March 11th- April 22nd, 2006
Opening Reception March 11th 3pm
Panel discussion with both artists and guests celebrating International Women's Day, Wednesday March 8th, 7pm.
Libby Hague and Yael Brotman (ON)
Open Images: Open Narrative / Dreamline
"Open Images: Open Narrative" presents the large multifocal works of Yael Brotman and Libby Hague. Brotman constructs "Dreamline" by grouping 79 miniature acrylic paintings mounted on wood blocks, interrupted by the occasional large painting and Hague adapts a 50 foot woodcut series "Everything Needs everything" to the Eastern Edge space. Both artists rely on a complex and open narrative structure.
Libby Hague:
Thematically, my recent work looks at the risks of living in a precarious world. My point of view is secular, and I use narrative to puzzle out how, without an external code to direct us, we can determine humane social relationships. I've worked for a long time in print and installation, and the two streams have come together in my latest series, Everything needs everything.
Everything needs everything plays out in Toronto's business core, its condo corridor and under the Gardiner Expressway at an apocalyptic future moment. As an installation of woodcuts, it is both claustrophobic and immersive. Girls tumble from the sky to protect babies who, perfect and fearless, give them a reason to hope and to act. Shards of glass and chandeliers interrupt the central dramas by spilling into our own space to mark the fragility and extravagance of civilized life.
To paraphrase Susan Sontagšs insightful essay - The Imagination of Disaster - science fiction attempts to reassure us with a happy ending that our anxieties about nuclear annihilation and mind numbing routine are not groundless but can be controlled by energetic, inspired intervention. In the process we get to experience the thrill of vicarious destruction. At the end of this work, in a cosmic shift, the chandelier motif reemerges as a newly forming and elegant rythymic pattern but one without human presence.
Nonetheless, Everything needs everything is concerned with the present and our mutual dependency. It is about not giving up and not giving up on each other.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/libbylibby/
Yael Brotman:
Dreamline
"For the past five years the thrust in my art practice has been the exploration of storytelling and the nature of narrative. Urban myths, legends, epics, fairy tales, and gossip are all versions of storytelling; and storytelling in a non-linear structure, informs my painting on woodblock installation, Dreamline. The installation consists of a double string of small blue paintings, each mounted on a 3-inch ash cube. The images figured in the paintings are culled from iconic emblems found in traditional fairytales, from photographs and advertisements in contemporary newspapers and magazines, and from my own sketches and photographs. The narrative, though an open-ended one, has rhythm and phrases that shift in mood from somber to whimsical to hopeful.
The shape and colour of the small paintings comment on the disjointed nature of communication in contemporary western life. The square dimensions of each painting allude to electronic media and its pixilated building blocks of imagery. As well, the varied shades of blue that float under each black and white painted image, harken back to a more low-tech time when televisions were first creating blue shadow shapes on darkened living room walls.
Every so often the narrative of the small paintings is interrupted by larger paintings of chandeliers. I conceived of the chandelier paintings as precious stones set along the trajectory of a beaded necklace. While the little paintings often embody details in the story of the everyday, the chandelier paintings represent the big, luminescent spectacles that draw us out of ourselves and ignite our imaginations.
The image of the chandelier came to me during a residency in the Yukon when I experienced northern lights. I was researching Klondike settlements and learned that every time a frontier town established itself, the townspeople would build a big hall for genteel activities and outfit it with a chandelier. I thought of all the towns in the west and north of Canada joined like a necklace by their sparkly chandeliers. On the other side of town, in contrast, were the lampshades of the saloons and brothels. I am drawn to such binaries: gentility versus utility; elegance versus violence; wisdom/folly; and order/chaos. In my narrative, I juxtapose them to create a dynamic of emotional engagement that is the essence of a story well told or a life well lived.
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