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loop Gallery presents:  Mark Adair Catherine Daigle Patrick Jenkins Alistair Magee Mary Catherine Newcomb Rochelle Rubinstein August 11 - 22, 2010. Reception: Thursday, August 12, 6-9 PM loop Gallery is pleased to pleased to announce an exhibition entitled Faithful and Faithless by loop members Mark Adair, Catherine Daigle, Patrick Jenkins, Alistair Magee, Mary Catherine Newcomb, Rochelle Rubinstein. The exhibition addresses the dual nature of the artist as both messenger and art historian aware of the long history of messengers in art, be it The Virgin Mary, The Lord of the Flies, The Redeeming Angel, or just language itself "... lost in a sea of paint." Works range from sculpture, printmaking and painting through to animated film. Mark Adair: Mark Adair: “After my father died my mother told me that she wanted an angel for her tombstone. Now angels are not rare in art history so I did my due diligence and tried to figure out what one would look like. Then I found a slab of marble in the ruins of an old insane asylum and chipped and scraped away at it for about a decade on and off until I came up with this piece. The style comes from a Sumerian cylinder seal I saw in The Louvre. Perhaps angels were still around then as the Mesopotamians were closer to the beginning of time.” Catherine Daigle: Between 2001 and her death in 2006, Catherine Daigle did a number of works using insects and stenciled images of flies. The little piece in this show Hissing for Flies was by inspired by Isaiah 7:18 (in the Old Testament), “And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord will whistle for the fly”. Daigle made works on acetate, plexiglass, and paper that were suggestive of clouds of flies, a phenomenon most us associate with foreboding. Patrick Jenkins: In this exhibition Jenkins presents two films along with Giclée prints of some of the individual paintings created in the making of the movies. Labyrinth is a surrealistic mystery in which a detective encounters strange phenomena and beings from the afterlife. Towers Rising, an animated film loop, was created spontaneously, and in retrospect, Jenkins realizes it was a response to 9/11. Jenkins' work explores the journey of the spirit through life, the imagination, and in Towers Rising, a desire for gentleness in a post 9/11 world. Alistair Magee: The technique employed to make these paintings involves repetitive stenciling of written language used as a system or grid to support more expressive brushwork. Palimpsest is central to the work. In all of his work since 2000, Magee has attempted to unmoor legibly meaningful but formulaic language and pull it back into the realm of abstraction. The stasis of inscription is released to ambiguity in a sea of paint. Mary Catherine Newcomb: Assumption of the Virgin 1996. “I have always been interested in the relationship between the spiritual and the corporeal, partly because I was raised to think that there wasn't one and partly because I am a sculptor. This piece plays off the Catholic feast of the Assumption (celebrated August 15th) when the BVM was bodily received into heaven. There is an intellectual debate as to whether she died before the ascension or was vacuumed up just as she was about to die - I can't see that it matters as she was only dead for a bit. Assumption can be an active or passive verb - meaning two different things... the gesture of the legs suggests questions about the relationship between the body and the sacred. The beeswax refers to, and smells like, Catholic church candles of my childhood. Beeswax has also been used to sculpt bodies over the bones of the saints - i.e. flesh out relics. The piece is cast from my own body and the legs are hollow.” Rochelle Rubinstein: Over & Above is the newest addition to an ongoing project called Marginalia, which consists of hundreds of printed, painted and carved wood panels. It was originally inspired by the 16th century codices of Mexico. When the Spanish army of Cortez converted the Aztecs to “the true faith” at sword point, it was under a banner bearing an image of the Virgin Mary. In Over and Above, a blond Mary holds her boy, surrounded by archangels and messengers and by the Hebrew phrase, “And his banner over me was love” (Songs of Songs in the Old Testament). It is a riff on The Book of Kells, the 7th to 9th century Irish manuscript codex. Images of woman, boy, angels, stones, babies, and words have been printed and over-printed on the four large wood panels. This repetition leads to variation and invites reflection. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Thursday, August 12th from 6-9 pm. __________________________________________________________________________________________________  Eric Farache Manifest Dream Isabelle Hémard Fuzzy, furry and cloudy. July 17 - August 8, 2010. Reception: Saturday, July 17, 2010, 2-5 PM. Question and Answer Session: Saturday, August 7, 3pm at loop with Eric Farache. loop Gallery is pleased to pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Eric Farache entitled Manifest Dream and Isabelle Hémard entitled Fuzzy, furry and cloudy. Eric Farache's's exhibition of large format photography is an investigation into the convergence of time, image and memory through richly layered multiple exposures. Farache works with layered images all created in-camera, not digitally. Through exposures, more reference points are created and strung together, creating whole new reference point, based on a very personal visual language. Throughout Farache's practice, his work has consistently focused on the passage of time - capturing moments in history as well as place. Eric is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design (1994) in Fine Art and the University of Leeds where he earned his Masters in Fine Arts (2000). He often expresses his ideas in photography, sometimes utilizing the cheap and sensationalistic Holga camera. Hémard's Fuzzy, furry and cloudy shares company with her previous public offerings. As an unapologetic, hopeless romantic, she shares what pulses through her heart and onto paper resulting in large scale crayon drawings mixed with pastels and paint. Hémard scratches, paints, carves, prints, and sews each mood and experience through and onto her materials. Hémard is a Toronto-based printmaker born in France, and has lived in Canada since the early nineties. She completed her MFA at Diplôme National Supérieur d'Arts Plastiques in France and has exhibited in Canada and internationally. Her work can be found in many private, public and corporate collections. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday, July 17th from 2-5 pm. __________________________________________________________________________________________________  Lorène Bourgeois Près du corps Chris Dow Landscapes June 19 - July 11, 2010. Reception: Saturday, June 19, 2010, 2-5 PM. loop Gallery is pleased to pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Lorène Bourgeois entitled Près du corps and Chris Dow entitled Landscapes. Lorène Bourgeois's Près du corps “close to the body”, is a series of large-scale drawings in Conté and charcoal exploring the relationship of cloth and clothing to the body and head. Born in France, Lorène Bourgeois has been living in Canada since 1984. Trained in Paris, Philadelphia and Halifax (MFA, NSCAD, 1986), her work in drawing, painting, and printmaking, has been exhibited across Canada, France, Korea, Russia, and the United States. She is represented in numerous private and public collections. Lorène Bourgeois gratefully acknowledges the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Lorène will speak about her work during a Question & Answer Session at the gallery on Saturday, July 10, 3pm Chris Dow explains, “For myself, painting is, in essence, an ethereal endeavour. Painting requires exploring feelings or perception that come from some place not understood and a place where words do not exist. The act of painting is experienced and the subject matter is a convenient starting point. I like painting outdoors and the way this requires intuitive response. Working in the studio forces me to take a contemplative approach, this is often more of a problem solving process where the problem itself is not an intellectual one.” Chris Dow has spent several of the past six years living abroad in both Japan and Australia, writing software and painting in his spare time. Dow has exhibited in galleries across Canada as well as in Italy through the Ontario College of Art & Design. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday, June 19th from 2-5 pm. __________________________________________________________________________________________________  Libby Hague SAFETY NET Rochelle Rubinstein SHAFT May 22 - June 13, 2010 Reception: Sunday, May 23, 2010, 2-4 PM Question & Answer Session: Sunday, June 6, 3pm at loop with Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein. Moderated by Pat Macaulay, Head, Visual Art, Harbourfront Centre, followed by Afternoon Tea at 402 College Street. loop Gallery is pleased to pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Libby Hague entitled SAFETY NET and Rochelle Rubinstein entitled SHAFT. Pushing her ideas further, Libby Hague shows results from some of this year's experiments which have shifted her painting and prints into sculptural hybrids. This exhibition features The trans-atlantic shift of the Elliott plaid, a deconstructed riff on Hague's ancestral tartan with an interjected grove of birch trees, Safety net, and a selection of landscape paintings including Shotgun marriage, Abracadabra - and it did and Heaven does a backbend. Libby Hague (Toronto, Ontario) is a visual artist who works primarily in print installation. She is featured in the British book, Installations & Experimental Printmaking by Alexia Tala and won the 2009 Open Studio National Printmaking Award. She is represented in many public collections including the Donovan Collection at U of T. www.libbyhague.com Rochelle Rubinstein's exhibition SHAFT expands upon Rubinstein's interest in strong narrative themes conveyed within an abstract, formal language. These larger wood panels, printed, painted and carved with subtle detail in a bold manner, depict the shaft as a pit, a conduit, passageway, a well, but also as a barb, a blow, a wound, a dig. A series of columns, sheathed in printed, painted and quilted fabric and paper, serve as counterpoints to the wood panels. These are at once shafts as spears or staffs, or shafts of light, beams, radiance and darkness, life and death, etc. Rochelle Rubinstein is a Toronto-based artist whose work has been exhibited in diverse venues worldwide and can be found in public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. As a community arts facilitator, her workshops and projects with groups such as battered women are based upon methods that are central to her own artistic practice. SAFETY NET and SHAFT will be exhibited concurrently with STILL LIFE ON EARTH, a collaborative installation by Libby Hague and Rochelle Rubinstein, at Mon Ton Window at 402 College Street. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Sunday, May 23rd from 2-4 pm. __________________________________________________________________________________________________  Mark Adair Death's Children Mary Catherine Newcomb Chocolate March 27 - April 18, 2010 Reception: Saturday, March 27, 2010, 2-5 PM Question & Answer Session: Saturday, April 17, 3 PM. Moderated by Gordon Hatt. loop Gallery is pleased to pleased to present exhibitions by loop members Mark Adair entitled Death's Children and Mary Catherine Newcomb entitled Chocolate. Mark Adair's Death's Children is a new series of small charcoal drawings that completes Death Drinks, a narrative about the adventures of Death in the modern world. Adair has worked on and off on the series for a decade and it has been exhibited in many shows in various stages of development. Both the subject matter and the labour intensive and detailed style of the work are inspired by the art of the difficult and dangerous 14th Century in western Europe. Mark Adair is a Toronto artist who does charcoal works on paper and makes sculpture. His work was recently featured in the Patrick Jenkins documentary, Death Is In Trouble Now, airing on BRAVO! Television, which was also the basis for a 25 year retrospective of Adair's work mounted at Brock University's Rodman Hall Arts Centre. Adair is a graduate of York University, Toronto (BFA 1979) and the University of Victoria (MFA 1982). He is a founding member of the Torontoniensis Collective with whom he has exhibited since the mid 1990's. He has exhibited with Loop since 2004. Mary Catherine Newcomb's spring exhibition at Loop features a 4' long reclining "chocolate" hare. The hare regards the viewer balefully and actually consists of a malleable material that smells slightly oily or rancid. A suspended oversized apple blossom crown that is made from copper, bronze and steel accompanies the rabbit. While heralding the beginning of spring, this exhibition juxtaposes ideas about beauty, illusion, consumption and our complex and often romantic relationship with nature. Mary Catherine Newcomb was born and raised in Montreal. She received her art education at University of Waterloo and York University. She currently works and resides in Kitchener, Ontario. She has received numerous grants and awards and her work has been exhibited internationally. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday, March 27th from 2-5 pm __________________________________________________________________________________________________  Tara Cooper Off-Season Elizabeth D'Agostino Artifacts of the Self-Made Exhibitions of painting and drawing February 27 - March 21, 2010 Reception: Saturday, February 27, 2010, 3-6 PM loop Gallery is pleased to pleased to present exhibitions by loop members Tara Cooper entitled Off-Season and Elizabeth D'Agostino entitled Artifacts of the Self-Made. Off-Season,Tara Cooper's first exhibition at loop, traces the route that 95 year old Doris Rittinger has taken for the past 40 years, from Southern Ontario to Panama City Beach, Florida. Looking at the migratory habits of the retired along with the impact of aging, the installation combines film, photography and drawing: ''I am 95 years old today. But I do not feel 95 years old, I feel I am a healthy 75, that is called my body age. Sometimes I think our bodies age more slowly than our minds. My mind feels like 200, pilled and worn transparent like an old sheet.'' Working within a narrative framework, Tara Cooper's practice considers the conditions of desire, both the murmurings of regret and the longing for the future. As a Toronto based artist, her expression is often Canadian in nature, from the habits of the snowbird, to the idea of north and the language of weather. Tara received her MFA from Cornell University in 2008, specializing in the disciplines of print, film and installation. She currently teaches at the Ontario College of Art & Design. www.taracooper.com In Elizabeth D'Agostino's Artifacts of the Self-Made, the artist is reminded of familial sites and surroundings she encountered growing up. It embodies a sense of individual desire to recapture and restore memories and fragments of historical passages, which influence daily life. D'Agostino is concerned with the notion of acclimation and how the environment begins to inform each other. The images take the form of the human body, human artifacts, vegetable and animal life. These images are displayed within complex settings as delicate curiosities in D'Agostino's drawings and prints; the natural world connects the human-made world. This work furthers her investigations of the transitional place, and the various stages that surround the transformations and adaptations of an object and the rooted structures that have formed their environment displayed as objects of curiosity. Elizabeth D'Agostino received her BFA from the University of Windsor and her MFA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL. She has exhibited in Canada and internationally and was selected as the 2008 Visiting Artist by the Fine Arts Department at the University of South Dakota. D'Agostino lives and works in Toronto and is a member of Open Studio. She teaches printmaking at the Ontario College of Art & Design and is the Curriculum Coordinator at the Toronto School of Art. www.elizabethdagostino.com Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday, February 27th from 3-6 pm __________________________________________________________________________________________________  Sung Ja Kim Nest Jane LowBeer Light on Little Things Exhibitions of painting and drawing January 30 - February 21, 2010 Reception: Saturday, January 30, 2010, 2-5 PM loop Gallery is pleased to pleased to present exhibitions by loop members Sung Ja Kim entitled Nest and Jane LowBeer entitled Light on Little Things. In Sung Ja Kim's exhibition at loop Nest communicates the idea of being sheltered from the inevitable storms of life through a growing spiritual awareness. Nest incorporates multi-imaged works of specially constructed cocoons, which are metaphorically used to encapsulate the central dimensions of our life experiences. Another work in the exhibition uses nests as an artistic metaphor for being spiritually sheltered from the elemental forces of life that are completely beyond our control. Kim emphasizes borrowed imagery from the natural world by using materials in their natural states. Sung Ja Kim Chisholm was born near Seoul, South Korea. She studied classical oriental visual art at Chu Gyo Art University in Seoul and worked as an animator. Following a number of successful group and solo exhibitions in Seoul, Sung Ja came to Canada. She is a graduate of the Fine Arts Program at the Ontario College of Art & Design. Nest is Sung Ja's fifth exhibition at loop. InJane LowBeer's Light on Little Thingswe see a glimpse of day-to-day living; the toothpaste tube, sink plug, push pins and nail brushes. These household items, ubiquitous and accessible are the models for her art work. Light on Little Things consists of three components; each group with a different relationship to the same objects. In the monotype series ''Hands and Objects'', each print depicts a single object held or touched by a hand. In the monotypes ''Inventory'' objects are all lined up but without reference to ground, cut loose with no shelf or tabletop to hold them. Finally, a series of small paintings of toothpaste tubes; the tubes bent and used, each in their own personnel setting in the manner of traditional still life. Their contortions can be seen as metaphors for human activity. Jane LowBeer started her artistic career as a printmaker studying with Stanley Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris. She has exhibited in New York, Montreal and Europe. Her work can be seen at L'Espace Mexique in Montreal and Open Studio and Nikola Rukai Gallery in Toronto. join us for a Question & Answer session with Jane LowBeer on Saturday February 20th, 3pm. Facilitated by David Holt. Click here to view a conversation with Jane LowBeer on the loop Gallery blog __________________________________________________________________________________________________  Heather Carey Approaching Mimesis Larry Eisenstein PHOSLOGICA Exhibitions of painting and drawing January 2 - 24, 2010 Reception: Saturday, January 9th, 2009, 2 - 5 pm loop Gallery is pleased to pleased to present exhibitions by loop members Heather Carey entitled Approaching Mimesis and Larry Eisenstein entitled PHOSLOGICA. In Heather Carey's first exhibition at loop Approaching Mimesis, the artist continues her quirky investigation of the idea of imitation. Mimicry appears first as the more recognizable representation of a photo, and then secondly as more abstract marks which represent 'figures' that exist within the space. The paint disguises itself in the form of a completed image, while also exposing its application. The works are explorations of space and colour using various languages painting has to offer. Rather than exploring political or moral issues, Carey depicts generic spaces not identifiable as belonging to a specific time or person. Spaces empty of human presence are given character by the artificially coloured abstract marks placed on top. The marks, which are used to emphasize the works' two-dimensionality, appear to float in front an illusion of space. By their placement, as if in the space itself, they have become the figures in the scene creating odd and comical interactions for the viewer to navigate. There remains a conversation between the two languages of marks. Approaching Mimesis explores perception and how the mind completes or interprets images based on the knowledge we have. Carey demonstrates what is possible in painting, the re-invention of images. Heather Carey was born in Guelph, Ontario. She is a 2009 graduate of the Studio Art Program at the University of Guelph where she has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions. Approaching Mimesis is her first gallery exhibition. Larry Eisenstein's exhibition PHOSLOGICA Phoslogica is part of his ongoing series Cellves, which probes the New Biology's concepts of human unconscious processes, morphogenetic fields and morphonic resonances. Cellves asks the questions; Are the laws of nature merely habits? And can art influence these habits? Eisenstein is a visual artist obsessed with making marks. He is compulsively driven to exploit line in his work. Eisenstein enjoys name-dropping. He once exhibited with Andy Warhol, Lucas Samaras, Cindy Sherman and William Wegman. Eisenstein leaps at any opportunity to reference his former teacher, Krzysztof Wodiczko. Eisenstein believes photographers Holly and Ka-Sing Lee of IndexG Gallery and Richard Fogarty and painter Julie Oakes of Headbones Gallery are the unsung champions of Toronto's drawers. Eisenstein is grateful for Ydessa Hendeles' sage advice, honored by Pawel Zablocki's mentorship at Open Studio and views William Davison and Sherri Lyn Higgins of the Ossington Drawing Party as art community treasures. Eisenstein loves Jude McDonald's sublime poetry, adores Anne Koyama's divine books, envies Fiona Smyth's passionate energy, would kill for Seth Scriver's delicious line, respects Rafi Ghanaghounian's curatorial zen, admires Libby Hague's expansive vision, and trusts Marc Bell's prophecy that Hairy Who is on the rise in Southern Ontario. Eisenstein lives and works in Toronto where he is a sometimes teacher, art director, illustrator and writer. Please join the artists in celebrating their opening receptions on Saturday, January 9th from 2-5 pm. __________________________________________________________________________________________________  Audrea DiJulio Post Haste Suzanne Nacha Origin November 28 - December 20, 2009 Reception: Saturday, November 28th, 2009, 2 - 5 pm loop Gallery is pleased to pleased to present exhibitions by loop members Audrea DiJulio entitled Post Haste and Suzanne Nacha entitled Origin. In Audrea DiJulio's Post-Haste, hasty-construction practices allow for an intuitive way of bringing familiar materials together while restricting the artist's tendency to 'control' the form through analysis. This allows the sculpture to develop its own character simultaneously displaying the formal decisions of the artist. The forms, which have evolved from this body of work, have taken on an organic character, which is unexpected however, seems to be the result of finding the most structurally integral arrangement possible within the material. After completing her BA in Studio Art and Art history at the University of Guelph, a strong interest in the characteristics of materials and their structural capabilities, which carried over from her investigations in sculpture, lead DiJulio to pursue a diploma in Civil Engineering Technology in Hamilton, Ontario, where she currently resides. Suzanne Nacha's exhibition Origin is part of an ongoing series that includes paintings, prints and drawings; the Origin series seeks to make iconic images that act as psychological mirrors to human experience. Underground imagery featuring tunnels, caves, and mine shafts are manipulated in order to create two dimensional bodies that hover between architecture and anthropomorphic form while titles from Dante Alighieri's Inferno narrative suggest ties to classical interpretations of the human condition (on earth and beyond). Suzanne Nacha is a visual artist engaged in the language of painting. Often incorporating sculpture and installation, her work seeks to make connections between our human experience of the landscape that surrounds us and the earth as a physical body. Please join the artists in celebrating their opening receptions on Saturday, November 28th from 2-5 pm. A Conversation with Audrea DiJulio and Suzanne Nacha (Charles Hackbarth, Dec. 15, 2009) Artist Profile: Audrea DiJulio (Ingrid Mida, Dec. 10, 2009) Artist Profile: Suzanne Nacha (Ingrid Mida, Dec. 13, 2009) __________________________________________________________________________________________________  Charles Hackbarth Geographic Tongue (my ghost likes to travel) David Holt Gardens, Ruins, Fragments October 31 - November 22, 2009 Reception: Saturday, October 31st, 2009, 2 - 5 pm loop Gallery is pleased to pleased to present exhibitions by loop members Charles Hackbarth entitled Geographic Tongue (my ghost likes to travel) and David Holt entitled Gardens, Ruins, Fragments. The name of Charles Hackbarth's new series comes from a medical condition caused by overly acidic saliva. The results of this condition are map-like shapes on a person's tongue. The works have developed from an exploration of the realm of organically shaped canvases. The exhibition combines drawings, paintings and sculpture. Themes include: maps, mapping, geography, orienteering, being lost, being found, multi-dimensions, biology, history, personal and universal, abstract and representational, control and chaos. Inter-connectedness. Ephemeral and enduring. Transient and eternal. Real, imagined, unknown, unknowable. The great mystery. Options, variables. Transformation. Charles Hackbarth is a Toronto-based artist, sound sculptor and writer. Hackbarth studied at Ottawa School of Art and OCAD. He has been exhibiting publicly since 1985. His paintings hang in a number of private collections. David Holt's paintings in his second show at loop involve subjects from European botanical gardens, architecture, and antiquities collections. Painterly brushwork animates quirky, abbreviated forms, and playful balances of shapes and colours abound. A painter who has had many solo and group shows in the US, Holt has been the recipient of a painting grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and an artist residency at the Ragdale Foundation. He was an art professor for many years at Marymount College (of Fordham University) in New York, and now lives in Toronto where he teaches at Upper Canada College. Please join the artists in celebrating their opening receptions on Saturday, October 31st from 2-5 pm. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ loop Gallery presents: At loop's new venue at Dundas & Dovercourt  Tanya Cunnington homesick, starry eyed Matha Eleen Distant Early Warning and The Necessities of Life October 3 - 25, 2009 Reception: Saturday, October 3rd, 2009, 2 - 5 pm loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Tanya Cunnington entitled homesick, starry eyed and Martha Eleen entitled Distant Early Warning. Tanya Cunnington's current body of work, homesick, starry-eyed is based on the idea of personal nostalgia; creating a feeling or a mood that almost makes one yearn for a time passed and irrecoverable. Obviously a romantic, Tanya traveled to certain noted cities in art history for inspiration. What were once very realistic representations of these cities turned extremely process-based, and have now been broken down into abstractions comprised of mixed media. For Cunnington, each painting is very much about the moment in which she creates it, which in itself becomes very nostalgic for the artist. Ultimately the artist strives to portray her own feelings of nostalgia while at the same time encouraging a sense of personal longing within her viewers. www.tanyacunnington.com Martha Eleen's exhibition, Distant Early Warning is a portrait of an Arctic village. In Tuktoyaktuk, the Inuvialuit people still live close to the land and their history is embedded in the landscape. The title is borrowed from the iconic local DEW line, a radar system set up during the Cold War. The Arctic has become a sort of environmental 'canary in the tunnel', as the melting ice reveals a wealth of new resources to exploit, and the resulting pollution threatens this delicate eco-system. The exhibition includes Eleen's current work in progress, The Necessities of Life. These paintings explore the signage of the big box mall, the fourth series in an ongoing investigation into suburban sprawl outside Toronto, which depicts an environment based on the unsustainable, and already collapsing, car culture, where nature is suppressed and destroyed as opposed to treasured. The language of the big box mall signage is an expression of our denial of the impending global ecological crisis. www.MarthaEleen.com Please join the artists in celebrating their opening receptions on Saturday, October 3rd from 2-5 pm. loop is pleased to present Eleen's and Cunnington's exhibitions during Nuit Blanche on Saturday October 3rd, starting at sunset and continuing through the night until sunrise on Sunday, October 4. Press about the Exhibition  __________________________________________________________________________________________________ loop Gallery presents: Inaugural exhibition at loop's new venue at Dundas & Dovercourt  Gary Clement Cluster Richard Mongiat How Things Work Underwater September 5 - 27, 2009 Reception: Saturday, September 5th, 2009, 2 - 5 pm loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Gary Clement entitled Cluster and Richard Mongiat entitled How Things Work Underwater. The show is the inaugural exhibition at loop's new venue at Dundas and Dovercourt. For the purposes of Gary Clement's exhibition, the term "cluster" refers to three distinct categories of phenomena, the man-made, the cosmic and the organic. The most familiar, the man-made, is here best illustrated by the urban form, the modern city, with it's hive-like network of glass and concrete structures that encroach, or are encroached upon first, by surrounding nature and ultimately, limitlessly by the deep and endless sky. That limitless sky is filled with matter and objects of great fascination, among them globular clusters. Dense, hivelike (again) spheroidal collections of up to several million stars that formed toward the early evolution of the Milky Way. And finally, there is the organic: dense, complex structures of blood, bone, plasma and incomprehensibly large amounts of microcosmic life. All this matter, the essential building material of an incomprehensibly vast and variegated universe, is the same matter that is the building material of our homes, offices, stores and cars, of our trees and mountains, rocks and microbes and ultimately, of us. Richard Mongiat's How Things Work Underwater is a painterly dive into an imaginary watery world - think of Carlos Castaneda and Jacques Cousteau sharing a picnic on the ocean floor. After watching Werner Herzog's documentary "Encounters at the End of the World" with it's beautiful and bizarre underwater footage I realized that my tendency of building layers of compiled shapes and imagery was a perfect match for the teeming world of sea creatures and plant life. Working with larger, clumsier brushes I was looking for a clunk-ier approach to the shapes being depicted and to the application of paint in general. I even changed the way I normally hold my brushes. And although I allowed my whimsy free reign, can anything really compare to the strange beauty of a seahorse? Please join the artists in celebrating their opening receptions on Saturday, September 5th from 2-5 pm. Stick around for loop's Grand Opening Party at our new space, beginning at 6pm also on Saturday, September 5, 2009. Press about the Exhibition  National Post (Vanessa Farquharson, September 23, 2009) __________________________________________________________________________________________________ loop Gallery presents: Final Exhibition at 1174 Queen St. W. 
York MFA/PhD 2009 Summer Show INQUIRE WITHIN August 19 to August 30, 2009 Reception: Thursday, August 20, 2009, 7-10 PM. loop Gallery is pleased to announce the final show at our Queen Street West location, entitled Inquire Within. Philosopher Francis Fischer has suggested that it is generally futile to want to grasp the emergence or the turning-point of a work. Moving from this notion, Inquire Within, the Summer group exhibition from York University’s graduate students in the Visual Arts, seeks to redirect inquiry from the confines of a possible ’turning-point’ to the broader process of art production. In re-framing how a work is examined, the conceptual underpinnings become more prominent and the conflicting ideas employed initiate an open dialogue. The individual works in the show reference various ideas and employ multiple conceptual frameworks, but maintain a collective resolve to move beyond the respective aesthetic schemes in which they are realized. The idea of movement beyond the work’s current state is not necessarily medium related. The objects in the exhibition are not necessarily in a state of evolution. Instead the currency of conceptual schemes employed is revaluated and their subsequent definitions are shown to be unstable and continually changing. The fluidity of the discourses surrounding each object leaves the viewer with the task of interrogating the ideas rather than the object. Curated by Arpi Kovacs, Inquire Within includes work by Jaime Angelopoulos, Laura Barrón, David Bender, Zev Farber, Melissa General, Lauren Goldman, Emily Gove, Rodrigo Hernandez, Risa Horowitz, Natasha Ivanco, Myung-Sun Kim, Anthony Koutras, Catherine Lane, Jennifer Linton, Melanie Lowe, Asma Arshad Mahmood, Julieta María, Kate McQuillen, Lisa Neighbour, Stephanie Reynolds, Jennie Suddick, and Dustin Wenzel. This will be the final exhibition in loop's Queen Street West location. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Thursday, August 20th, from 7-10 pm. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ loop Gallery presents: At 1174 Queen St. W. 
Chris Dow The Black Swamp Patrick Joseph Mifsud From One Horizon to Another July 25 to August 16, 2009 Reception: Saturday, July 25, 2-5 PM Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop Gallery member Chris Dow and Patrick Joseph Mifsud. Chris Dow explains, "For myself, painting is, in essence, an ethereal endeavour. Painting requires exploring feelings or perception that come from some place not understood and a place where words do not exist. The act of painting is experienced and the subject matter is a convenient starting point. I like painting outdoors and the way this requires intuitive response. Working in the studio forces me to take a contemplative approach, this is often more of a problem solving process where the problem itself is not an intellectual one." Currently based in Millis, Massachusetts, Chris Dow has spent several of the past six years living abroad in both Japan and Australia, writing software and painting in his spare time. He has shown in galleries across Canada as well as in Italy through the Ontario College of Art & Design. In From One Horizon to Another, the figures are considered iconic, as they are based on Patrick Joseph Mifsud's sightings of nannies and caretakers with their employers while in Hong Kong. The figures are iconic in the sense that they are representations of actual people in moments of their purpose in a foreign land, glorified. Each painting depicts a proletariat outsider with the person(s) they are to care after. The social interaction between these two types of peoples is the focal point in this series. There is often a disconnect present, both verbally and mentally, resulting in a lack of communication between the caretaker or nanny and the employer. Each scene demonstrates a sense of crisis in the relationship between the two. This moment in time for each nanny/caretaker depicts their current occupational situation involved with an employer they are unable to socially or culturally connect to. Patrick Joseph Mifsud is a Toronto-based artist whose work explores the disposition of narratives to an audience, in regards to the relationships between one figure to another, as well as the viewer and the viewed. Narratives, actual or imaginary are portrayed in a bold play on colour adding a peculiarity to his work. Patrick is a recent graduate from the University of Toronto. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Libby Hague Double Vision Liz Parkinson Paradise Lost June 27 to July 19, 2009 Reception: Saturday, June 27, 2-5 PM Artists' Talk: Thursday, July 9th, 7 pm. Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop Gallery members Libby Hague and Liz Parkinson. The work for Libby Hague's Double Vision began last summer in a residency on Toronto Island. Inspired by the gentleness of the place and season, she decided to return to landscape painting, something she had loved twenty years previously. Double Vision is a series of small intense paintings done from nature and later from the imagination, painted in acrylic with oil superimposed. The outdoor acrylic painting respects the complexity and specificity of a place infusing it with all the physical aspects of the moment. The oil component has a more intense chromatic and textural register that overlays an emotional, abstracted response. In this way, two ideas of one place are folded together and sustained at the same time. Both layers have their own speed, their own focus, their own anxiety and their own happiness. In Paradise Field, Liz Parkinson continues her interest in collections and how choices are made about those things that surround us: Sometimes they come to us, again and again. Here an undulating field of traditional-looking botanical prints shifts in perspective. Drawn versions of local wildflowers, they collectively re-present an ideal Southern Ontario garden paradise in a soothingly familiar field of information. Each plant is easily named, free of labour, has a history of botanic use, and is perennially returning and together bloom continuously throughout our growing season. But all these plants were introduced to Canada. Their names are multiple reminders of someone, somewhere or something else. From royalty (Queen Anne's Lace), the gods and saints (Helenium) and animals (Bird's Nest) they are not our own. Naturalized into fields and waste places, they carry their history with them but are habitually seen as always here, always our own. What has this paradise replaced? Despite a desire for a singular understanding, a longing for permanence in an ideal return, paradise is a shifting construct based on a changing field of understanding. Collections always refer to someone, somewhere or something else. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday, June 27, 2-5 PM. The artists will speak about their exhibitions in an Artists' Talk on Thursday, July 9th from 7-9pm. Libby Hague Web Catalogue (2.5 mb) Libby Hague Print Catalogue (3.1 mb) __________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Kelly Cade In Between Candida Girling The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves May 30 - June 21, 2009 Reception: Saturday, May 30th, 2009, 2 - 5 pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop Gallery members Kelly Cade entitled In Between and Candida Girling entitled The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves. Kelly Cade's exhibition of recent paintings move from 'washi' (Japanese paper) to canvas and offer a glimpse of a floating, transient world. Cade invites us to shift focus between material and ephemeral experience, as we examine our connections to nature within daily life. Kelly Cade, is a Toronto based artist and graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design, who has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows. Her work can be found in private and public collections throughout Canada, the United States and the U.K. In Candida Girling's painting series The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves, the artist turns to Yeats and the dilemma of quieting the mind amidst the chatter that both propels and enervates us. Girling's women have a brawling in their heads born of melancholy or chaotic whimsy. Candida Girling is a South African-born artist whose work has been shown in Canada, the United States, the U.K. and Denmark. She works in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, fashion and installation. Girling currently teaches at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, and is a founding member of Loop Gallery. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday May 30th from 2-5pm. __________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Yael Brotman The Mountain in Our Living Room Adrian Fish The North York Project (Child is Father of the Man) May 2 - May 24, 2009 Reception: Saturday, May 2nd, 2009, 2 - 5 pm Join us for an Artist's Talk by Yael Brotman: Thursday, May 7th, 7 PM Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop Gallery members Adrian Fish entitled The North York Project (Child is Father of the Man) and Yael Brotman entitled The Mountain in Our Living Room. Adrian Fish's exhibition The North York Project (Child is Father of the Man) documents the mostly recreational environments that are synonymous with Fish's childhood experience growing up in the suburb of North York. The photographs consist of five different locations: a swimming pool, an ice rink, a soccer field, and a school - all familiar facets of the vernacular of the suburban environment. Child is Father of the Man refers to a Wordsworth poem from 1802, pointing out that our childhood experiences constantly underlie our adulthood dispositions. In the spirit of Wordsworth, The North York Project (Child is Father of the Man) documents sites that have psychic weight associated with Fish's childhood experience - an experience that continues to influence his present-day tendencies and propensities. Adrian Fish is a Toronto- and Halifax-based artist and teacher working in photography. He holds an MFA from York University, as well as accreditation from the Ontario College of Art & Design and Sheridan College. He has exhibited in a number of public institutions, artist-run centres and commercial galleries nationally and internationally. Yael Brotman's The Mountain in Our Living Room uses Delacroix's 'Diary of Morocco' as impetus, substituting time for space. Brotman looks back to the world of her teen years in Winnipeg. Her particular focus is upon a mountain that her mother constructed in the living room of their bungalow in the middle of that flat city. Like Delacroix's annotated sketches, Brotman's new work incorporates various drawing media (plus photo-based inkjet elements not available to Delacroix) and text, and juxtaposes varying scales. Such an approach to markmaking renders a surreal atmosphere to the drawings that underscores memory and history's connection to myth. Yael Brotman's practice includes drawing, painting and printmaking. Brotman has exhibited in public galleries across Canada (from St. John's NF to Dawson City YK), as well as at commercial galleries and artist-run centres. Her work has been reviewed in newspapers and magazines. Brotman has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work is represented in numerous private and corporate collections. In June 2009 she is scheduled to exhibit and lecture in China, for which she received a supporting pilot National and International Touring and Residencies Grant from the Ontario Arts Council. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday May 2nd from 2-5 pm. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Barbara Rehus Fly By Thelma Rosner Elisabeth's Book April 4 - 26, 2009 Reception: Saturday, April 4th, 2009, 2 - 5 pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop Gallery members Barbara Rehus entitled Fly By and Thelma Rosner entitled Elisabeth's Book. Barbara Rehus Fly By The concepts behind Fly By began to form when, dealing with health issues, Barbara Rehus often found herself alternating between two strong emotions: hope for change and the desire to run away. First came the boxes. It seemed natural for Rehus to work with crows, as in recent years their numbers have been decimated by West Nile disease; crows know health issues. The birds were painted with glass enamels and then kiln-fired, resulting in delicate and translucent images. Each crow was on its own, flying freely. Initially, the wire running through the layers of glass added to feelings of movement and grace. But then it was time to fasten the paintings into the boxes, and the wire became rough and twisted, fence-like; the birds seemed to struggle against it. Yet, placed against a background of sky and clouds, they remain airborne – hope is not entirely lost. Next came Fly By, an installation depicting crows in flight. The birds have been screenprinted onto hundreds of small glass tiles, the tiles kiln-fired, wired together and hung in strands from the ceiling. The crows have come together; they are a flock. Their numbers are again strong – now they are part of a group, one which provides individuals with comfort and support. It's hard it know if the flock is coming together, or breaking apart, but no matter what, each individual can find a sense of community. In exhibition, Fly By may be varied in size and shape, just as our own support bases, both within a community and inside ourselves, can vary from day to day. Rehus is an Oakville-based painter and sculptor. She holds two undergraduate degrees from Cleveland State University, as well as accreditation from Toronto School of Art. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in public institutions, artist-run centres and commercial galleries throughout Canada, the UK, The Netherlands, Australia, and the United States. Her work is included in numerous private collections. Please join the artist in celebrating the opening on Saturday, April 4th from 2-5 pm. Thelma Rosner Elisabeth's Book In December 1944 Eszter Schwartz gave Elisabeth Raab a homemade gift. It was a small book made of black felt pages (about 2” square) onto which she had sewn tiny metal cut-outs, one on each page. Loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Loop Gallery member Thelma Rosner entitled Elisabeth's Book. Elisabeth's Book is a suite of archival digital prints that pays homage to the power of human creativity and courage, despite situations of unimaginable horror. Thelma Rosner is a London Ontario artist, whose practice combines the meanings and metaphors of traditional still life, with subjects arising from her own Jewish heritage. She works as both a painter and printmaker, and often presents her work in the form of installations. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the USA and England. She has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and has been the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. Thelma Rosner is grateful for recent support from the Ontario Arts Council. Please join the artist in celebrating the opening on Saturday, April 4th from 2-5 pm. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Maria Gabankova Puzzle Maureen Paxton Little Babel March 7 - March 29, 2009 Reception: Saturday, March 7th, 2009, 2 - 5 pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop Gallery members Maria Gabankova entitled Puzzle and Maureen Paxton entitled Little Babel. Maria Gabankova's exhibition Puzzle uses the parable of the blind, words spoken by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, as a starting point for her drawings and paintings. She interprets the parable by referencing current social unrest caused by global economic and political uncertainty, corruption and confusion to bring to mind a contemporary adaptation of this Biblical illustration. Enticed by the disturbing imagery and mysterious meaning of a painting by Pieter Bruegel (1524-1569) titled The Parable of the Blind, Gabankova has "entered" the Bruegel image mindset by painting some of its parts and placing them into a visual dialogue with fragments of current events. She explores how these will resonate and morph. Maria Gabankova, who was born in the former Czechoslovakia and currently lives and works in Toronto, has worked as a professional artist and has exhibited her drawings and paintings in Canada and internationally since 1980. Her work is represented in private and corporate collections in Canada, USA and Europe. Maureen Paxton's Little Babel is the artist's version of a certain infamous tower. It is also the name given an ape appearing throughout the exhibition. In some incarnations, Little is as naked as the day she came home from the dollar store; in others, a pilgrim wearing her road, her hook, her hoop, her ignorance and her knowledge. She is Sisyphus, the Climber and Pusher, her body now a brave but ungainly amalgam of rock and hill. She's a walking billboard: We Bring Ourselves Wherever We Go. In this exhibition, there are large drawings and tiny paintings. The drawings are based on a tower constructed by the artist, a cipher for a building that went through many trials en route to becoming a new studio. To date, both tower and studio are still standing. Maureen Paxton is a writer as well as visual artist and at work on a novel. Awarded a Works-in-Progress grant by the Ontario Arts Council in 2007, she has been a member of the Tarragon Playwrights' Unit, children's book illustrator and was shortlisted for the Governor General's medal for one. She also works in animation. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Saturday March 7th from 2-5 pm. Press about the Exhibition  ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Isabelle Hémard hearts, drops & pebbles.... Adrienne Trent Burden of Histories February 7 - March 1, 2009 Reception: Saturday, February 7th, 2009, 2 - 5 pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop Gallery members Isabelle Hémard entitled hearts, drops & pebbles.... & Adrienne Trent entitled Burden of Histories. Isabelle Hémard's installation hearts, drops & pebbles.... a series of new linocuts, painted mylar and stencil installations related to Hémard's life as a woman in her forties. Twelve years ago, an exhibition at Engramme, Quebec, trente ans déjà, told the story of Hémard's coming to the age of thirty - an age that had always seemed to her to be an important life-stage. It was a look back on the expectations and the deceptions that one encounters when growing older: how to stay connected with our goals and dreams without always aiming too high. Now in her forties, she is concerned with how to go forward and put aside fears of making decisions due to good and bad past life experiences. Decision-making would seem to come easier with age, but Hémard finds herself second-guessing everything because the life left to live is getting shorter and she wants to make the right choices in order to fully live her life. By exposing her 'secret garden' to herself and others it gives the artist a clearer idea of where she is and where she wants to go next. hearts, drops & pebbles.... is an exhibition about making choices in life, how they shape who you are and how people and society perceive you. Part of the 'mis au point' is the fact that Hémard is living in a country that has become her home, but where one part of her always feels like a foreigner. It is a look at the difficulty in gaining a sense of belonging that one should gain with age but which feels somehow harder when one's roots are in another country, in Hémard's case France. Toronto-based artist printmaker Isabelle Hémard was born in 1966 in France, and has lived in Canada since the early nineties. She completed her MFA at Diplôme National Supérieur d'Arts Plastiques in France and has exhibited in Canada and internationally. Her work can be found in many private, public and corporate collections including: The Department of Foreign Affairs, The Bank of Montreal and The Ontario Ministry of Health. Her work is available in Toronto through Loop Gallery, Open Studio, Tracey Capes Fine Arts and Lennox Contemporary. Adrienne Trent is drawn to the allure of the constructed/decomposing image, and its ability to invent believable narratives evoking personal contemplation for the viewers. With her use of objects that hark from a pre-plastic age, Trent presents them in their evolving state of decomposition. It's a combination of loss and gain. Things are born, live and hang in limbo, to quote British artist Cornelia Parker. After graduating from the Ontario College of Art in the 80's, Adrienne Trent went on to exhibit her art, both nationally and internationally. Adrienne was a co-founder of Republic and was a member of the Red Head Gallery in the 1990's. She has had exhibits in commercial galleries such as Robert Birch, Edward Day, Deleon White, Lonsdale and V.Macdonnell; in public galleries such as the Art Gallery of Clarington, Koffler Gallery, Justina M. Barnicke at the University of Toronto, Robert Langen at Sir Wilfred Laurier University, and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa; and in various artist-run spaces; Artspace in Peterborough, White Water Gallery in North Bay, Mercer Union in Toronto, La Centrale in Montreal, and SAW Gallery in Ottawa. Adrienne has also curated a number of exhibitions in conjunction with both Republic, Red Head, and with Visual Arts Ontario, where she was the head of the Colour Reprography programme for artists from 1994 to 1998. Adrienne's work is part of the permanent collections at the Art Gallery of Ontario, University of Toronto Art Centre, CBC, DeLeon White Gallery, Robert Birch Gallery, and numerous private collections. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening on Saturday, February 7th from 2-5 pm. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Sung Ja Kim Wilderness Linda Heffernan Ordinary People January 10 - February 1, 2009 Reception: Saturday, January 10th, 2009, 2 - 5 pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop Gallery members Sung Ja Kim entitled Wilderness & Linda Heffernan entitled Ordinary People. Sung Ja Kim's Wilderness is the escape from the true wilderness of the natural human condition into authentic community through the process of spiritual growth and maturity. Kim incorporates works that build upon the tensions between the alienating and healing dimensions of our human condition. These new works reveal how these tensions strengthen our responses to life's experiences through the 'weathering' that is induced by spiritual growth and maturity. Several of the works focus on deceased individuals who made significant contributions to modern civilization. Each of their achievements reduced some of the sources of the alienation that is inherent in our human condition. Yet the healing that their contributions made have not permanently cured or healed the basic alienation or wilderness aspect of who we are. Artistically, Kim expresses the on-going tension between wilderness alienation and healing but not curing through the 'portraits' of the deceased individuals that 'punch' through their individualized canvas enclosures. The forms of these works communicate that we are permanently enclosed in our wilderness alienation, regardless of the success of our achievements. Sung Ja Kim was born near Seoul, South Korea. She studied in Seoul, where her passion for artistic creation was first unleashed, and worked as an animator following her secondary education which enabled her to develop remarkable skills as a figurative artist. Kim's artistic talents continued to blossom with her studies of classical oriental visual art forms at Chu Gyo Art University in Seoul. Following a number of successful group and solo exhibitions in Seoul, Kim came to Canada. She enrolled in the Fine Arts Program at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) in Toronto where she became a skilled practitioner of conceptual art. Her studies have enabled her to communicate deep spiritual truths about the human condition in mixed media forms. After graduating from OCAD, Kim became a member of the Loop Gallery. Wilderness is Kim's fourth exhibition at Loop Gallery. Linda Heffernan's current body of work, Ordinary People is a tongue in cheek response to politics, the media and ordinary people. It speaks to the manner in which corporate America, government officials and ordinary people interact with the media during coverage of both global and local events in a constant play of bait and banter. Painted photos of ordinary people combine with titles inspired by a Toronto Star meme of the week, or a quote from Saturday Night Live or Canada A.M., to demonstrate the disconnect between the politically astute and those who simply want off the current economic roller coaster to put their head between their knees and take a deep breath. The semi abstract backgrounds stand in for the snow and ice of backyard rinks, melting glaciers and the extended political snow day invoked by our prorogued parliament. The surreal nature of these paintings is both a comment on the current state of Canadian political affairs and a portal for momentary escape. Linda Heffernan is a Whitby-based artist exploring themes of consumer capitalism and bureaucracy in an ever more interconnected global economy. She recently obtained her BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design where she was named to the Dean's Honour List in the Faculty of Art. She has exhibited her work in a number of galleries in Toronto's Queen West district as well as Whitby's Station Gallery. Please join the artist in celebrating the opening on Saturday, January 10th from 2-5 pm. Press about the Exhibition  ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  JJ Lee Migration Mary Catherine Newcomb Product of Eden 2008: Bare Garden November 22 - December 14, 2008 Reception: Saturday, November 22nd, 2008, 2 - 5 pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop Gallery members JJ Lee entitled Migration & Mary Catherine Newcomb entitled Product of Eden 2008: Bare Garden. Bare Garden represents Mary Catherine Newcomb's 2008 Product of Eden phyto-collaboration. The Product of Eden project began in 2006 with the cultivation of saint and (latterly) demon bushes. During the 2008 growing season Newcomb worked with polar bear, arctic fox, and arctic hare vines (white pumpkin varieties). She sculpted models out of clay and made polycarbonate moulds to encourage optimum animal development. In early August Newcomb discovered that the plants had been infested with squash vine borer. All efforts to save the crop were unsuccessful. This exhibition consists of a few sadly misshapen pumpkins, unfired clay positives (for the moulds), "happy thanksgiving" polar bear pumpkin (humble) pie and an atmosphere of lament. Mary Catherine Newcomb was born and raised in Montreal. She received her art education at University of Waterloo and York University. Currently she works and resides in Kitchener, Ontario. She has received numerous grants and awards and her work has been exhibited internationally. In Migration JJ Lee explores identity and hybrid cultures by borrowing from Eastern and Western artistic traditions. Migration continues Lee's fascination with the surface and subject of painting, as well as the tension between presence and absence. By referring to geographic movement Migration also implies psychological, cultural and emotional movement. Migration is a series of encaustic paintings that borrow from, refer to and re-imagine this genre through second-generation eyes. Lee is curiously attracted to the flatness of these paintings and how flatness reinforces the 'picture plane' in the Modernist Western painting tradition. She is also interested in how much is said with so little paint. Born and raised in Halifax, NS, JJ Lee received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1992. After living in Vancouver and exhibiting across Canada, Lee pursued her Master of Fine Arts from York University, Toronto (1999). Lee has been featured in The Globe and Mail and ELLE Canada. She is the recipient of several awards, such as from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, RBC /Canadian Art Foundation's New Canadian Painting Competition and the Asian Canadian Artists Fund for Visual Arts. She is featured Carte Blanche Vol.2: Painting (Magenta Foundation Publishing), "an unprecedented showcase of Canada's best and most promising painters". She lives and works in Toronto where she teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design and the Art Gallery of Ontario. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Laura Ciruls Retrospective in Memoriam October 25 - November 16, 2008 Reception: Saturday, October 25, 2008, 2 - 5 pm Loop Gallery is honoured to present a memorial exhibition of the work of Loop Gallery member Laura Ciruls who passed away on July 2, 2008 at the age of 49 after a lengthy battle with cancer. The show offers highlights of Laura's career. Using acrylic gel mediums, extenders and photo-transfer techniques Ciruls' multi-layered abstract works explore how natural things are affected by global warming and urban development. The images stand as a metaphor for our unconsciousness as a society toward the environment, and larger issues that are buried but eventually resurface, such as memory, identity, emotional fears and empathy to things outside ourselves. Her most recent series of bold paintings, entitled Wrapped, presents construction sites covered in billowing plastic sheeting and the geometric floor plans that served as departure points for the work. Ciruls was fascinated by the magical in-between world beneath the plastic-wrapped structures that exists in the viewer's imagination, but is ultimately more compelling than the later revealed buildings. In another series, Weave, pattern, line and colour weave across and below the surface, suggesting a complexity found both in the physical world and the mind. The weave of depth, gesture, emotional layers, and private/public space is explored in these works. Different points-of-view suggest a weave of perspectives, from a distance, right on the surface and deep within a location. The play of colour and line depicts images of construction and perhaps deconstruction. The physicality of the paint captures light as a sculptural element which changes and describes the painted surface. Through her focus on this subject, Ciruls' work questions how a rapidly developing city may create significant public change and therefore undermine our personal sense of place, security and identity. Originally from Toronto, Laura Ciruls studied Visual Arts (BFA) at York University. She also studied at the Toronto School of Art and completed the Independent Studio Programme there in 2003. Her third exhibition at Loop gallery was in October/November 2007. The Laura Ciruls Fund at the Ontario Arts Foundation The friends and family of Laura Ciruls have established a foundation for donations in Laura's name. Memorial donations may be made to The Laura Ciruls Fund at the Ontario Arts Foundation or to a charity of choice. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Jane LowBeer River of Life October 23 - November 16, 2008 Reception: Thursday, October 23, 2008, 6 - 9 pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Jane LowBeer. In River of Life, LowBeer continues her exploration of the everyday dramas of the small objects around the house. This exhibition includes pieces from two series of work. The first series uses the space of the tabletop as the metaphor of a river with the ebb and flow of objects slipping, falling, moving in and out of focus on their way along the picture plane. The second series, of large monotypes, depicts the same small household objects as reflections on the surface of larger-than-life vases. The mass of these heavy vessels contrasts with the translucent flowers they contain. This tension aims to describe the duality inherent in the human condition, the material world versus spirit. Jane LowBeer is a mixed media artist living in downtown Toronto. Monotypes have been her medium of choice during the last decade. Her most recent exhibition was last fall at Open Studio. During her career she has exhibited in New York, Montreal and various places in Europe. Her works are included in private and public collections including The Victorian and Albert Museum in London and Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In Toronto she is represented by Open Studio and The Nikolai Rukaj Gallery. Please join the artist in celebrating the opening on Thursday, October 23 from 6-9 pm. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents: 
Mark Adair Last Garden Elizabeth Babyn Playing Off the Grid September 27 - October 19, 2008 Reception: Saturday, September 27th, 2008, 2 - 5 pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Loop Gallery members Mark Adair entitled Last Garden and Elizabeth Babyn entitled Playing Off the Grid. Mark Adair is a Toronto artist who both does charcoal works on paper and makes sculpture. His work was recently featured in the Patrick Jenkins documentary, Death Is In Trouble Now, currently airing on BRAVO! Television, which was also the basis for a 25 year retrospective of Adair's work mounted last year at Brock University's Rodman Hall Arts Centre. Adair is a graduate of York University, Toronto (BFA 1979) and the University of Victoria (MFA 1982). He is a founding member of the Torontoniensis Collective with whom he exhibited since the mid 1990's. He has exhibited with Loop since 2004. His new work, Last Garden, includes large charcoal drawings and the sculpture 21st Century Reliquary which borrows its complex form and function from the sacred reliquary sculptures of the Middle Ages. These new works continue Adair's effort to come to grips with the ongoing destruction of the natural world and our complex and violent relationship with Knowledge. For a few years now, Elizabeth Babyn has been creating large gestural non-objective paintings that incorporate elements of process and chance. Her method has allowed her to harness the spontaneously occurring drip marks which create the final skeletal framework that supports each of her paintings. A natural occurring grid reveals itself through this process, which has led the artist to further explore the grid as well as various optic illusions for this current series. The psycho-physiological unnerving experience that Op art of the 1960's provided has always intrigued Babyn. What would be the effect of juxtaposing various optic and colour field studies with her method of acrylic painting? To answer this question, Babyn attempts to explore this concept by under-painting with gesso various grid and optic designs on raw canvas. As her painting evolves on canvas through gestural brushwork and further paint applications, various aspects of the initial under-painted design are either hidden or revealed. Originally from the Eastern Townships in Quebec, Elizabeth Babyn now resides with her family in the beautiful hills of Caledon. After years of working as a registered nurse, Babyn decided to follow her hearts desire and obtained her BFA with honours in Drawing and Painting at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Babyn now teaches art at King's College in Caledon as well as at her studio in Bolton, just north of Toronto. Babyn has been a member of Loop Gallery since 2003. In addition to exhibiting at Loop Gallery, she has exhibited work at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Spin Gallery. The Whitney Gallery, The Lyndia Terre Gallery, SGI, McMichael Gallery, The Caledon East Studio Tour and surrounding area. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Rochelle Rubinstein & Lanny Shereck OVERLAP August 30 - September 21, 2008 Reception: Sunday, September 7th, 2008, 1-4pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Loop Gallery members Rochelle Rubinstein and Lanny Shereck entitled OVERLAP. In his first exhibition at Loop Gallery, Lanny Shereck overlaps sections of his urban photographs with painted imagery to create an effect which dissolves from realism to pixilation upon close inspection. Shereck’s banal, iconographic images of a garbage truck, gas pump, and playground house, reflect our society’s concerns regarding our trash, our environment, gas prices, and safety. Rochelle Rubinstein’s printed, painted, and carved images on wood deal with national, and personal security and include suburbia, gas masks and gas nozzles. Her suburbs mutate, choked off by the expense of gas; while the gas masks reflecting both fear and protection proliferate. Her images often overlap, sometimes to the point of obscuring original meanings and dissolving into abstraction and beauty. OVERLAP works on two levels: a juxtaposition of two artists' work within the gallery space, as well as the formal and technical aspects of overlapping in two distinct bodies of work. The art of Rubinstein and Shereck also sometimes overlaps narratively, with shared images of old Havana, downtown Toronto, and visuals derived from topical events of the present and of the past. Rochelle Rubinstein is a printmaker, painter, fabric and book artist who has completed several residencies in Ireland and in New York and has exhibited internationally. She is also a community arts practitioner who has worked with youth groups, battered women and people with eating disorders. Lanny Shereck is an artist and art teacher working in paint and using photographic collage to create images of urban life. Both artists are also represented by The Fran Hill Gallery in Toronto. Please join us for the opening reception of OVERLAP at Loop, Sunday, September 7th, 2008, 1-4 PM. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Matthew Budden The Babies of 2008 Matthew Janisse Investiges August 13 - August 24, 2008 Reception: Saturday, August 16th, 2008, 2-5pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce a two-week exhibition presented by Toronto artist John Brown. The show features the works of Matthew Budden and Matthew Janisse. Matthew Budden’s The Babies of 2008 is a painterly meditation on human infancy. The paintings in this show are intimate objects, 6" x 6", and merge a tactility of paint surface with a depth of feeling approaching hallucination. The images of infants at once horrific and vulnerable were originally sourced through newspaper baby announcements and are rendered with an ardent appreciation of Flemish Renaissance painters, Japanese portrait art, and contemporary mystical imagery. Matthew Janisse's Investiges features five oil paintings on wood and masonite panels. Each explores the natural geometric layout of urban topography. Janisse carefully weaves together diverse perspectives through several distinct layering techniques. The result is a series of multi-dimensional and carefully constructed compositions that truthfully reflect our past and present surroundings. Matthew Budden is a Vancouver-based painter. This is the first Toronto show of his paintings. Visit matthewbudden.com for further information. Matthew Janisse was born and raised in Toronto. He studied at the Toronto School of Art, graduating in 2004. He shares downtown studio space with John Brown. Matthew Janisse's paintings are a part of his continuing evolution in process. For more information, please visit mattjanisse.com. Please join the artists in celebrating the opening on Saturday August 16 from 2-5 pm. __________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents:  Tanya Cunnington Passed in the Stuck Elizabeth D’Agostino Under Leaf and Log July 19 - August 10, 2008 Reception: Saturday, July 19th, 2008, 2-5pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop Gallery members Tanya Cunnington entitled Passed in the Stuck and Elizabeth D’Agostino entitled Under Leaf and Log. Tanya Cunnington hopes to achieve something nostalgic within her art; a yearning for, or a memory of, a time past and irrecoverable. While in Europe, Tanya Cunnington began to examine the roles of the artist, both past and present, and realized that she felt extremely drawn to the past. She began to paint cityscapes as a means to express her strong interest in certain cities as they related to art history. Passed in the Stuck is Tanya Cunnington's most recent Exhibition Opening at Loop Gallery. Her exhibition is comprised of mixed media collages which the artist sees as symbolic of these pasts. They are urban landscapes broken down into pure visual abstraction. In 2001, Tanya received her Associates Degree from the Ontario College of Art and Design. She was also awarded the Eric Freifeld Scholarship for Excellence in Figurative Art. In 2006, she became a member of Loop Gallery where she exhibits annually. Tanya Cunnington currently lives and works in Toronto. Elizabeth D’Agostino’s practice has evolved from the investigations of drawing and painting media to print media. Elizabeth D’Agostino’s interests have been in the technical aspects of intaglio methods both traditional and photomechanical combined with screen-printing. In Under Leaf and Log shes uses photo polymer plates, which are produced with using a film positive transparency, a light source and water as the developer. These plates will be combined with layered monotypes to create a field of color and photo silkscreen images and patterns. Each piece that she completed is a singular print numbered 1/1 and layered with numerous intaglio methods in order to generate a surface that demonstrates a relationship with the natural world. Elizabeth D’Agostino has been fascinated by the structure and setting of the city and is constantly reminded of familial sites and surroundings she encountered growing up. Her fascination embodies a sense of individual desire to recapture and restore memories and fragments of historical passages, which influence her daily life. The daughter of Italian parents, who immigrated to Canada, Elizabeth D’Agostino is concerned with the notion of acclimation and how the environment begins to inform each other. As a child, she watched those around her form an ancestral and collective wholeness by grounding themselves with familiar and foreign ideas, which shaped their locale. The destination of one’s original place of birth led her to the path of the extended sense of home, which is revealed in both animate and inanimate objects. This concept has multiple meanings, going beyond a shelter; relating to an individual’s stability in his/her relationships, and their surroundings that often dictate their day-to-day functions. Narrative devices derived from a generation of specific traditions, cultural domestic systems and patterns that are affected by continual growth and change are often depicted as backdrops or motifs printed onto paper, they are common examples repeated in order much like landscape. They are used to adorn the surfaces of many objects or ’things’ and are often collected, stored, displayed and passed on. Elizabeth D’Agostino received her BFA from the University of Windsor and her MFA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL. She has exhibited in Canada and internationally including Iziko: Museum of Cape Town, South Africa, Manhattan Graphics Center, New York, and The Print Center, Philidelphia. Her work can also be found in many private and public collections including the University of Changchun Jilin, China; Frans Masareel Centrum, Belgium and Ernst and Young, Canada. She has been selected as a 2008 Visiting Artist by the Fine Arts Department at the University of South Dakota. Elizabeth lives and works in Toronto and is a member of Open Studio in Toronto where she does most of her printing. Currently Elizabeth teaches printmaking at the Ontario College of Art and Design and is the Curriculum Coordinator at the Toronto School of Art. __________________________________________________________________________________________ |
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Loop Gallery presents:  Dawn Stafrace | Scott Ireland | Catherine Telford-Keogh labouriously³ June 26 - July 13, 2008 Reception: Saturday, June 28th, 2008, 2-5pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Dawn Stafrace, Scott Ireland and Catherine Telford-Keogh entitled labouriously³. Dawn Stafrace’s site-specific installations reflect her interest in line, the hand, the maker and learning through touch and making. Using hand-worked sticks, sometimes whittled from wood, other times formed of clay or paper pieces, she creates three-dimensional linear textures that respond to the architecture of the gallery and reflect her intuitive responses to the structure of the work as it develops. The works are literal experiences of line in space. There is a definite focus on labour in the handmade quality of the works; Stafrace chooses not to mechanise the process so that there is physical evidence of presence left on the work. This is done partly out of the desire for the lines to be organic, showing evidence of the hand, but also as an exercise in labour reminiscent of the production potter in which the marks of the hand visually leaves time instilled within its parts. The fragility of the material highlights the fleetingness of Stafrace’s efforts and time. The idea for the works in Scott Ireland’s exhibition initially came from urban telephone poles postered with ads. Ireland’s process involves the deconstruction and reconfiguration of the Bible, pulling pages from antique books and stapling them to plywood in the pattern of Renaissance wallpaper. The patterns allude to past Renaissance artists who embedded Christianity into their neo-pagan art. By combining the wealthy Renaissance wallpaper pattern, with the message and physicality of the biblical text, Ireland’s work comments on current changes and differences in culture and society. By ’posting’ the Bible, Ireland aims to interweave the sacred into the fabric of life and society. Employing habitual repetition of symbolic and bodily processes, the orifice-like sculptural works in Catherine Telford-Keogh’s exhibition are constructed using materials laden with cultural and religious myths of the feminine, such as hair, fur, textiles and natural materials. Through sewing, braiding, weaving and wrapping - actions traditionally ascribed to the realm of femininity - as well as repetitive additive and subtractive methods, each sculpture references the bodily construction of the gendered self. Drawing upon a drag and camp aesthetic, she uses over-the-top materials to reveal the performative nature of femininity. The work focuses on revealing and disrupting the repetitive and idealized acts that intelligibly feminize the body. The blatant visibility of these obsessively repeated acts, the oddity of the objects as well as the overt feminine material reveal gender as a pariodic performance rather than something innate and abiding. Dawn Stafrace is a graduate of OCAD and Sheridan College, and completed her Master’s degree in the University of Waterloo’s Fine Arts Studio program in 2007. She is currently a resident artist at the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga. Scott Ireland and Catherine Telford-Keogh are 2008 graduates of the Bachelor of Arts, Fine Arts Studio program at University of Waterloo. __________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents: FLEX A Members’ Exhibition for the World Washi Summit  Mark Adair Elizabeth Babyn Yael Brotman Kelly Cade Gary Clement Elizabeth D'Agostino Martha Eleen Maria Gabankova Candida Girling Charles Hackbarth Libby Hague Isabelle Hemard David Holt JJ Lee Liz Parkinson Maureen Paxton Barbara Rehus Rochelle Rubinstein Yvonne Singer Adrienne Trent May 31 - June 22, 2008 Reception: Saturday, June 7, 2008, 2-5pm Loop Gallery is pleased to announce a group members’ exhibition for the World Washi Summit entitled FLEX. FLEX is a Loop Gallery members’ exhibition incorporating washi, the traditional hand-made Japanese paper. FLEX explores the central paradoxes of this wonderful material: fragile but strong; light but resilient; understated but beautiful. Endangered habitats, changing social factors and market forces have threatened the traditional production of this paper. FLEX, along with the other exhibitions in the World Washi Summit, shows why washi matters. Literally and metaphorically, washi demonstrates the value of cultural knowledge accumulated over centuries to a world looking for something cheap and fast. Instead, FLEX, flexes our washi muscles and plays with a new paradox, art that incorporates tradition and invention. The World Washi Summit is a project developed by the Japanese Paper Place involving exhibitions, workshops and lectures at more than 35 prominent museums and galleries in Toronto and environs. For more information, please visit: www.japanesepaperplace.com. Loop Gallery has been in operation since December 2000 and is one of the founding galleries of the Queen West Gallery District. Loop Gallery is a collective of professional artists and features artist/members who have a solid practice behind them, exhibition experience, and an interest in an alternative, pro-active approach to art and their career. Press about the Exhibition      __________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents: Charles Hackbarth Topography of Ooze Yvonne Singer Signs of Life; an intimate portrait of someone I don’t know  May 3 - 25, 2008 Reception: Saturday, May 3, 2008 Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Charles Hackbarth entitled Topography of Ooze and Yvonne Singer entitled Signs of Life; an intimate portrait of someone I don’t know. Topography of Ooze is Charles Hackbarth’s fourth exhibit of abstract and semi-abstract paintings that attempt to morph various types of mapping; biological mapping, cartography, satellite imagery, deep mapping, psycho-nautical mapping into a cohesive manifestation of barely contained chaos. Continents shift, seed pods erupt and launch their bounty into the wind, water and blood flows in all directions. Cells separate and multiply while a moth feeds on crystals. Spliced into his vibrant mudscapes, Hackbarth collages graphic images culled from history books (The Expanding World), medical texts (blood cells) and instructional guides (bobbin stitch lace). Disrupting the surface of some of the paintings are polyps of various size and colour. Hackbarth hopes, with these paintings, to evoke a world of multi-dimensional unfolding, wondrous and terrifying in all its manifestations. Charles Hackbarth is a 46 year old, Toronto-based artist, sound sculptor and writer. Hackbarth studied at Ottawa School of Art and OCAD. He has been exhibiting publicly since 1985. His paintings hang in a number of private collections. Yvonne Singer's exhibition investigates political and personal artifacts by juxtaposing 1945 post-war travel documents from occupied Europe with handwritten personal recordings of medication. The installation constructs a portrait of an individual at the intersection of personal and political history. The title, Signs of Life refers to the traces we leave behind and challenges what is revealed by these artifacts. The installation includes a series of digital prints of postwar European travel documents including passports, visas, transit permits from 1945, a highly detailed handwritten recording of medication taken over 10 years, as well as a stainless steel screw used to repair a broken hip. These artifacts belonged to Yvonne Singer’s father and document a personal story of migration and dislocation. They also provide social markers of identity , a political record of his journey from post-war Hungary to Canada indicated by official status and personal information like physical features and date of birth. The record of medications reveals an idiosyncratic system of control over the body and the residue of one person’s illness. The hip screws allude to the body’s fragility. Together these different elements provide signs of life, clues to an identity shaped by the intersection of personal, cultural and political forces and yet an identity that discloses very little at the same time. The travel documents in the exhibition highlight our current debates about individual rights and governments' concerns about border security. Yvonne Singer is a practising artist with an active national and international exhibition record. Her installation works employ multimedia techniques, often with cryptic texts to articulate cultural issues of disjuncture and perception. She is particularly interested in the intersection of public and private histories. She has received several public art commissions and her work is found in many private collections. She is a member of the Art Advisory Committee of The Koffler Gallery and a board member for C Magazine. Singer has been teaching at York University since 1980 and currently serves as Director of the Graduate Program in Visual Arts. Recent Press about the Exhibition   __________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents: Martha Eleen Midnight on the Water David Holt Archaeology, Natural History and other Paintings April 5 - 27, 2008 Reception: Saturday, April 5, 2 - 5 PM  Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions of paintings by Loop members Martha Eleen entitled Midnight on the Water and David Holt entitled Archaeology, Natural History and other Paintings. Martha Eleen's Midnight on the Water was produced in residence at Klondike Institute for Art and Culture (KIAC), Dawson City, Yukon, in June and July 2007. The series of 40 paintings are intended to function as an installation that recreates the experience of being in the North in the particular light of the midnight sun. They are an investigation into interference patterns, which are caused by natural and artificial events. Constructive interference is caused by winds, tides, currents, eddies, undertow and silt as well as man-made objects and energy. The river goes up and down as ice melts and the speed varies. At Dawson City, the faster, more turbulent, Klondike River empties into the Yukon and runs alongside, blue and brown, before mixing downriver. Water is constantly changing, it's unpredictable patterns obeying random laws and in the case of the Yukon River, moving relentlessly in one direction, oddly, towards the north. Martha Eleen's recent work investigating suburban sprawl Into the (905): The View from the Car and an artist residency in a Muslim subdivision on the outskirts of Toronto, Peace Village, has been exhibited in public and commercial galleries between 2002 – 2007 and has received critical attention in the form of reviews, essays and publication. Midnight on the Water was produced as Artist in Residence at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon 2007. Martha Eleen lives in Toronto where she teaches painting at the Toronto School of Art. David Holt's recent paintings are part of an ongoing series involving subjects from archaeology and natural history. These painterly works evoke the arrangements of specimens and objects found in museum display cases and botanical garden conservatories. The compositions contain motifs derived from plants, birds, fossils and fragments of ancient vessels and sculpture. Many of the paintings were completed in the Netherlands last year, and were inspired by collections in the Naturalis, Hortus Botanicus and the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden.* David Holt is a painter who recently relocated from New York City to Toronto. He has had many solo and group shows in the US, and was awarded an artist residency at the Ragdale Foundation in Illinois and a painting grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. An art professor for many years at Marymount College (of Fordham University) in New York, Holt now lives and works in Toronto where he teaches at Upper Canada College. *David Holt wishes to thank Upper Canada College and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study for the time and space to paint during the 2006-07 academic year. Recent Press about the Exhibition  __________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents: Sung Ja Kim Wilderness Chris Dow Landscapes  March 8 - 30, 2008 Reception: Saturday March 8, 2 - 5 PM Chris Dow: Landscapes Oil paintings, 3 ft x 4 ft, painted outside and reworked in the studio. Painted from the New England area. Currently based in Millis, Massachusetts, Chris Dow has spent several of the past six years living abroad in both Japan and Australia, writing software and painting in his spare time. He has shown in galleries across Canada as well as in Italy through the Ontario College of Art & Design. Sung Ja Kim: Wilderness The works in this exhibition communicate various aspects of the alienated aspects of the human condition or what Kim calls "the wilderness experiences of life". Our alienations typically originate from unexpected, disruptive experiences that shatter our hopes and can leave deep emotional scars such as feelings of loneliness, abandonment and despair. Shattered hopes and deep emotional scars lead to deep psychological, emotional and spiritual hungers for a vision of new ways to relate to ourselves and others. Several of the works in this exhibition symbolize print media in books and the visual media because the modern media often communicate modern experiences of tragedy and alienation. The visual images in each of these compact rectangular works build around the modern media headline stories that communicate the shattering of the hopes of those who seek a better world. Relating to ourselves and others through a vision that heals our emotional hungers requires a process of growing and maturing in the psychological, emotional and spiritual aspects of our lives. These growing and maturing experiences are communicated in Kim's work through images of miraculous plants that grow in parched ground that has been baked dry by the absence of nurturing fertility. These works communicate both our wilderness experiences in life and also point to the maturing visions that can lead us and help us to mature and cope effectively with the unexpected, disruptive experiences that shatter our hopes. Sung Ja Kim lives and works in Toronto, Canada. She graduated with a fine arts diploma in the Department of Oriental Painting in Seoul, Korea, and then after immigrating, graduated from the Ontario College of Art in Design in 2002. She has worked as a professional artist and has exhibited her work since 1989. __________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents: Gary Clement My Space Yael Brotman A Third Register of Space  February 7 - March 2, 2008 Reception: Saturday, February 9, 2 - 5 PM Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop members Yael Brotman, entitled A Third Register of Space, and Gary Clement, entitled My Space. Yael Brotman's new body of drawings is a response to an unpublished manuscript of poems, The Bronzino Poems, by Gary Michael Dault. The drawings create a parallel narrative that riffs off textual imagery. They examine the state of suspension: when we must make a choice. Or when we are caught in a liminal register between action and inaction, between wakefulness and sleep. This new suite of drawings examines the ways in which we make decisions. It explores the liminal space where the states of activity and inertia overlap and where intent remains subtle yet crucial. Media of work: graphite and acrylic drawings on paper (30" x 22") with poetic text handwritten directly on the wall. Media of work: graphite and acrylic drawings on paper (30" x 22") with poetic text handwritten directly on the wall. Yael Brotman grew up in Winnipeg and now lives in Toronto. She has been an active exhibitor both in Toronto and across Canada, most recently showing in St. John's NL at Eastern Edge Gallery, in Halifax NS at Mt. St. Vincent University Gallery, in Hamilton ON at the McMaster Museum of Art and at Harbourfront and at Open Studio in Toronto. Her work is represented in private, public and corporate collections. She has received production grants from both the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Last spring she completed her Master of Visual Studies and is currently a faculty member in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Gary Clement: My Space An exhibition of works on paper "Memories, as Salvador Dali noted, persist. I think back to a time when I was ten years old, si men in bulky suits walking on the surface of the moon. I used Laurentien colouring pencils on typewriter paper on a table in the front room. The cottage, a rental near Jackson's Point, was approximately 1800 km from what was then called Cape Kennedy, Florida and approximately 380,000 km from the moon and yet I could not have been psychically closer to the events of those days had I been in a capsule sitting next to Neil Armstrong. It was also, of course, a time of war. The conflict in Vietnam was escalating and though I was too young to fully understand its relevance, I could not escape its constant and heavy presence, impressed upon me over dinner with my parents, Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News. In retrospect, these two events describe, for me, a perfect Manichean universe where light and darkness, perfection and imperfection, hope and despair coexist in a state of perpetual opposition. Their contradictory nature challenges and interferes with the pleasant warmth of my nostalgia ultimately leading to a subtle re-arrangement of the visual record. The watercolours in this show acknowledge that the past is not frozen but fluid, subject to change and subtle intervention. It is a past that is mixed with both hope and cynicism." -Gary Clement Gary Clement is a Toronto-based artist who has been exhibiting his work since 1994. This is his fifth exhibition at Loop Gallery. He is a sessional faculty member at the Ontario College of Art & Design. Recent Press about the Exhibition  __________________________________________________________________________________________ Loop Gallery presents: Maria Gabankova Labyrinth of the heART Mary Catherine Newcomb Product of Eden 2007  January 12 - February 3, 2008 Reception & Book Launch: Saturday, January 12, 2 - 5 PM Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop members Maria Gabankova entitled Labyrinth of the heART and Mary Catherine Newcomb entitled Product of Eden 2007. Maria Gabankova: Exhibition and Book Launch A selection of drawings and paintings featured in a recently published book body broken body redeemed by Piquant Editions Publisher in Great Britain on Gabankova's Art. This second volume in the Piquant Editions VISIBILIA series of 'visual biographies' features over 50 full-colour reproductions of paintings and installations by Czech-born Canadian artist Maria Gabankova. Introduction by John Franklin. 'Gabankova's theology, like her art, sounds a wake-up call. It calls us to pay attention to the state of our world and the signs of our times. Nobody who passes by her art can fail to be touched, shaken or, indeed, shocked by the power of her imagery. It is, in one word, wake-up-art. More than that, however, it is an invitation to our tired, fragile and broken bodies to join the wedding banquet of the Body Broken For You, so that we can be fully re-nourished and redeemed.' -- Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin In 2003 Maria Gabankova travelled to Colmar, Alsace, France and visited the Unterlinden Museum with the purpose to study the Issenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. She was commissioned to paint a large copy (94" x 108") of Crucifixion panel for the Biblical Museum of Canada in Vancouver, BC. She completed this work in the summer 2007 and it will be part of the exhibition at Loop Gallery. This painting has had a profound influence on Gabankova's work and its spiritual content and expressive power relates to the themes of her previous work. The exhibition's title Labyrinth of the heART pays hommage to a literary allegory Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart by the 17th century Czech philosopher, educator and theologian Jan Amos Comenius. Maria Gabankova lives and works in Toronto, Canada, where she also teaches figure drawing, painting and portraiture at the Ontario College of Art and Design. She has worked as a professional artist and has exhibited her drawings and paintings in Canada and internationally since 1980. Her work is represented in private and corporate collections in Canada, USA and Europe. Mary Catherine Newcomb: Exhibition consisting of several pickled saints and demons grown on her saint (eggplant) bushes during the 2007 season. Using different types of eggplant and squash, she makes porcelain figures that roughly correspond to the expected shapes of the fruits of each variety of plant. She makes casts of the figures in an aluminum-impregnated resin and has clear acrylic plastic vacuformed over them. She then makes the final clear two-piece moulds in the shape of the original porcelain figures. She attaches the moulds over the growing fruit in order to persuade them to grow into the shapes of saints. When they are ripe, she fits them with golden crowns. In 2007 she added hot pepper demons. Started as an experiment in 2006, Product of Eden examines specific themes such as the human predilection to anthropomorphize natural forces, narrative, memory, mortality, etc. Reflecting the artist's interest in the psychology of religion, this new work continues to question the relative privileging of text and intuition in determining a model of reality. Product of Eden is a three-pronged project. It includes growing the plants as ephemeral artworks, pickling some of the saints, and shop-dropping the saints and demons in grocery stores with Product of Eden stickers and correct skew numbers so that they can be purchased. Recently Newcomb has also been producing seed packages (for purchase) from particular mother plants and creating invitations for the Midwinter Institute of Small Things (MIST). MIST's 2008 activity will be to invite individuals to make an appointment for tea and conversation with a plant. The exhibition at Loop Gallery consists of 2007 pickles and one plant with MIST invitations. Seed packs are also available. Mary Catherine Newcomb is a sculptor based in Southern Ontario who was born and raised in Montreal. She has received numerous awards form both the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work has been widely exhibited in Canada and internationally. Recent Press about the Exhibition     __________________________________________________________________________________________ Richard Mongiat Weeds and Wildflowers Maureen Paxton The Ape Paintings December 7, 2007 - January 6, 2008 Reception: Thursday, December 6, 6 - 9 PM  Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop members Richard Mongiat entitled Weeds and Wildflowers and Maureen Paxton entitled The Ape Paintings. Richard Mongiat: These new richly layered paintings bustle with energy, their overlapping forms jostle and engulf each other to create a tangled garden of colour, shape and texture. Mongiat writes: 'After inheriting the care of a large and unruly garden, I discovered by surprise that the actual process of gardening started to closely resemble my concerns and activities in the studio. What to put in the bald patch by the peonies? What needs more light? How to bring some colour to that far corner near the back? Moving plants around was not dissimilar from moving paint around. After spending morning after morning in the garden, once in the studio I began to notice organic shapes sprouting up like weeds all over the paintings. Flower and petal shapes, tangled vines, earthy textures and watering cans all started to infest my imagery. While previously I had relied on a ruthless regime of visual editing to achieve a finished painting, now, like my overgrown garden, I allowed the spaces to fill in, constantly working into them, adding more paint here, shapes and textures there.' Catherine Beaudette and Richard Mongiat founded loop gallery in March of 2000. This is Richard's fifth exhibition at loop. He has also been showing his work within the Toronto art community and art centres throughout Canada for the past 25 years. Opening reception will be on Thursday December 6, 6 to 9 pm. Regular gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday 1 to 5 pm, Sunday 1 to 4 pm. For further information, please contact the gallery at (416) 516-2581. Richard Mongiat can be contacted at: (416) 536-4551, rmongiat@sympatico.ca Loop Gallery is a member of the Queen West Gallery District Association. Maureen Paxton: In 1917, Franz Kafka wrote a short fictional piece titled 'A Report to an Academy.' In it, the narrator has been asked to recount details of his transformation from ape to man. Declaring that he remembers little prior to being wounded and taken captive off West Africa's Gold Coast, he nonetheless can recall the grim transatlantic voyage back to Europe. He is caged and tormented. Knowing that he faces a future as a zoological exhibit, he decides to apply all his gifts for mimicry towards becoming human. In describing the decision, he leans on the language of mimesis and catharsis, of image and limen. His tone is dignified, distant and above all, ironic. He says, 'I, a free ape, submitted myself to this yoke.' THE APE PAINTINGS are oils on canvas. While not intended as illustration, they offer a response to Kafka's text. Maureen Paxton is an artist and writer living in Toronto. Recent Press about the Exhibition   _______________________________________________________________________________________________ Libby Hague Martian Odyssey: I will not be sad in this world* Liz Parkinson After Paradise November 10 - December 2, 2007 Reception: Saturday, November 10, 2 - 5 PM  Loop Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Loop members Libby Hague entitled Martian Odyssey: I will not be sad in this world* and Liz Parkinson entitled After Paradise. Libby Hague: Martian Odyssey juxtaposes huge Martian panoramas downloaded from the NASA and Hubble, small characters of children done in stone lithography and the eccentric paper-cut miscellanea of their world. It is a fantasy about starting a new society where the instincts of the child for play, work, constructive invention and happiness provide the basis for an experiment in social change. As foreigners in their precarious digital world, they try to side step disaster and instead to make their own happiness through art, restorative justice (forgiveness) and friendship. The works are structured loosely on the conventions of the epic, the utopian novel, the science fiction film and the video game. They explore ideas from literature, philosophy, ethical theory and modern science. One of the main visual themes, for example, is a strand of paper that will run through the series and connect everything. It is a riff on string theory which is a dream of unification or some say a theory of everything. Not demonstrable, part philosophy, part physics, it attempts to connect general relativity and quantum mechanics or the science of the very large and the very small. In my case it is also a metaphor for mutual dependency and hope. I may be preoccupied with disaster but also and perhaps more importantly, with the possibility of rescue and the need for hope in a time of disaster. Why shouldn't art try to imagine this? Martian Odyssey: I will not be sad in this world* is the second part of a larger Martian Odyssey series, the first part of which was shown at Loop in 2006. They will be accompanied by an ongoing book project. The title is taken from a song of that name by the Armenian composer, Djivan Gasparyan. Each work in the series is a combination of digital printing, stone lithography, watercolour and paper cutouts. Image size is 19 x 78 x 1 in. , 2005 - 2007 * Title from the song by the same name by the Armenian composer, Djivan Gasparyan Libby Hague - bio Libby Hague was born in St. Thomas, Ontario but grew up in the suburbs of Montreal. Using combinations of print, video and installation she looks at the risks of living in a precarious world. Her point of view is secular, and she uses narrative to puzzle out how, without an external code to direct us, we can determine humane social relationships. Her latest print installations, Everything Needs Everything and Rehearsal for Disaster have been shown at Engramme in Quebec City, Eastern Edge in St. John's, MSV University in Halifax, Open Studio and Loop in Toronto among other locations. It received awards in Toronto (Great Canadian Print Competition) and Montreal (Voir Grand). Her video titles include: Amy is looking for Jake Paradise, Parade, Close to home and Our town which received the Marion Mahon Award at the Images festival in 2002. www.libbyhague.com Liz Parkinson: After Paradise presents a collection of souvenir biscuit tins chosen for their references to an ideal nature. Within Loop's intimate rear gallery blooms a domestic garden oasis of perpetual nature reclaimed from the ephemera of an earlier time. My mother died last year. Collection and loss have very much occupied my thinking as I continue to sort, save or discard her things. After is a word that keeps appearing in my sketchbooks. There is an appearance of after. An aura of after… As I deal (distribute or occupy myself) with her things, choices are made, connections are recognized and new collections imagined. Paradise is utopically pictured in most cultures as nature reordered, economic, instructional, and reassuringly, enclosed. It is individually characterized by an illusive longing: What shall I keep? What does it mean? Contemporary thinking however cannot also escape questions of genetic engineering, sexual politics, colonialism, nationalism, and environmental responsibility. After Paradise considers this destabilized ideal in an interior space filled with secondhand containers hoping to keep anxiety away. As well as the garden room with its collection of tins, After Paradise will include a 'store' selling souvenir postcards of the collection, as well as a suite of digital prints, Domestic Science, which present specific tins identified with botanical nomenclature. (Images 15” x 15”) You can collect aspects of Paradise. Liz Parkinson - bio Liz Parkinson currently lives, works and collects in Port Hope. She is interested in how specific information is recognized, desired and acquired; in how it is ordered and named as belonging to a collection. She is interested in how a science, a history and many other narratives may be created based on the choices, organization and context of the collection. Liz Parkinson's prints are included in many important public and private collections. She won First Prize in the Ernst and Young/ Canadian Art magazine Great Canadian Print Competition in 1995, which allowed her to travel to London to study at the Botany Library of the British Museum and which has stimulated many years of thinking about collections. Liz's previous Loop exhibitions were Another History (2004), a collection of Japanese paper monoprints constructed from the detritus of previous printing activity, and The Domestic Fealty Collection (2005), an amassing of broken china offering audience choice in display within a cabinet of curios. In 2006 she was awarded a Canada Council Research and Development Grant which has supported further travel and consideration of public and private collections, including this work. www.lizparkinson.com _______________________________________________________________________________________________ Sasha Pierce Affinity Laura Ciruls Wrapped October 13 - November 4, 2007 Reception: Saturday, October 13, 2 - 5 PM Artist Talks: Saturday, Octobber 22, 2 PM Featuring a performance by composer Frank Horvat.  Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop members Sasha Pierce entitled Affinity and Laura Ciruls entitled Wrapped. Sasha Pierce: At first glance one may believe that they are viewing an exhibition of small delicate textile works. The works are small fields of textured colour or pattern and many have gentle curves coming in on either side like the female form. As the viewer gets closer, the tiny fibers turn into fine lines of paint and the textile works turn into paintings. Sasha Pierce is continuing the practice of working (sewing, knitting) similar to her female ancestors however through a different medium. This exhibition continues her work in minimalist abstraction, which are influenced by her intimate surroundings. Sasha Pierce is a full time Toronto artist and has exhibited her work in galleries in Canada and the United States. Her work can be found in private and public collections. She recently participated in a post-graduate fellowship residency and New Research in Abstraction exhibition directed by Robert Linsley and funded through SSHRC/PREA grants. Pierce is a graduate from the Master of Fine Arts program specializing in painting from the University of Waterloo and received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Guelph. To preview the exhibition please visit her website at www.sashapierce.ca Sasha Pierce would like to thank the Ontario Arts Council. Laura Ciruls: Construction sites wrapped in billowing plastic sheeting and geometric floor plans served as departure points for this group of bold paintings. A magical in-between world beneath the plastic-wrapped structures exists only in the artist's or viewer's imagination, but is ultimately more compelling than the later revealed buildings. Simple, graphic shapes suggest figurative or decorative imagery and the use of closely related colour creates a relationship between background and surface line. Laura Ciruls is originally from Toronto where she studied Visual Arts (BFA) at York University. She also studied at the Toronto School of Art and completed the Independent Studio Programme there in 2003. This is her third exhibition at LOOP gallery. Recent Reviews of the Exhibition   _______________________________________________________________________________________________ John Abrams Little Soldier JJ Lee Trace September 15 - October 7, 2007 Reception: Saturday, September 15, 2 - 5 PM Artist Talks: Saturday, September 22, 3 PM Scotiabank Nuit Blanche: Saturday, September 29, 7:03 pm to sunrise  Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by John Abrams entitled Little Soldier and JJ Lee entitled Trace. John Abrams' art making practice is primarily about painting and looking. His paintings proceed from looking at international film and by extension digital video. These mass mediums have come to order how we view the world and how we interact within it. The stories and myths embedded in movies have become part of the fabric of contemporary visual culture; a culture that we are both immersed in and conceptually compete within. This exhibition, entitled Little Soldier after a 1963 Jean-Luc Godard film of the same name, continues his investigation of ways to portray the politics of intimate relationships. The work engages the language of painting as a way of interpreting the language of film, not dissimilar to the way a book is made into a film, or a script is turned into living theatre. Each translation is open to reinterpretation through different productions over time. Painting is the place where Abrams translates his own personal experience of these temporal forms into pictures that function as signs for both painting and mass media. Film functions as a mirror that enables Abrams to step back to get a bigger picture of what is happening inside painting. The act of exploring new media through old media unlocks a form of slippage by exposing different ways of depicting, seeing and knowing. As a painter, he is responding to narratives and images that are affective, aesthetic and formally about allegory. JJ Lee's newest paintings and drawings are a culmination of sorting through a collection of materials obtained over the last 15 years through her art practice: collage fragments from labels, bits of information from books. The unifying thread running through all of these seemingly disparate fragments is about the body, where identity and self is located. In an effort to make sense of it all, Lee makes these fragments whole and complete. The cyclical nature of life has been a recurring subject in Lee's work in the last few years. Life, birth, death, then life anew. Through life and loss, and life again is a new body of work created from old findings. The mixed media works in Trace primarily pair acupuncture charts and botanical diagrams as looking at systems of looking at the body, where hurt and healing take place. Pieces are sewn together but layers underneath are allowed to show, as a metaphor for the history that created the foundation for the new layer. Wax, skin-like, obscures yet unifies the underlying images. Sewing the pieces together refers to mending. The process reveals itself. Recycling the old, and using as few new bought materials as possible, Lee breathes new life into the collection of treasured odds and ends. The closure of a chapter occurs as a new one begins. A chapter of hope, the future and new beginnings. About John Abrams Named one of "Canada's best new figurative painters" in Saturday Night Magazine, John Abrams was born in Montreal and currently lives and works in Toronto. Interested in the impact of visual media on the present, his paintings have explored imagery from mass media, popular culture and history. Whether drawing upon images from films, newspapers, glossy magazines or Canadian history, Abrams' work offers a fresh perspective. Characterized by a simple palette, his luminous paintings have gradually incorporated colour. Abrams has served a term as A Space board member, he is a core member of Torontoniensis collective, a founding member of Loop Gallery (Toronto), and is represented by Boltax Gallery (Shelter Island, New York). Abrams' paintings can be found in the public collections of: the O'Hare Airport (Chicago), the National Gallery of Canada and Canada Council Art Bank, (Ottawa), Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery (Oshawa), Macdonald Stewart Art Centre (Guelph), Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queens University (Kingston), the Art Gallery of Windsor (Windsor), McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton) and Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and University of Toronto Art Centre (Toronto) as well as numerous private national and international collections. Abrams will have paintings on view January 2008 in a solo exhibition entitled, cinema vernis at McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton) curated by RM Vaughan. His work is on view now in group exhibitions including Crowd Conscious, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queens University (Kingston), curated by Jan Allan and Would I: Interrogative or Proposition, Art Gallery of Windsor (Windsor, Ontario) curated by Gilles Hebert and the Boltax Gallery, (Shelter Island, New York). About JJ Lee Born and raised in Halifax, NS, JJ Lee received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1992. After living and exhibiting in Vancouver and across Canada, Lee pursued her Master of Fine Arts from York University, Toronto (1999). Lee has been featured in The Globe and Mail and ELLE Canada. She is the recipient of several awards, such as from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, RBC Investments/Canadian Art Foundation's New Canadian Painting Competition. She recently won the Asian Canadian Artists Fund for Visual Arts, presented by the North American Association of Asian Professionals. She currently lives and works in Toronto where she has taught Ontario College of Art and Design, University of Toronto (Scarborough), and the University of Western Ontario. Recent Reviews of the Exhibition  
_______________________________________________________________________________________________ Michael Amar Division (of light from darkness) Erin Finley Dezzy and the Lusty Moor August 17 - September 9, 2007 Opening: Thursday, August 16, 6 - 8 PM  Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Michael Amar entitled Division (of light from darkness) and Erin Finley entitled Dezzy and the Lusty Moor. In his exhibition Division (of light from darkness), Michael Amar's imagery being abstract is accomplished by painting on sheet lead. The substance of lead as a surface for painting is unique in respect to its visual and handling characteristics. This present exhibition echoes Amar's earlier abstract painting being essentially minimilist in nature. Erin Finley's most recent body of work is a series of paintings exploring connections between the spectacular worlds of professional wrestling and Shakespearean theatre. All elements of the grossly physical and the sublimely ethereal are fused in the theater of the ring, where passionate, seemingly earnest proclamations of hate, love and betrayal are countered by the heavy artifice of metallic costumes, superheroic personas, and soap-operatic narratives. These large-format oil and acrylic paintings on glittering black faux-velvet re-envision Shakespeare's play Othello as a 'wrestlemania' opera in which the brutal themes of betrayal and revenge are hyperbolized by the coarse (yet glittering) arena of professional wrestling. As an artist, Erin Finley's overarching concerns are in manipulating concepts of fiction, particularly as they relate to gender issues, narrative voice and power relations. Michael Amar is a Toronto-based artist and curator who has worked and exhibited since the mid-seventies. The artist's work can be found in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the University of Toronto. Erin Finley is a Toronto-based artist whose artwork is focused on the interplay of fiction and reality in art. Often featuring an archetypal femme fatale anti-hero loosely based on Finley herself, her works have been exhibited in Ontario, Alberta and New York City. Finley completed her Master of Fine Arts (Drawing, Painting) at the University of Calgary in 2004 and recently presented a conference lecture at Brock University, with an essay to be published in the fall of 2007. Recent Reviews of the Exhibition  
_______________________________________________________________________________________________ Linda Heffernan Current Affairs Wil Murray Strawberry Alarmist Talk Radio July 21 - August 12, 2007 Opening: Saturday, July 21, 2 - 5 PM  Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop members, Linda Heffernan entitled Current Affairs and Wil Murray entitled Strawberry Alarmist Talk Radio. Current Affairs - a new series of mixed media paintings by Linda Heffernan is a response to recent news coverage of the threat of global warming. These surreal images of semi-frozen waterscapes speak of the dire consequences if governments from around the world, and all sectors of society,and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Can we get beyond our history of global wars long enough to instill an atmosphere of global cooperation? Political leaders in Canada and the U.S. continue to present greenhouse gas reduction plans that fall below Kyoto targets in fear that doing more will ruin the local economy. In response, the works in Current Affairs point to futuristic nightmares where the demise of melting glaciers is hastened by expanding tourism in the north. Steely blues and blurred ribbons of green evoke impressions of peaceful northern lakes that thinly veil warning signs too long ignored and eventually submerged. Complacent plexiglas figures stroll casually through surreal semi-frozen waterscapes seemingly oblivious to the need to migrate to higher ground. They cling to the surface via rare earth magnets like pawns in a military strategy game. They hold on to the unsealed promise that new technologies will pave the way to sustainable global economic growth and the green economy that lies beneath. Wil Murray's most recent body of work takes its cues from three books: John Hawkes' The Lime Twig, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge. Specifically: how personal pronoun use, point of view and narrative play can, without self-conscious or purposeful obfuscation, solicit and order the chaos of quotidian horror, confusion, and terror in a form more permanent than its maker. The horror of hope in horrible futures, un-foretold and without contingency. The confusion of imperceptible human weakness, loudly indicated by the weak. The terror of the inevitable, inconsistent slip of the present into an inaccessible past. While the possibility of translation between mediums remains impossible and seductive, Murray tracks and coordinates and loses and regains the moving points in painting that, while named differently and of very different dimensions, correspond to that which, in these books, is not dream, but is dream-like. The paintings in the exhibition, completed over the course of months, are thick with acrylic paint, insulating spray foam, glitter, glazes and collaged sections of paint, extending in places out from the board 3 to 4 inches. Murray pours directly on the painting, and on glass, to be peeled and applied to the paintings. Sometimes flat, other times the artist is a sausage maker or Montgolfier, tacking down the edges to fill the inside with foam. Murray cuts back in, removes sections, re-applies. He collages his own marks. With the building of the paintings out from the board, Murray has also been working inward. With admitted embarrassing greenness, he is starting to render form with brush and tube. Linda Heffernan is a Whitby-based artist exploring themes of consumer capitalism and bureaucracy in an ever more interconnected and rapidly expanding global economy. She recently obtained her BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design where she was named to the Dean's Honour List in the Faculty of Art. She has exhibited her work in a number of galleries in Toronto's Queen West district as well as Whitby's Station Gallery. Born in Calgary in 1978, Wil Murray currently lives and works in Montreal. He studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design before moving to Vancouver to start a studio practice. Propelled by a studio fire that destroyed all of the paintings at his Pender St. studio, Wil moved to Montreal in 2004, and was short-listed for the RBC Painting Prize in 2005. Represented by The Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Ottawa and a member of The Loop Gallery Collective in Toronto, his work is included in many collections across Canada and the United States. Recent Reviews of the Exhibition 
 
_______________________________________________________________________________________________ Candida Girling WATER Rochelle Rubinstein INKHORN June 23 - July 15, 2007 Opening: Thursday, June 21, 6 - 9 PM  Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop members, Candida Girling entitled WATER and Rochelle Rubinstein entitled INKHORN. WATER - A series of paintings and drawings by Candida Girling. These water stories range from images of working women of southern India to the city streets of New Orleans; of people surrounded by water who "Do not consider the stillness through which they move". [Derek Walcott] The roots of INKHORN, Rochelle Rubinstein's new series of one hundred and twenty printed, painted and carved wood panels, can be found in Aztec pictographic scrolls, the Book of Job, and Toronto newspapers. INKHORN's imagery, which reflects a variety of contemporary concerns, represents a quiet assault on the dogma of religious and political fundamentalism. Candida Girling is a South African-born artist whose work has been shown in Canada, United States, the U.K. and Denmark. Familiar themes for Girling are: finding the sublime in the mundane, and the mythology of war from a woman's perspective. She is a founding member of Loop Gallery and works in a variety of media, ranging from painting, drawing, fashion and installation. Rochelle Rubinstein is a Toronto-based artist exploring themes of repression, displacement, ritual, desire, tribal and familial relations. As a community arts facilitator, her workshops with groups such as battered women and people with eating disorders are based upon methods that are central to her own art practice: drawing, printmaking, sewing, and bookmaking. Her work has been exhibited extensively and can be found in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. She is represented in Toronto by Loop Gallery and Fran Hill Gallery. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ Elizabeth Babyn Hopscotch and Bubblegum Thelma Rosner BORDER May 25 - June 17, 2007 Opening: Saturday, May 26, 5 - 8 PM  Loop Gallery is pleased to present exhibitions by Loop members, Elizabeth Babyn entitled Hopscotch and Bubblegum and Thelma Rosner entitled BORDER. Elizabeth Babyn incorporates elements of childhood fantasy into her current abstract acrylic paintings in an attempt to capture the joy, excitement and magic that a child experiences upon making those very first marks and scribbles on paper or other surfaces. She harnesses the spontaneous drip marks on canvas to paint various types of candy, bubble gum and jellybeans. These carefully painted three-dimensional forms defy all logic as they come out of flat free form gestural abstract imagery within the paintings. In the early stages of canvas priming, childhood scribbles or word games are scribbled with gesso onto the raw canvas surface with carefree abandon. As in the game of hide-and-seek, when these areas are either deliberately covered with paint or drip marks they playfully re-emerge or disappear. Some areas have been harnessed from chance drip marks that have only had the subject's cartoon drawn in, the absence of colour and form may suggest other possibilities as well as the raw potential that still exists within these marks. By attempting to explore her paintings as though she is looking through the eyes of a child, Babyn feels that she has gotten closer to that inner joy of knowing that anything and everything is possible. Concern about national and religious conflict in the Middle East has been the subject of Thelma Rosner's artistic practice for several years. Her work has considered Jewish-Muslim relations in both historical and contemporary contexts, from the magnificent culture of Andalusia, to the complexities and pathos of today's Israel-Palestine. Rosner's themes inform her choice of materials. Her mixed media installations have included elements of painting, sculpture, ceramic, and most recently, giclee printing. Both pieces in this exhibition ('BORDER', 'DICTIONARY') refer to the emotional and physical opposition and connection of Israelis and Palestinians. The words in 'DICTIONARY' (an ongoing project) can resonate in similar or different ways for both peoples. The images of 'BORDER' are taken from a small book of pressed wildflowers, produced in Palestine in the early part of the twentieth century. These fragile dried flowers have been scanned and altered to produce double images. Each equal half is both the same and opposite to the other. Perhaps the flowers are the Israelis and Palestinians, their interconnected and conflicted histories, and their desire for justice. Recent Review of the Elizabeth Babyn's Exhibition 
_______________________________________________________________________________________________ Adrian Fish Staged Barbara Rehus Just leave April 25 - May 20, 2007 Opening: Saturday, May 5, 2 - 5 PM  Loop Gallery is pleased to present exhibitions by Loop members, Adrian Fish and Barbara Rehus, entitled Staged and Just leave. Adrian Fish's large-format digital prints document performative spaces directed towards the spectator seating area. Each respective environment is devoid of viewers, suggesting the pregnant moment before an anticipated spectacle. The weighty absence of an audience altogether nevertheless insinuates their presence, as well as invites the viewer to contemplate the architectural aspects of each setting. The inversion of the traditional role of actor-as-exhibitionist and audience as voyeur intimates the subjective and constructed nature inherent in all photographs. The exhibition is presented by Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Ottawa, as part of the Contact Toronto Photography Festival. An image from Staged was purchased by the Canada Council Art Bank in 2007. The exhibition travels to Patrick Mikhail Gallery in October 2007. With her new body of work, Barbara Rehus looks at how people can, through no choice of their own, disappear from society's view. This involuntary invisibility has been on Rehus' mind since visiting her brother, a long-term resident in a nursing home. She was struck how, when people enter such a facility, they essentially disappear. Thinking about her brother's disappearing act led Rehus to recognize that there are many kinds of forced invisibility in our culture, beyond that of hiding away the sick and disabled. Hatred and bigotry, related to whatever reason, hold an inherent desire to impose invisibility: there is a wish that the targets of loathing would disappear, that they would just leave. Through a series of portraits drawn and eaten into diaphanous fabric panels, Rehus tells the stories of people who have had no choice but to make nursing care facilities their homes. With Take a Pill, a book work, Rehus addresses misogyny by way of a sequence of self-portraits. A second book, Cloaks of Invisibility, based on accounts of family and friends, illustrates some of the ways one can feel invisible in our society. Additionally, visitors will be invited to share their own experiences of invisibility, by writing out their stories on old typewriters. It is Rehus' hope that she may, if only in some small way, bring the invisible back into view. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ Catherine Daigle Retrospective In Memoriam Curated by Mark Adair March 31 - April 22, 2007 Opening: Saturday, March 31, 2 - 5 PM  Loop Gallery is pleased to present a memorial exhibition of the work of Loop Gallery member Catherine Daigle who died last December. Curated by Mark Adair, the show will offer highlights of Catherine Daigle's short 20-year career. She worked in a range of media beginning with installation, then painting and drawing, to her sculptural vitrines, and in her last years, returning to installation. Adair has chosen to represent the periods of Catherine Daigle's career by selecting standout pieces and studies, some of which have never been shown before. Catherine Daigle's work avoids being described thematically -- but she was always concerned with issues of loss, betrayal and the transient nature of life. Catherine Daigle was a Toronto based artist and OCAD graduate. She exhibited her work in private and public galleries for the past twenty years. She was a core member and organizer of The Torontonienisis Collective. Mark Adair was a close friend of Catherine Daigle. They worked and collaborated together for the last eighteen years. Catherine Daigle Award The family and friends of Catherine Daigle have created an endowed award as a tribute to Catherine's art and her dedication to emerging artists at the Ontario College of Art & Design. If you would like to make a donation in memory of Catherine Daigle, please contact us at loopgallery@primus.ca or (416) 516-2581 to request a donation form. Recent Review of the Exhibition 
_______________________________________________________________________________________________ Past Events A NEW SERIES FROM TICKLESCRATCH PRODUCTIONS The Artist's Life On Bravo! Sunday November 9, 2003 at 7:30 pm EST.
Provocative and captivating, this 13-part series features painters, sculptors, and photographers from across Canada.
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Loop is pleased to present the work of Paula Braswell and Miklos LeGrady.
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With her new sculptural work, Paula Braswell
has returned to the imagery of water as a metaphor for the body
and as a symbol for joining as one spirit and one universal body
as part of nature. These new pieces continue her investigation into
the alienation and fragility that she feels permeates our contemporary
lives. She is interested in exploring the impact that technology
has on the emotional condition of our contemporary society. Pure
(North Channel) speaks of the connection between humans, technology,
and the natural world – the way the human race manipulates nature
and the alienating impact it has on life in the world today. Braswell
illustrates this world where our reliance on industrialization and
technology has resulted in contradictions that are exposed by physical
and emotional conflicts. Her sculptures empathize with the human
condition of survival in a society which is removed from nature
and affection. |
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New work on the theme of the book of Revelation Then the fourth angel sounded: and a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, and third of the stars, so that a third of them turned dark. (Revelation 8:12) Plagues, wars, famines, earthquakes, floods, fires, murders - all that sounds like much of our daily news. Yet, these same catastrophic events are also described in many Biblical texts, such as the Book of Revelation or the Apocalypse. My paintings in this exhibition are the beginning of a series on the themes of the Book of Revelation. More specifically I have focused on some of the Angels - Messengers - who appear throughout John’s vision. The layers of events in this book are complex referring to the present and to the future. The figures in my paintings do not represent literally angels of the text but are inspired at times by several angels, symbols or acts at once; for example the sounding of trumpets, the plagues bowls, destroying fire, the chain binding Satan. I think of these paintings as visual meditations on the meaning of the Revelation and spiritual reality as experienced in our present time. | |||||||||||||
The human figure is a wonderful subject to draw and
paint. It is also particularly difficult subject to do well. Weaknesses
are unfailingly exposed. It demands discipline and focus. It also
requires (at least for Lorne) an approach that is both objective
and subjective in nature. The bringing together of these two opposing
attitudes make the figure a particularly challenging and fascinating
subject.
Artist Contact Info: |
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Le Jeu d’Artifice arose out of a crisis of
indecision—or perhaps a more general malaise endemic in our time—a
case of decision fatigue. Signs appeared first in the process of
painting some still-lifes for a show three years ago. Under too
much time constraint, I was floundering to find pictorial solutions
too quickly and decided to put some of my habitual motif on bits
of paper into a hat to which I could resort in moments of desperation.
I gave myself the freedom to reject whatever came out, but found
that it jarred something nonetheless and the terrible muteness of
the void in which an artist works was lessened. This solution brought
to the fore a question which has always intrigued me. How much of
what we do is an inevitable expression of the self and how much
of it is artifice. Are they in fact the same thing? All the questions
of making a painting seem related to this crisis of self-expression.
What is shallow illusion and how does depth of meaning arise from
an arrangement of paint on a flat surface? Where is the line between
what is supposedly “merely” decorative and from whence does evocation
and meaning arise? If one removes the autonomy of the decision making
process does the painting become more, less, or equally reflective
of the individual? Rob Waldeck: Incognito Rob Waldeck’s Incognito deals with transformation
- not of an object or person but rather a transformation of perception
or understanding. Using masks as his primary metaphor, Incognito
combines elements of surrealist portraiture, fantasy and imagined
scenarios and situations. Drawing on sources as diverse as Francis
Bacon, Star Wars movies, poetry and fashion advertisements, Incognito
provokes the viewer into liberating themselves from the traditional
realms of reason and narrative, and instead, allow the unconscious
to lead the way. | |||||||||||||
SOUPY July 19th, – August 10, 2003 a mix of Canadian paint |
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Opening May 24 - June 15 2003 Starting off our summer season, Loop is very pleased to present new paintings by Moira Clark and Lisa Petrocco. Sonnets In Moira Clark's new work she has drawn on the visual patterns of the sonnet poem. A sonnet is a kind of lyric poetry written in a strictly defined form. There are actually four different forms of the sonnet each with their own fixed arrangement of fourteen iambic pentameter lines and a specific rhyming scheme. Although an aural and literary medium, there are also visual patterns that accompany this poetry, which are reflected in Moira's suite of four large paintings called "Sonnets". | |||||||||||||
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Patterns Lisa Petrocco's new paintings, "Patterns", shows her continued study of fresco surfaces where subtlety and repetition appear in patterned motifs. Subtlety is the strength of this work in which the relationship of the shapes and colour overlap and reveal themselves. Suspended in a shallow space, these organic forms make reference to familiar shapes such as transparent floating organisms and botanical plant forms. | |||||||||||||
Closing
weekend Following up on the invite that was sent to you by
the artists, this is a reminder to come down to Loop Gallery for
the last weekend of Scott Childs' and Eugene Knapik's exhibition
titled "Two Miserable Bastards".
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"Two Miserable Bastards" | |||||||||||||
Opening March 29 to April 20, 2003 "The cottage of content is better than the palace of
cold comfort." PAINTINGS Shelley Adler is a painter who has been working with portraiture for several years and her new paintings continue to explore the boundaries of the genre. In this exhibition, the key pieces are two very large faces - 9’ x 6’ - that fill the wall from floor to ceiling. The works have the feeling of billboards with a broad brush and restrained palate. Yet, despite their size, these faces still project an intimacy that relect a startling candidness and pensiveness. As is often the case with Adler¹s work, the faces look familiar to us even though their identities are completely anonymous. | |||||||||||||
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DRAWING, PAINTING Gary Clement suffers from a chronic condition which
causes him to fantasize that life in some pastoral countryside setting
is somehow better, more wholesome and altogether more fulfilling
than life in the city. Though recurrent, this condition is temporary
and generally harmless. His heart, soul and brain are thoroughly
metropolitan and the drawings and paintings in this show reflect
his ongoing fascination with the interior and exterior phenomena
of urban life. | |||||||||||||
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Opening January 4, 2003 to January 26, 2003 Loop Gallery is pleased to present the work of two new members to our collective. Our first show for the year 2003 will feature printmaking by Rochelle Rubinstein and mixed-media paintings by Peter McFarlane. LOOK – OUT LOOK – OUT is a series of large prints and drawings by Rochelle Rubinstein which depict landscapes both real and imagined. The specific sites of the county of Wellington, Ontario, Ground Zero, New York, Auschwitz, Poland and the Isle of Inichoire, Ireland, dissolve into abstraction as they are displaced and reworked into patterns of abstraction. Through this abstraction, new layers of meaning and ambiguities can appear. | |||||||||||||
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Solder Splatter Peter will be showing works from his series, Solder Splatter, that explores traditional iconography through the use of the flotsam and jetsam of industry. His new work uses scrap circuit boards as the canvas for this series of 3-D paintings. | |||||||||||||
Opening February 1, 2003 to February 23, 2003 Loop Gallery is excited to present the works of Candy
Girling and Anna Yuschuk for our next exhibition opening on Saturday,
February 1st, 2003. Both artists have felt the gravity of the current
world political situation and have reflected this onto their own
life experiences to produce works of bold and significant character. Spectre Candida Girling's show Spectre comprises an assortment of pictorial media that speculate on readings of Homer's Iliad through the eyes of the women in the tale. Girling's paintings explore personal and female perspectives of armed conflict as aspects of heroic fiction and fact. Girling paints the shadows of women whose lives have been forfeited, of women who see the madness or are dragged into the melee. Both the poem and the poem's admirer suggest that we are subjugated by our atrocities, and that they haunt our thoughts. | |||||||||||||
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Bad Boy Good Boy  Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys? Who
is right and who is wrong? In her exhibition titled Good Boy Bad
Boy, Anna Yuschuk asks us to look at how the play-acting of our
childhood mirrors our adult pretensions and aggressions while considering
how the current political climate makes it increasingly apparent
that there are no 'good guys' and there is actually no right. Do
we ever grow up? Reflecting on the absurdity of the toy soldier
and what it represents, Yuschuk reduces such heroic fantasies to
wry comments on hostility and violence - immobile figures acting
out our whims of power and control. | |||||||||||||
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Loop Gallery is located at 1174 Queen Street West. Gallery Hours are Thursday to Sunday from 1 to 6 PM or by appointment. If you require any further information or an appointment please contact the gallery at 416-516-2581. |
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