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In anticipation of Bau-Xi Gallery's upcoming exhibition ‘Simple Days’, opening July 9 in Vancouver, Laura Busby of Vitamin Daily interviewed Toronto-based photographer Joshua Jensen-Nagle to learn more about his latest dreamy beach scenes.

How would you describe your visual art practice?

I approach photography with a means to create rather than document. Throughout the years, I have used many different techniques to achieve the final image including the use of expired Polaroid film in my early works, painting on photography and re-photographing the images, to most recently dangling out of helicopters and using the highest-end digital camera available.

A consistent theme in your work is beaches and bathers. Why is this subject such a rich possibility for you?

I reflect on my life experiences when I create, and this particular theme stems from my childhood spent at the beach. Each summer, we would stay at my grandfather’s shore house in Mantoloking, New Jersey. It was a simpler, more carefree time that has remained one of my fondest memories from my youth. Since then, I have spent the last 16 years photographing beaches and each time I am able to capture it in a new way.

How would you describe your new series of images and where did you travel to photograph these scenes?

Most recently, I have travelled to Australia, Rio de Janeiro, Hawaii and Miami to capture images of the beach from a helicopter. An aerial perspective produces an almost abstract view of the beaches and ocean. You recognize the subject but in a very different way, so what you are mostly left with is an overall sense of joy in the moment.

What can the perspective from high above reveal about the beach for the viewer?

It’s interesting that usually people like privacy and would like their own personal space. However you notice that in these scenes people seem to flock together. There is something about it that is unusual and very interesting. It says something about our culture when we are out of our daily routines and we find comfort in crowds.

Your new series shows a distinct divide between water and sand, punctuated with people. What inspired this composition?

That is just the vantage point. Photography is all about finding the right vantage to take the image from and then finding the right visual composition. I have been photographing this subject from the ground for so many years, that it is natural for me to move on. You have to keep yourself excited about a subject or the work will suffer.

You must have the best vacation advice, which location was your favourite? 

I get asked this question often. Each place is such a unique experience with its own challenges. People often say how much fun it must be to travel to these destinations, and while it is exciting, it is also work. So much effort goes into the planning and scheduling of these trips. I am mostly thinking about making images and don’t spend a lot of time relaxing on the beach. With that said, I love Italy! It has so many different dynamic landscapes to work with and the food is great!

Joshua Jensen-Nagle’s exhibition Simple Days is available July 9 to 23, 2016 at Bau-Xi Gallery Vancouver

VIEW ARTWORK FROM THE EXHIBITION HERE

Photo by Nathalia Allen

June 30th, 2016: Q&A with Toronto artist Kathryn MacNaughton, by Bau-Xi Toronto Co-Director Alissa Sexton

1. Where do you draw inspiration for your paintings?

Everyday experiences. I can be inspired by the colour of a brick wall next to a lamp post or the roof of a building next to a blue sky. I find myself getting inspired in the most obvious, yet obscure places.   

2. How do you begin a painting, with colour or composition?

 I like to change it up. It’s nice to start with a colour palette because it’s usually the component that creates a certain feeling/mood, but sometimes I have a compositional idea first so I’ll try to rough out the idea in black and white and then add colour.

3. Which do you feel is most important in your paintings, colour or composition?

Both are just as important, but if I had to choose one, colour. It’s the part that creates the connection between myself and the art. It conjures up feelings, memories, emotions and I think the composition helps support that.

4. How much time do you devote to planning the painting versus actually painting it?

I do like to spend some time experimenting in between producing the work. It always inspires me and gets me motivated to try out some new ideas. Then I’ll mockup something up and try to stick to it, but it’s always a journey that can become a completely different vision then I expected. 

5. Do you prefer the composition planning stage, or the painting stage?

I like both for different reasons. The planning stage is where the initial ideas start to take form. It feels like a puzzle you’re trying to solve. The painting stage is where things become unpredictable and you start discovering new ideas. I love both. Organized thoughts, then unpredictable chaos. 

6. How does it feel when a completed piece leaves your studio?

Really great. I never let anything leave my studio that I’m not happy with.  

7. You’ve recently collaborated with Style Garage to create a chair – how did that experience inform your practice?

 It was amazing. I’ve been wanting to work on different surfaces and this was the perfect opportunity. It was just an experiment that will hopefully lead to me working on more furniture. I’m very inspired by interior design. I think it’s a really important part of my work. I always think about the environment in which my paintings can live in.  

8. What would you like people to feel (experience, visualize, etc) when they look at your work?

I hope something romantic. There is a lot of lust and sexual tension in the paintings.

VIEW KATHRYN MACNAUGHTON'S LATEST PAINTINGS HERE

New arrival in at Bau-Xi Gallery, Toronto. Painting by Chris Temple features the majestic Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Downtown Toronto.

Chris Temple, Dowager, 30 x 70 inches, oil on canvas

Click to acquire

Robert Marchessault, Seven Bird Tree, oil on panel, 24 x 24 inches, available at Foster/White Gallery, Seattle.

"New works now" is currently on at Foster/White Gallery in Seattle. About this show, Robert Marchessault states:

"My painting can be seen as an inquiry which ultimately seeks to reveal how painted images act as a metaphor for who or what I am. The landscape paintings, which I have been making since the mid-1970s, seek to reveal my emerging understanding of the non-duality of nature. These works have gone through a range of artistic treatments with the 1990s seeing a focus on space, light, textures, atmosphere and distance. I am intrigued with the sensation of being personally diminished when experiencing great spaces. Deserts, mountains, and vast open plains make me feel that some fundamental truth is revealed by this sense of dissolution into these spaces. My landscape paintings are made from memory, not from on-site drawings or photographs. 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."

PREVIEW THE SHOW CATALOGUE HERE

VISIT FOSTER/WHITE GALLERY WEBSITE

Left: William Lazos, Bubble Blower, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 inches
Right: Chris Temple, One Way, oil on canvas, 60 x 45 inches

This July, Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto will be exhibiting artwork that celebrates contemporary realism. Three gallery artists will be exhibiting new work in a variety of media, sizes and formats – each interpreting this theme in varied ways. Artists included will demonstrate not just technical skill with, but also the unique ways in which paint contributes to figuration.

Shaun Downey's realist style masterfully bridges traditional portraiture and the contemporary. Jenna Opsahl of Jungle Magazine (London, UK) states: "His scenes are mysterious and unknowable - and yet they feel familiar; as if we ourselves, have been here before." This exhibition closely follows Downey’s inclusion in the public installation Keeping It Real, on at Station Gallery, Whitby, this June and July. 

William Lazos' painted surfaces are technically precise and smoothly rendered, using a combination of meticulous airbrush and paintbrush techniques to capture subtle plays of light and complex textural surfaces. His subjects - carnival scenes and other contemporary cultural objects - call on all the senses in their striking detail. Lazos' paintings combine haze and sharp focus, document and memory, hyper-realism and childlike wonder to mesmerizing effect.

Chris Temple has been capturing the complexity and sublimity of Canada's urban environments for over 30 years. His technically precise paintings render the cityscape as something both strong and delicate, familiar yet mysterious, and always reverant of contemporary landscape as an endless source of visual interest. Chris Temple has exhibited extensively across Canada, and is featured in prominent collections and institutions.

CLICK ARTIST NAMES ABOVE TO PREVIEW ARTWORK FOR THIS EXHIBITION

Toronto artist Shaun Downey currently has 4 paintings on view at Station Gallery, a public gallery in Whitby Ontario. 'Keeping it Real' runs June 2 - July 10.

Following this exhibition, these stunning paintings travel to Bau-Xi Toronto for inclusion in a photorealism show July 16 - 30, 2016.

Click to view available Shaun Downey artwork on our website: Most pieces are available for acquisition now, and delivery following July 30, 2016.

Downey is featured in the current issue of Jungle (London, UK) in a large spread featuring many of his images.

“Shaun Downey’s paintings beg for a second look, for a pause. His large, photo-realistic portraits are all at once soft, dramatic, and intimate. His scenes are mysterious and unknowable – and yet they feel familiar; as if we ourselves, have been here before.” Jenna Opsahl for Jungle 01.

Cole’s project began 20 years ago, when, while traveling, the artist became enamored with the incomparable gardens of England. She was inspired by their romantic ambiance: whimsical lattices, wiry brambles, and lush roses, all overseen by classically inspired statues, impossibly weightless despite their stone medium. Capturing these whimsical spaces with her Polaroid SX-70 film, and later manipulating the malleable photographic surface to painterly effect, Cole’s documentation resulted in a series truly romantic in both history and conception. Still, Cole felt that the project was somehow incomplete; her English garden series was stored away, and soon forgotten.

Falling Through Time is a resurfacing—of not just time and place, but Cole too, who collaborates with a past self. An incomplete project comes full circle as the English garden series becomes background to the artist’s captivating underwater portraits.

The result is a visual study of time in which personal and mythical histories—refracted through the water surface—layer to create dynamic, ethereal scenes with an editorial edge. “These women do not exist in a moment in time,” says Cole, but rather alongside it, as extra-temporal travelers who float between history’s layers with confidence and mystery.

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday June 11, 2-4 pm, Artist in attendance

VIEW THE COLLECTION

VIEW THE MAKING OF THIS SERIES (4 MINUTE VIDEO)