Exhibitions

In the latest series of paintings by Alex Cameron, the artist turns his gaze skyward. Celestial objects—super moons, constellations, and comets—blend with terrestrial phenomena like fire embers, snow, and cloud formations to create energetic landscapes in a style unique to Cameron and his over 40 year long career.  David’s Bonfire refers warmly to an evening at the Rideau Lakes, when the artist spent time with long time friend and fellow painter David Bolduc on holiday with their families. The occasion--fondly remembered--included lively painting sessions, and what Cameron refers to as a "kitchen show:" watercolours adorned the cottage walls, and were later exchanged between artists, and taken home to be cherished for years. Memory, then, becomes for Cameron a proverbial bridge, connecting and uniting land, sky, and stars.

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. He lives and works in Toronto. 

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Vicky Christou | Undertone
February 3-17, 2018
3045 Granville St, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 3, 2:00 - 4:00pm

Bau-Xi Vancouver is pleased to present Undertone, an exhibition of paintings by Vicky Christou. Christou’s inaugural exhibition at Bau-Xi Gallery showcases the artist’s exploration of acrylic paint, and an investigation of the subtle shifts in the perception of colour.

Vicky Christou pays homage to the tradition of craft and women’s domestic labour through her sculptural paintings. Since 1990, she has devoted her practice to the full expression of line and form. Christou meticulously applies lines of paint synchronized to one full meditative breath. Paint accumulates line by line, layer upon layer, each colour shrinking and expanding at different rates: a visual record of time and human consciousness.

The colour white features predominantly in Undertone, unique for its lack of hue and its ability to fully reflect and scatter all wavelengths of light. Rife with poetic metaphor, Christou’s grid acts as a veil that conceals and reveals.  The simplicity of the grid, and uniformity of the square formats are intentional choices for Christou. Its small-scale both an invitation to view the work intimately, and to recognize and contemplate the fleeting qualities of light and time: “I like duplicity and what it reveals: what we first see and know, and what light and shade reveal to us from different vantage points and at different times.  I find that transitory passage inspiring and poetic, like watching the day`s light fade into evening.” With dozens of painted marks repeated, Christou’s highly textured surfaces culminate into an artifact of making which defy traditional distinctions between painting, sculpture and craft.

350 Dundas St West, Toronto
February 3-17, 2018

This month, Bau-Xi Photo is pleased to present a selection of the newest work by gallery artists, featuring Cara Barer, David Burdeny, Anthony Redpath and Barbara Cole. 

Click here to view the photography collection 

Janna Watson | Light is Heavy
January 13-27, 2018
3045 Granville St, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 13, 2:00 - 4:00pm

Light is Heavy presents a diverse body of work from contemporary abstract painter Janna Watson—a visually poetic culmination of her practice to date. In this suite of paintings the artist explores the paradoxical weight of light and lightness through the reactive materiality of mixed media.

Evident in these latest works is the maturation of Watson's artistic process, as her panels reveal renewed confidence and technical mastery of her distinct painterly language. Watson’s works are endlessly evocative of organic forms, populated by familiar figures and rife with art historical reference— at once inviting subjective meaning whilst resisting easy interpretation and the stasis of representation.

Watson's coalescing forms are suspended mid-motion and contain within them an expressive cacophony: marbled, multi-hued brushstrokes are juxtaposed against bold, gestural streaks to maintain precarious equilibrium. Stark ink lines inscribe the pictorial plane of Watson’s panels—disturbing profusions of calligraphic strokes and contrasted with sporadic rushes of pure colour. All punctuated by decisive pastel markings and unfolding on a gradient and richly hued surface, oft delineated by the dynamic introduction of a horizon line. Each piece is a deeply nuanced and profoundly personal undertaking, composed of singular moments of paint and informed by a great depth of feeling, manifested in the application of each individual element.

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Mel Gausden | Girls Gone Wild
January 13-27, 2018
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 13, 2:00 - 4:00pm

Canadian landscape painting has mythologized the great outdoors through the work of Tom Thomson, A.Y. Jackson and David Milne. Emerging artist Mel Gausden marks a departure from the Canadian landscape tradition—a genre historically dominated by male painters—by centralizing the experience of women in nature, and her own in Girls Gone Wild, the artist's inaugural exhibition at Bau-Xi Vancouver.

Typically overlooked in traditional landscape painting, Gausden's canvases feature women as outdoors people: active participants who build fires, climb fences, and carry their own canoes. Her female subjects, often situated or leaving evidence of their trace, discover themselves within the natural environment in which they gather, explore and commune.

The visual culture of our contemporary digital age informs Gausden's unconventional palette. Neon silhouettes and brightly hued accents take reference from pre-set Instagram camera filters, fashion and consumer trends. The artist's manipulation of oil paint varies from sculptural— bending and piling thick layers of paint into matchsticks of textured impasto—to painterly— diluting paint until it drips with controlled precision— to sketchlike with her mark-making. For Gausden, the act of painting is intuitive as much as it is intentional; an exploratory act of personal and cultural identity which fuses past and present influences to create new possibilities for representation.

Gallery Artists | Holiday
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
December 2 -16, 2017
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 2, 2:00 - 4:00pm

Bau-Xi Vancouver presents its annual Holiday exhibition featuring new work by gallery artists in a wide variety of sizes and media. To list just a few: new floral watercolours by Jamie Evrard, paintings and oil pastel abstractions by Janna Watson, photographs by Anthony Redpath and surrealistic paintings by Michelle Nguyen.

Darlene Cole | Kissing Trees
340 Dundas Street West, Toronto 
December 2 -16, 2017
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 2, 2:00 - 4:00pm

Kissing Trees—the latest chapter of paintings by Darlene Cole—is an expression of what the artist calls her “craving  for the wildly private”—the curious sense of intimacy and longing unique to the experience of being alone in nature, consuming it, being consumed by it, becoming it. Cole’s painted world is a spectrum of sensation: an endlessly expanding forest, a blooming rose, an open window, a fold of fabric, and a ripple in the water.  More than visitors to the scene, Cole’s figures descend deeply into their worlds, their painted forms becoming almost indistinguishable from their environments. These women are obscured but not overtaken:  each performs, with equal part curiosity and confidence, an act of total immersion.  The state of being outside is, for Cole, a turn inward: “It is the interconnectedness...perhaps almost a union...of the tangled-ness of fragility and strength that I am drawn to as I pain the flesh of the body alongside the flesh of nature.”

 Cole's work has been exhibited across North America and is collected internationally in collections in Switzerland, France, Russia, the U.K., Italy and the U.S. Notable public collections include: Fairmont Hotels (Toronto, Montreal), Manulife Financial, RBC, CIBC, OCAD University, and the K.F. Preueter Collection of Canadian Art (Etobicoke).

Join us at the opening reception Saturday, December 2^nd from 2-4pm at Bau-Xi Toronto to meet the artist and view the exhibition.

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Jeffrey Milstein | LA NY

December 2-16, 2017
350 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception + Book Launch: Saturday December 2, 2:00 - 4:00 pm 

Bau-Xi Photo is pleased to present LA NY by Jeffrey Milstein. The exhibition will feature work from his newly released book, LANY: Aerial Photographs of Los Angeles and New York (Thames & Hudson, 2017). Shot from a helicopter, these stunning aerial photographs of Los Angeles and New York offer the viewer a fresh perceptive on two of the most iconic cities in America. 

Join us on December 2nd from 2:00-4:00 pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition and book launch. 

Milstein’s 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.

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