooks, and to celebrate the launch of Transformations, the first-ever monograph of her work. The artist will be in attendance to discuss her work, and sign copies of her book. 

About the exhibition: In Scrapbooks, Barer draws on her personal archive as source material, filled with memory. Barer gathers travel photographs, scraps of paper, guestbooks and maps, binds them into book form, and sculpts them into abstraction. Her final photographs speculate about how we might carry on when that archive is gone.  After the Flood is a provocative example that refers to more than the post-hurricane Houston from which it comes. Ambiguously optimistic in its references to disaster, renewal and rebirth, it reiterates Barer’s thesis: that a book is never broken, and memory never lost, only made anew with time and care. Indeed, it is not loss, but accumulation and excess that continues to describe Barer’s future projects, as she remains committed to her practice as a special kind of record keeping. For as long as the book sculpture can take new shape, evolving into more free-form and abstract compositions, so will Barer meticulously sculpt and document. Of the new, hand-bound books waiting to be photographed, Barer aspires to fit in more information than ever before: “I want them to be denser.” From Transformations, 2018.

The viewer can detect the different ephemera, but the images began with my “scrapbooked” thoughts, dreams, visions, and hope.

Click here to view the collection

Click here to purchase Transformations. 

Robert Marchessault | The Lorax Dreams 
November 10-24, 2018
340 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 10, 2-4 pm, Artist in Attendance

David Restivo, three-time winner of Pianist of the Year from the National Jazz Awards, will be playing during the Reception.

The Lorax Dreams is being held to honour the 30 years since Bau-Xi Gallery first began representing Robert Marchessault’s career. We look forward to celebrating this momentous occasion alongside the artist with an Opening Reception on Saturday, November 10^th, 2-4pm.

Robert Marchessault’s newest body of work evolves from his continued interest in the contemporary, sublime landscape, with a renewed focus on texture and abstraction. The series seeks to reveal the artist’s emerging understanding of the non-duality of nature through the depiction of the sole-standing tree. Marchessault’s preferred subject has gone through a range of artistic treatments since they were born in the 1970s; seeing a shifting approach to space, light, textures, atmosphere, and distance. Marchessault’s trees are created from memory, as opposed to en plein air drawings or photographs. He states “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."

VIEW ROBERT MARCHESSAULT FULL COLLECTION HERE

Commingling the materiality of paint with the digital image, Anda Kubis creates a seamless reality between disparate and even opposing methods of production. In Shimmering Mirages, a new body of large-scale digital paintings and works on paper, Kubis intentionally blurs the boundary between paint and the digital output to play with the conventions of painting and art practice in general. Through modulated colour, transparent layers, and indistinguishable brushwork, she provokes associations to beauty and the sublime. The paintings assert a visionary space that reflects our current existence – where we function between virtual and concrete experience daily, often without noticing. By illusionistically blending the handmade into the digitally created image, Kubis reflects upon the nature of our contemporary tools to highlight the human potential within them.

With degrees from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and York University, Kubis crosses her artistic practice with design and architecture, material exploration, and her significant teaching career. She is the Associate Dean of Outreach and Innovation in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University. Numerous public and private collections have acquired Kubis’ work, including RBC, TD Bank, BMO, Cenovus Energy, Aimia, The Westaim Corporation, and the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development.

Artwork details: Anda Kubis, Twenty Times, 2018, Digital Painting on Canvas, 72 X 108 in., $15550

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