Exhibitions

David T. Alexander | Small Works
July 1 - August 24, 2019
350 Dundas Street W, Toronto

Bau-Xi is pleased to present a gallery feature of David T. Alexander's Small Works, a new collection of intimate, small-scale landscapes. 

Throughout his fifty-year career, David Alexander has been known to paint works ranging from incredibly large-scale to those only mere inches wide. While his large paintings are undoubtedly powerful, Alexander's mastery of paint is equally evident in his small works. The pieces burst with intensity and drama, managing to possess an incredible amount of visual information despite their small size. These works prove that it is not scale that envelops a viewer into a scene, but rather a true understanding and honest portrayal of a subject by a skilled artist.

Through exploration and intimate study, Alexander’s lyrical work transcends the specificity of location and manifests as something new and entirely his own. Part refinement, part embellishment, the interactions occurring in his paintings make them an event rather than strictly a landscape. The final piece, even in intimate scale, beautifully expresses the drama of the subject Alexander explored. 

Bau-Xi is excited to announce the launch of a book dedicated to David T. Alexander's Small Works. Purchase the book here. 

SEE THE FULL COLLECTION HERE

Joshua Jensen-Nagle | 5 Years of Me
July 13-27, 2019
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 13, 2019, 2-4 PM 

For years, Joshua Jensen-Nagle has captivated the viewer with his evocative and dream-like photographs.  His work explores photography as a medium to create, rather than document a reality, allowing the viewer to bring their own associations to the images.  Jensen-Nagle acknowledges, “I am an artist first and foremost.  Photography is a tool I use to create and it has been important to me over my 15-year career to constantly push myself in new directions, experimenting with technique and subject matter.”  5 Years of Me explores select images from 3 bodies of work photographed since 2014.

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Kathryn Macnaughton | MOVED
July 13-27, 2019
340 Dundas Street W, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 13, 2-4 PM 

Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto is pleased to be exhibiting Moved, the latest series of abstract works by painter Kathryn Macnaughton. “Moved” describes a state both physical and emotional; a concept that resonates with the artist in a period of literal and symbolic transition in her life and career.

Macnaughton’s paintings are equally full of movement – manifested with the layering of undulating abstract forms over a base layer of organic loose washes. This marrying of two distinct techniques results in exhilarating canvases of contradiction: at once contemporary and timeless, flat and sculptural, compiled and uniform, static and unmistakably alive.

A graduate of OCAD, Macnaughton has exhibited in both Canada and abroad since 2010.

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Richard Barnes | Gallery Feature
July 13-27, 2019
350 Dundas Street W, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 13, 2019, 2-4 PM 

This July, Bau-Xi Photo is excited to feature Animal Logic, the award-winning series by acclaimed fine art photographer Richard Barnes. Animal Logic reveals the curious beauty of animals being prepared for display in natural history museums. Barnes, who is based in New York, spent over 10 years building this series, cataloging methods of collecting, conserving and exhibiting elements of the natural world. Drawing inspiration from science, history, archaeology, and anthropology, Barnes’ work offers a reminder that there is nothing inher­ently natural about viewing animals in a museum, an irony that is underscored by photographs that show the care taken to preserve taxidermy specimens, placing them into artificial landscapes, similar to ones they once called home.

Barnes’ work has been shown in solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, the Cranbrook Art Museum, and the University of Michigan Art Museum. He has lectured at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, Parsons School of Art and Design, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; he has taught at the California College or the Arts, and has served as an adjunct professor at the San Francisco Art Institute.

His works can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.  He is the recipient of the prestigious Julius Schulman Award for 2011. He was previously a recipient of the Rome Prize 2005-2006 and his photographs of the cabin of Ted Kaczynski, aka the "Unabomber," were featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and awarded the Alfred Eisenstadt Award for Photography.

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Cori Creed | Switchbacks
June 1-15, 2019
340 Dundas Street W, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 1, 2019, 2-4 PM 

Bau-Xi Gallery is excited to present a new collection of works by Cori Creed, an established Canadian painter who captures the wealth of texture and colour in the Canadian scenery with joy and vitality. As referenced by the show’s title, Switchbacks, Creed’s current practice oscillates between abstraction and representation, story and storytelling, as well as depth and surface.

Creed aims to disrupt illusion with reminders of the artist’s hand and paint itself. Ultimately, the viewer is allowed to be continually aware of both the surface and the process. Creed’s exploratory mark-making delights in its variety; thick and thin, slow and fast, dry and wet brush, and reflects the artist’s keen interest in the language of paint.

Creed was born in Vancouver and studied Fine Art at Simon Fraser University, and Design at Capilano College. Creed's work has been placed in various private and corporate collections across Canada. She has been represented by Bau-Xi Gallery since 2011, and currently lives and works in West Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Janna Watson | Melancholy Has a Day Job
May 4-18, 2019
340 Dundas Street W, Toronto
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4, 2019, 2-4 PM 

Bau-Xi Gallery is proud to share that Janna Watson's solo exhibition, Melancholy Has A Day Job, marks the 10 year anniversary of exhibiting her work at the gallery. 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.

Watson expands upon her inspiration for the exhibition in the artist statement below:

"'Janna, I’d like you to go to the back and paint the essence of a tree. Make it abstract.' When I returned to show him what I created, he used to say to me time and time again 'It’s okay… but it needs to be wilder.' I was eight years old and loved hanging out with my grandfather, Arthur Bonnet. I am continuously inspired by Arthur’s fascination to make clashing colours work. Through his lessons, I remember him telling me 'I love things harmoniously ugly.' These words have stuck with me throughout my practice.

Painting wild and embracing 'different' has always been my primary focus. As I work through harmoniously ugly pigments, I feel like I’m communicating with my grandfather by painting independent and bold brushstrokes suspended in time and space. 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, and as a personal reminder to paint wilder! These scribbles are my exclamation marks that finish each sentence.
Memories of Arthur were so present while I worked through this collection. He first taught me how to paint with watercolours and would buy me artist grade supplies (which I realized that I couldn’t afford when I was studying at OCAD!). To pay respect to his lessons, I incorporated lighter washes of paint across the panels. And after all of these years, I discovered that I intuitively prefer working on birch wood (rather than canvas) because the paint absorbs similarly to watercolour paper, and it highlights the material that it is painted on. In some cases, the washes are so thin that it emphasizes the woodgrain and flashbacks of painting the trees outback start flooding in.

This new series holds a special place in my heart. This collection is dedicated to the memory of Arthur Bonnet who would be celebrating his hundredth birthday this year."

-- Janna Watson

Bau-Xi Gallery Toronto is celebrating this exciting milestone by holding a special Opening Reception on Saturday, May 4th, from 2-4pm, at 340 Dundas Street West, with the artist in attendance.

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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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Steven Nederveen | Between the Moon and the Sun
May 4-18, 2019
3045 Granville St, Vancouver
Artist's Reception: Saturday, May 4th, 2-4 pm

The title 'Between the Moon and the Sun' refers to the rise and fall of ocean tides, as well as the turbulent inner world of people. Much like our own lives, the sea is always in a state of flux. The movement of water is captivating to watch in all its forms, from roiling, hateful torrents to zen-like calm ripples, the fluidity of water mirrors the physical and emotional range of our outer and inner worlds.

Steven Nederveen’s newest body of work charts his navigation and exploration of the psychic qualities of water. He draws attention to the physical world (depicted in the photographs) and applies it with painterly effects to articulate his emotional connection to the sea. Paint and photo form a bonded alchemy of magical revealing and concealing. Gold specks and textures are created by scratching into the emulsion of the photograph to unveil gold tones present in the underpainting. By isolating the wave, it becomes a kind of portrait - the qualities of which have been distilled and given new expression.

As an avid sailor, the artist’s relationship with water is an intimate one. Nederveen imbues a sense of mystery and spiritual depth into the waves, derived from his own attachment to the sea. Rolling waves emerge out of a haze of serene grey, or pitching up from a rich blue-black void, while gold highlights spill out of the turbulence between light and dark and settle into a white, frothy flutter. ‘Between the Moon and the Sun’ is an intimate meditation on the interconnectedness of planets, water and ourselves.

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