Kristina Durka I Sarah Sproule I Laura Brandreth
PART of the FURNITURE
Group exhibition of sculpture and digital prints
November, 3 - 30, 2023
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Kristina Durka is an interdisciplinary artist, arts administrator, and rabbit enthusiast from Hamilton, Ontario. She holds a BFA in Studio Art From McMaster University and her work has been exhibited throughout North America and is held in international private collections. In addition to her studio practice, Durka is a member of the Assembly Gallery and has held positions with the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Factory Media Centre, Hamilton Arts Council, Hamilton Artists Inc., and is on-call preparator and Arts Educator for various galleries across the GTA. By night Durka also runs a commercial ceramics business creating vintage inspired animal planters. Durka was awarded a Hamilton Arts Award Creator Award in 2022.
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Sarah Sproule is an artist and cultural worker based in Hamilton Ontario. They hold a BFA in Studio Arts and a BA in Art History from McMaster University. Sarah works primarily in the casting and mould-making process, utilizing plaster, clay, and found objects to create dimensional images of abstracted and whimsical bodies. Her work explores ideas of otherness and the body through the lens of queerness, disability and fat politics to create colourful sculptural interventions that seek to challenge our understanding of the domestic and thebody as spectacle. Their work has been shown extensively across Ontario and is currently exhibited at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. In 2023, Sarah was the recipient of theHamilton Arts Awards Creator Award.
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Laura Brandreth is a visual artist and sculptor from Ancaster, Ontario. She graduated from McMaster University in 2017 with a BFA Honours in Fine Art and a Minor in History. Currently, she works as the Gallery Administrator and Program Coordinator at The Carnegie Gallery in Dundas, Ontario. Brandreth's practice investigates the application of absurd functions to crafted forms. Visual cues referencing symbols of mass communication, word play, and the contrast of unusual materials are assembled to create self contained narratives. Laura works primarily in exotic woods and sheet metal with integrated electrical components. Additional work includes urethane resin casts from original clay sculptures.
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Kristina Durka is an interdisciplinary artist, arts administrator, and rabbit enthusiast from Hamilton, Ontario. She holds a BFA in Studio Art From McMaster University and her work has been exhibited throughout North America and is held in international private collections. In addition to her studio practice, Durka is a member of the Assembly Gallery and has held positions with the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Factory Media Centre, Hamilton Arts Council, Hamilton Artists Inc., and is on-call preparator and Arts Educator for various galleries across the GTA. By night Durka also runs a commercial ceramics business creating vintage inspired animal planters. Durka was awarded a Hamilton Arts Award Creator Award in 2022.
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Sarah Sproule is an artist and cultural worker based in Hamilton Ontario. They hold a BFA in Studio Arts and a BA in Art History from McMaster University. Sarah works primarily in the casting and mould-making process, utilizing plaster, clay, and found objects to create dimensional images of abstracted and whimsical bodies. Her work explores ideas of otherness and the body through the lens of queerness, disability and fat politics to create colourful sculptural interventions that seek to challenge our understanding of the domestic and thebody as spectacle. Their work has been shown extensively across Ontario and is currently exhibited at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. In 2023, Sarah was the recipient of theHamilton Arts Awards Creator Award.
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Laura Brandreth is a visual artist and sculptor from Ancaster, Ontario. She graduated from McMaster University in 2017 with a BFA Honours in Fine Art and a Minor in History. Currently, she works as the Gallery Administrator and Program Coordinator at The Carnegie Gallery in Dundas, Ontario. Brandreth's practice investigates the application of absurd functions to crafted forms. Visual cues referencing symbols of mass communication, word play, and the contrast of unusual materials are assembled to create self contained narratives. Laura works primarily in exotic woods and sheet metal with integrated electrical components. Additional work includes urethane resin casts from original clay sculptures.
Christopher Reid Flock
The Structures Within
An exhibition of 12 limited edition and one off digital prints
October, 1st - 31st, 2023
In my journey with clay, I find myself deeply immersed in the malleable nature of my craft, constantly shaping and reshaping ideas and forms. A process that mirrors the greater algorithmic dance, I believe, we unknowingly participate in, extending from our sustenance to the systems that structure our lives.
The collection of 12 digital prints here captures a mental landscape that traverses the tumultuous period from mid-Covid to the present day. These images of vulnerability are a chronicle of my journey through this transformative era.
I've arrived at these images through a unique compression of time and the careful management of place. However, only some things I wished to capture through my lens could be framed. In those instances, I've turned to a sequence of words, phrases, and thoughts generated with an AI calculator. Testament to the strange turn of events brought about by COVID and my exploration of new tools.
The unexpected intersection of Covid-induced vulnerability, the employment of unfamiliar technological tools, and my artistic expression have left me feeling exposed, deconstructed, and paradoxically imploding, I am a wanderer in search of a home amidst a discombobulated world. Through my work, I aim to unravel the enigmatic interplay between the tangible and the algorithmic, inviting viewers to contemplate the complex tapestry of our existence within a system that often operates beyond our control.
- Christopher Reid Flock
The collection of 12 digital prints here captures a mental landscape that traverses the tumultuous period from mid-Covid to the present day. These images of vulnerability are a chronicle of my journey through this transformative era.
I've arrived at these images through a unique compression of time and the careful management of place. However, only some things I wished to capture through my lens could be framed. In those instances, I've turned to a sequence of words, phrases, and thoughts generated with an AI calculator. Testament to the strange turn of events brought about by COVID and my exploration of new tools.
The unexpected intersection of Covid-induced vulnerability, the employment of unfamiliar technological tools, and my artistic expression have left me feeling exposed, deconstructed, and paradoxically imploding, I am a wanderer in search of a home amidst a discombobulated world. Through my work, I aim to unravel the enigmatic interplay between the tangible and the algorithmic, inviting viewers to contemplate the complex tapestry of our existence within a system that often operates beyond our control.
- Christopher Reid Flock
Alison Thompson, Andrea Carvalho, Camille Myles, Cherie Harte, Kerri-Lynn Reeves, Lan Luo, Leah Gold, Marlene Yuen, Mary-Ann Alberga, Mary Dyja, Olga Klosowski, Rachelle
Wunderink, Sarah Cullen, Suzi Garner, Xiao Han
August 5 – 27
Reception: Saturday August 19, 1-3 pm
MOTHRA: Eclipse brings the MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Project to Hamilton.
MOTHRA was founded in 2018 by Sarah Cullen with the help of Alison Thompson. The project runs artist residencies, agitates around the rights of caregivers, produces a zine, and exhibits together.
The artists in this exhibition are all part of the MOTHRA network and have all been participants in a MOTHRA residency at some point over the last five years.
As a group we were intrigued by the themes of the eclipse: an event in which light is obscured from one celestial body by the passage of another between it and the observer. The feeling of a loss of significance, that one’s light has been obscured, can be common amongst parents and carers in relation to their child, but also in relation to how an artist-parent might feel in relation to their practice as well as with the art world in which they participate.
However, an eclipse is also a time when people come together. We marvel at the rarity, of the mystery, of the beauty of an eclipse. They are a spectacular sight. This is not unlike a MOTHRA residency, where for a short fleeting time we gather under the same roof with our children. We make work, cook, read, talk, and play together. After, we go back to our regular lives, albeit slightly changed forever, transformed.
A patriarchal mode of working and making art has dominated our lives as artists as it has throughout our culture. To be taken seriously in most fields you are expected to sever your links with personal relationships - such as family - in order to be successful. MOTHRA is attempting to push back against this.
We are here to acknowledge the parent/artist relationship, often overlooked in contemporary art, and to set a precedent that one can still be an artist and a mother/father/carer of a child and that these roles can conflate.
Wunderink, Sarah Cullen, Suzi Garner, Xiao Han
August 5 – 27
Reception: Saturday August 19, 1-3 pm
MOTHRA: Eclipse brings the MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Project to Hamilton.
MOTHRA was founded in 2018 by Sarah Cullen with the help of Alison Thompson. The project runs artist residencies, agitates around the rights of caregivers, produces a zine, and exhibits together.
The artists in this exhibition are all part of the MOTHRA network and have all been participants in a MOTHRA residency at some point over the last five years.
As a group we were intrigued by the themes of the eclipse: an event in which light is obscured from one celestial body by the passage of another between it and the observer. The feeling of a loss of significance, that one’s light has been obscured, can be common amongst parents and carers in relation to their child, but also in relation to how an artist-parent might feel in relation to their practice as well as with the art world in which they participate.
However, an eclipse is also a time when people come together. We marvel at the rarity, of the mystery, of the beauty of an eclipse. They are a spectacular sight. This is not unlike a MOTHRA residency, where for a short fleeting time we gather under the same roof with our children. We make work, cook, read, talk, and play together. After, we go back to our regular lives, albeit slightly changed forever, transformed.
A patriarchal mode of working and making art has dominated our lives as artists as it has throughout our culture. To be taken seriously in most fields you are expected to sever your links with personal relationships - such as family - in order to be successful. MOTHRA is attempting to push back against this.
We are here to acknowledge the parent/artist relationship, often overlooked in contemporary art, and to set a precedent that one can still be an artist and a mother/father/carer of a child and that these roles can conflate.
Twilight Craft Table
Dan Gibbons, Nancy Anne McPhee, Philippa Gibbons, Helena Gibbons
During the month of July, partners Dan and Nancy will develop the exhibit Twilight Craft Table with their children Philippa and Helena. Nancy participated in parent and child residencies led by MOTHRA in 2022 and 2023, where artists are encouraged to collapse the traditional boundaries between artmaking and parenting, rather than seeing art creation as parallel to child raising.The foundation for the collaborative artwork is the introductory medium of ceramic coil pots and pinch pots, gathered in groupings as though kin. The work suggests liminal absence, interior spaces, and a twilight exhaustion.
Collaborating with Philippa and Helena on this show has opened up questions on the nature of collaboration and compromise, skill and perspective.
Please join us for the closing reception on Sunday July 23rd, 3-5pm. There will be a craft table.
Angela Busse
GORE PARK: a 3D exploration
June 3rd to June 29th
Meet the artist Friday June 9th from 4 to 6pm
gore (noun) : a small usually triangular piece of land.
In the series “Gore Park: a 3D exploration,” LiDAR, Light Detection and Ranging, is used to capture and explore various elements in and around Hamilton’s downtown park.
Angela Busse is a multi-disciplinary artist whose studio practice incorporates photography, traditional printmaking, and ceramics.
Bio
Angela Busse is originally from Northwestern Ontario and relocated to Hamilton to pursue a BFA from McMaster University. She graduated summa cum laude in 2018. Her work has been published in numerous publications and exhibited in the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. She is an Artist Technician in the Nusteel Alternative Education Program and the Print Technician at Centre[3
Breanna Shanahan
Green Prescriptions and other colours
amid boundaries and blades of grass
May 5th - 28th.
Opening reception May 5th from 5-8pm.
Green Prescriptions and other Colours; amid boundaries and blades of grass is a development of many three-minute contemplations, feelings, and exchanges that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Picking up on the return to the garden at peak points of the pandemic, mixed feelings around restrictions, and an overwhelming awareness of anthropogenic excess; these works seek to reflect on shared experiences that now in a fast-pace post-pandemic society, we are slowly beginning to forget.
During Covid-19, Shanahan adapted her practice to work within the constraints of the domestic space when her sculpture studio and art community was forced to lock down. She sought to process shared experiences while simultaneously keep connection to a network of artists in very isolating times. Over Zoom artists would meet and talk about the pandemic, financial instabilities, climate anxieties and artistic endeavours. Together and with the help of the virtual, they would create works and snippets from the day which would be painted, drawn or sculpted in short three-minute creations, stacked to produce a series of small works that catalogued memories.
Breanna Shanahan (she/her/they) is a recent resident of the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississauga's (known to some as Hamilton) Shanahan received an MFA at Concordia University in 2019, her BA. and Dip. FA from UTM and Sheridan College's joint Art and Art History Program in 2014. Shanahan is one of the newest members of the Assembly Gallery artist collective and is a longstanding member of the Montreal based artist collective QO (Quite Ourselves) Her works have been exhibited in Italy, China, Austria, the United States of America and in Canada. Shanahan teaches Sculpture and Drawing courses across Canada at multiple post-secondary and community institutions.
breannashanahan.com
VICK NARESH
“A SEQUENCE OF EVENTS”
Opening Reception
Saturday, April 1
2-4pm
Closes April 30th
Created during his recent residency at the Hamilton Arts Council, “A Sequence of Events” is a series of abstract paintings that delve into the interplay of line, colour, geometry, and texture in a reflective process that mirrors how Vick navigates everyday life as a person of colour.
These paintings consist of intricate mazes of multilayered representations, drawing from memory to interweave metaphorical narratives executed with scrapes, scratches, and visceral colour harmonies that work to destabilize and empower. They incorporate digital domains to better understand the analog and convey its voice to the canvas, oscillating between the realms of spirituality and materialism in an ongoing battle.
Each artwork serves as a reflection of his journey, uncovering new meanings and connections within interference fields of oil & acrylic, paint, overlaid by motifs of chance. This series aims to strike a dialogue with the past, comprehend the present, and grasp the possibilities yet to formulate.
View a short video on the making of “A sequence of Events”
image: Bird of Paradise ( Quadriptych), 2022
Oil, oil stick and acrylic on canvas, 48”X48”, 2022
Birds of Paradise is an exploration of the intricate interplay between mythology and science that shapes our everyday existence. This quadriptych delves into themes of time, evolution, and creationism, presenting a series of panels that represent distinct voices. Each panel offers a unique voice but can be connected to the other panels in several ways creating a new voice and a new vision for the piece as a way of finding commonality in our disparity of thought.
www.vicknaresh.art/
Frolic
Stephen Altena
March 4 - March 31
Opening reception Saturday March 4, 1-4pm
In his new work Altena redeploys elements and motifs from pattern and decoration, wallpaper and textile samples to create a landscape for our own revelry.
Employing paintings and drawings, new and old, reconstructed and recycled, he creates a dappled forest glade ripe for a frolic. Layered fragments of paintings and coloured pencil drawings are suspended with ribbon and twine to evoke an atmosphere of delight and wistfulness. Sentiment and nostalgia, memory and dreams, pleasure and enchantment, decadence and innocence, commingle to blossom into a safe space for your tender feelings.
Stephen Altena is co-founder of Hundred Dollar Gallery/The Hamilton Art Gallery with Andrew McPhail, and is one of the founding members of the Hamilton artist run collective, The Assembly Gallery. He is a graduate of the Independent Study Program at Dundas Valley School Of Art. He lives and works in downtown Hamilton.
www.stephenaltena.com/
read a review of the exhibition here
... for my cat Annie (RIP) a poem by Brian Kelly
Feb 2-28, 2023
"Perhaps no one who opens a tin can notices, but tin itself is known to cry. Some say tin screams when it is bent, the sound of its crystals abruptly jammed together. Some say this sound is like a plaintive meow.
Opening a can of cat food in the presence of your cat, perhaps the cry of the tin can’s lid is mistaken for your cat’s meow.
As a symbol the tin can is often depicted with its lid aloft. Alas it is the universal symbol of garbage, and depicted as such on anti-litter highway signs all along the Trans-Canada Highway. This is unfair, as so-called tin cans are actually made of recyclable aluminum. Poem and its fellow sculptures are another interpretation of tin cans, more fair, regardless of what they are made.
Ornamental as any of the above facts may be, the importance of the tin can lid is its beauty. The circular tin can lid is a primal harmonious."
Excerpted from a short, short story by Jeanne Randolph
again and again and again
Sarah Kernohan
Gareth Lichty
Mark Prier
Saturday, January 14, 1-4 pm
Exhibition from January 6 to 29, 2023
Again and again and again. Layers stack and gather. A cache accretes. Over and over.
Everything in series.
Sarah Kernohan builds collages using photographic fragments of rocks she has
gathered over time. Like an archaeologist rebuilding artifacts from scrim found on a dig,
she assembles and re-configures, making new, hypothetical rock formations.
Gareth Lichty translates his large-scale installations into woodcut prints on paper.
Meticulously cutting plates on a table saw, the narrow vertical lines and bold colours
create optical distortion.
Mark Prier coaxes coolers, ropes, and tennis balls into unsettling but mundane forms.
Tennis balls in uncertain stacks refuse to be just yellow or green. Ropes bore, puncture,
and perforate. Coolers collect but spill forth.
Image credits (left to right):
Sarah Kernohan, Laminal Structure #10. Pigment print on Hahnemühle Museum
Etching paper. 2022.
Gareth Lichty, Warp. Ink on paper. 2018.
Mark Prier, Optic Yellow #1. Tennis balls, braided steel wire. 2022.
Images courtesy of the artists.
read a review of the exhibition by Regina Haggo here
Adam Matak
(in)organic
November 2-29
Opening Reception Saturday, November 5, 12-4pm
(in)organic is a collection of collaged floral works made solely from paint swatches. The works bloom, wilt, expand, decorate, deteriorate in both natural and unnatural ways. For the artist, becoming a new parent has prompted a period of inner-contemplation, awareness of life cycles, and growth that sparked this turn to flowers.
Adam Matak holds an MFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His practice explores the surprising beauty of our daily routines and traditions. Turning his attention to the world of nature in a time that is largely unnatural; Matak composes floral arrangements from the “garden” of paint shops and hardware stores. Solo exhibitions include Le Gallery (Toronto), ARTCITE Inc. (Windsor), Agnes Jamieson Gallery (Minden Hills), and the Thames Art Gallery (Chatham). Matak’s work has been featured in the textbook Art Works as well as The Hamilton Spectator, The Globe and Mail, National Post, and The Boston Globe.
www.adammatak.com
IG @yomatak
Image attached: Swatch Arrangement (How we were brought together), 2022, paint swatches & acrylic on panel, 30”x30”.
Read a review of the exhibition by Regina Haggo HERE
John Haney
Received Wisdom
Saturday, October 8 - Sunday, October 30
Opening reception Saturday, October 8, 3pm.
Gathering and revisiting found and clichéd words and images, Haney irreverently pokes at the lines between dread, ennui, and remorse. After two years of pandemic tailspin, we are pushing hard to get back to business-as-usual. What residue is left in the wake of willful amnesia? With materials as disparate as plant spores and pure gold, the trivial gets lionized and the eternal becomes dust.
John Haney lives in an old farmhouse on the Bay of Fundy in Wood Point, NB. He plants trees, cuts down trees, splits and stacks wood, then burns it. The wind is fierce, the stars are bright. Lots of ideas fly by, some get turned into something.
Image: Left: Untitled (fern spore print), 2020. 20" x 26".
Right: Illumination 24, 2021. Pencil, ink, and 24k gold on paper, 13.5" x 20"
BOO WHO
ANDREW McPHAIL
July 4th to 30th
Opening Reception Sunday July 10th, 2-4 pm
BOO WHO is a meditation on gender, identity and violence. It is the perception and proximity of danger. It is a question about selfhood and culpability.
Andrew McPhail is a Canadian visual artist. He was born in Calgary Alberta in 1961 and studied at York University where he received his MFA in 1987. Living in Toronto in the 1980's and 90's his work focused primarily on drawing, often with pencil crayon on a polyester film called mylar. After moving to Hamilton in 2005, his interest shifted towards three dimensional work and performance. His accumulative, craft oriented work reconfigures ephemeral materials such as Band Aids, Kleenex, pins, sequins and post-its into large sculptures and installations often with a performative element. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and in 2013 was the recipient of the Canada Council International Studio in Paris. He is also cofounder, with Stephen Altena, of the Hundred Dollar Gallery and a founding member of The Assembly in Hamilton, Ontario and in 2021 received the City of Hamilton Arts Award.
read about the exhibition here
Veneration
Jeanne Fries
Sarah Sproule
May 2nd - 28th
Reception May 14th, 3 - 5 pm
Jeanne Fries - Bio
Jeanne Fries is a socially engaged artist and educator. Her work explores power dynamics in our built and social environments through sculpture, painting, interactive installations and socially engaged art projects. The works selected for this show come from various bodies of work that look at communications technology, militarization of airspace, prison design, and most recently, air quality and the power of compassion.
Fries studied at the Glasgow School of Art and received her BFA with minors in philosophy and art history from Mount Allison University (2016). She has exhibited nationally and internationally including such cities as New York, Portland, Vancouver, Miami, Glasgow, and Istanbul. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards and her work is part of both private and corporate collections.
Jeanne is currently living and working in Hamilton, Ontario. She is a founding member of Project Billbored, a community video screening project. More info at Billbored.net
Jfries.org @jfriezzz
Sarah Sproule - Bio
Sarah Sproule is an emerging artist and arts administrator with a BFA in Studio Arts and a BA in Art History from McMaster University. During that time, she focused both her artistic practice and research on contemporary feminist sculpture and fat politics.
Sarah works primarily in the casting and mould-making process, utilizing plaster, clay, and found objects to create dimensional images of abstracted bodies. Their current body of work explores the relationship between the body and religious trauma, visualizing the physiological and mental effects of religious trauma syndrome. Her work also explores wider ideas of otherness and the body through the lens of queerness, disability, fat politics and the intersections that exist between them. Her work has been shown across Ontario, and recently in Glasgow, UK.
As an administrator, Sarah has previously held positions at Hamilton Artists Inc., at McMaster University’s Archives and Research Division, and The Bertrand Russell Archives and Research Centre. She currently holds a position at Centre3 for Artistic + Social Practice.
sarahsproule.ca @sarahmsproule
Jeanne Fries
Sarah Sproule
May 2nd - 28th
Reception May 14th, 3 - 5 pm
Jeanne Fries - Bio
Jeanne Fries is a socially engaged artist and educator. Her work explores power dynamics in our built and social environments through sculpture, painting, interactive installations and socially engaged art projects. The works selected for this show come from various bodies of work that look at communications technology, militarization of airspace, prison design, and most recently, air quality and the power of compassion.
Fries studied at the Glasgow School of Art and received her BFA with minors in philosophy and art history from Mount Allison University (2016). She has exhibited nationally and internationally including such cities as New York, Portland, Vancouver, Miami, Glasgow, and Istanbul. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards and her work is part of both private and corporate collections.
Jeanne is currently living and working in Hamilton, Ontario. She is a founding member of Project Billbored, a community video screening project. More info at Billbored.net
Jfries.org @jfriezzz
Sarah Sproule - Bio
Sarah Sproule is an emerging artist and arts administrator with a BFA in Studio Arts and a BA in Art History from McMaster University. During that time, she focused both her artistic practice and research on contemporary feminist sculpture and fat politics.
Sarah works primarily in the casting and mould-making process, utilizing plaster, clay, and found objects to create dimensional images of abstracted bodies. Their current body of work explores the relationship between the body and religious trauma, visualizing the physiological and mental effects of religious trauma syndrome. Her work also explores wider ideas of otherness and the body through the lens of queerness, disability, fat politics and the intersections that exist between them. Her work has been shown across Ontario, and recently in Glasgow, UK.
As an administrator, Sarah has previously held positions at Hamilton Artists Inc., at McMaster University’s Archives and Research Division, and The Bertrand Russell Archives and Research Centre. She currently holds a position at Centre3 for Artistic + Social Practice.
sarahsproule.ca @sarahmsproule
Urban Interstices: A series of analogue, pinhole photographs exploring the unbuilt, ambiguous, in-between spaces within the city of Hamilton.
Angela Busse
Saturday, April 2 to Saturday, April 30th
Closing Reception: Saturday, April 30th. 1pm to 3pm
Pinhole photography incorporates the most fundamental principles of the camera, the movement of light travelling through the smallest of apertures, inverted and formed into an image at the back of a darkened box.
The images in this series were captured using a modified Kodak Brownie Hawkeye with Lomochrome Purple 120 film.
This year Worldwide Pinhole Day falls on April 24th. The last week of the show pinhole photographers are invited to share their captures. Please email the artist with your current pinhole images at [email protected]
Angela Busse is a multi-disciplinary artist whose studio practice incorporates photo-based processes through traditional printmaking, and ceramics. Angela is originally from Northwestern Ontario and relocated to Hamilton to pursue a BFA from McMaster University. She graduated summa cum laude in 2018. Her work has been published in numerous publications and exhibited in the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival
Natasja Bichoff "Upright #1", encaustic on wood, 13"x 4.5"x 6", 2022
Nb2
Natasja Bischoff
Nancy Benoy
Exhibition through March
Opening Saturday March 5, 1-5 pm
Assembly Gallery presents artist Natasja Bischoff's co-show with guest artist Nancy Benoy.
Both friends and peers in the Hamilton art community, Natasja Bischoff's and Nancy Benoy's work stand in stark contrast to one another. Bischoff's minimalist and monochromatic compositions and sculptures explore materiality through waste, while Benoy's colourful and energetic abstracts seek to capture a moment of movement frozen in time.
Natasja Bischoff is a mixed media visual artist. Born, living and working in Hamilton, she is a current member of Assembly Gallery and a former member of Oswald Collective. Natasja facilitates at Dundas Valley School of Art and sits on the Board of Directors there. She has work in both local and international collections.
Nancy Benoy is a mixed media abstract painter in Hamilton. She is a self-taught artist who explores the expressive qualities of acrylics, watercolours and printmaking. Nancy brings her passion, expertise and encouragement to students of all ages at Dundas Valley School of Art, the Art Gallery of Hamilton and various outreach programs throughout the city
Natasja Bischoff
Nancy Benoy
Exhibition through March
Opening Saturday March 5, 1-5 pm
Assembly Gallery presents artist Natasja Bischoff's co-show with guest artist Nancy Benoy.
Both friends and peers in the Hamilton art community, Natasja Bischoff's and Nancy Benoy's work stand in stark contrast to one another. Bischoff's minimalist and monochromatic compositions and sculptures explore materiality through waste, while Benoy's colourful and energetic abstracts seek to capture a moment of movement frozen in time.
Natasja Bischoff is a mixed media visual artist. Born, living and working in Hamilton, she is a current member of Assembly Gallery and a former member of Oswald Collective. Natasja facilitates at Dundas Valley School of Art and sits on the Board of Directors there. She has work in both local and international collections.
Nancy Benoy is a mixed media abstract painter in Hamilton. She is a self-taught artist who explores the expressive qualities of acrylics, watercolours and printmaking. Nancy brings her passion, expertise and encouragement to students of all ages at Dundas Valley School of Art, the Art Gallery of Hamilton and various outreach programs throughout the city
Nancy Benoy, "Wandering Minds" Acrylic on canvas, 16"x 20", 2021
American beech cDNA Contig 1", 30" x 22.5", archival ink on paper, mounted to Komatex, 2021
JUBILEE
October 2-27
Mark Prier
Jubilee is a conversation (in sculpture and print) between two Victorias—Victoria Hall, the building currently housing The Assembly, and the Queen Victoria monument in Gore Park:
Colonial engravings are made lewd and delirious. Queen Victoria’s direct link to beech bark disease is uncovered. Small pieces of American beech DNA are encoded onto beechwood and paper. Ontario’s largest beech tree is observed.
Victorias echo among us (and echo, and echo).
Background
Sometime between 1887 and 1897, Queen Victoria sent a gift to the Halifax Public Gardens to mark either her Golden or Diamond Jubilee (the records aren’t entirely clear). The gift was an ornamental European beech tree. Queen Victoria’s gift came with a hitchhiker—the beech scale insect. American beech trees around Halifax began to show signs of beech scale infestation. Then, they began to show symptoms of what is now called beech bark disease. Ever since that gift arrived, beech bark disease has been spreading across North America, reducing once-stately trees to stunted, cankered thickets.
After Victoria’s death, the Queen Victoria Statue Memorial Committee, a group of Hamilton women, raised money to create a monument for the dead queen. It was unveiled in Gore Park in 1908.
Mark Prier’s artwork examines the interaction between culture and ecology. Working from diverse sources, such as botany, folklore, geology, and history, he rearticulates this examination into sculpture, installation, performance, sound, and video. He has collaborated with environmental conservation workers, cast seed for urban birds, started restoring an acre of farmland to the documented pre-colonial forest, and created large-scale sculptures reimagining suburban fence posts. His exhibitions include shows in Canada, Mexico, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
www.markprier.com
YOUR KISS NEEDS MORE TONGUE
CORINNE DUCHESNE
March 4-28th
Opening Sunday March 7th from 2-4
Finissage March 27th 2-4
When I was a child, I would draw pictures of what I thought “sex” was in an effort to make friends, and then generously give those pictures away. My hope was that my expressions of sex would work their magic, and friendships would blossom. I recall these early drawings being conversations with myself; visually building a language that was trying to understand the complexities of adult relationships, social interactions, and gender. As I matured, so did the drawings, becoming more curious about the world, combining and converging into surreal perceptions of what “sex” was.
In this exhibition “Your Kiss Needs More Tongue” new characters are added to this motley crew! Included is a small works series “Dick Picks!” Intimate in size, these works play with obsession, repetition, favourite naughty bits, nick names and more naughty bits. The series responds to the COVID-19 pandemic by raising questions and awareness of lockdown, loneliness, “wankin’ in isolation”, “lookin’ for luv in all the wrong places”, and learning to love ourselves.
PRICKS
Men Who Sew
Andrew McPhail.
Matthew Varey
Steve Newberry
December 5th to the 23rd.
reviewed by Regina Haggo in the Spectator here
MICHAEL ALLGOEWER
MARKING TIME
Thursday November 5 to December 3.
Opening Saturday November 7th. 2- 4pm.
Henri Bergson stated that “our perceptions, actual and virtual, extend along two lines…the point, at the intersection of the two lines, is the only one actually given to consciousness.”
The work in MARKING TIME loosely interprets this central theme through painting, installation pieces, and found text.
Utilizing a predominantly minimalist aesthetic, these pieces suggest a metaphorical, cosmic timeline…
image: Sol 24 inches in diameter, wood, gold and copper leaf, paint and patina, 2020.
for more info on Michael Allgoewer and his practice see here
Adam Matak
Let a Thousand Blossoms Bloom
October 9-November 2 2020
Opening Reception Saturday October 10, 3-5pm
Debuting two new bodies of work, large-scale paintings and intimate collages, Adam Matak turns his attention to the world of nature in a time that is largely unnatural. In his first exhibition with Assembly Gallery, Matak composes floral arrangements from the “garden” of art history, mass culture and paint swatches.
The paintings utilize Matak’s compulsion towards collecting and accumulating cultural iconography to express feelings of life, mortality and human connection.
The artificiality of our current lived environment is heightened with Matak’s collages made of paint swatches, as the colour codes and identification numbers share the same space as the low relief imagery. As his paintings source material are other’s depictions of nature, the collages use depictions of colour used by local paint shops.
Bio
Adam Matak holds an MFA from Tufts University in conjunction with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. His practice centres around making images and objects that complicate notions of the meaning of cultural objects and modes of representation. Solo exhibitions include Le Gallery (Toronto), ARTCITE Inc. (Windsor), Agnes Jamieson Gallery (Minden Hills), and the Thames Art Gallery (Chatham). His work has been featured in the Canadian art history textbook Art Works as well as in The Hamilton Spectator, The Globe and Mail, National Post, and The Boston Globe.
www.adammatak.com
@yomatak
image: Swatch Arrangement (NU10 Black Magic) Paint swatch collage. 6.25”x7.25”
Let a Thousand Blossoms Bloom
October 9-November 2 2020
Opening Reception Saturday October 10, 3-5pm
Debuting two new bodies of work, large-scale paintings and intimate collages, Adam Matak turns his attention to the world of nature in a time that is largely unnatural. In his first exhibition with Assembly Gallery, Matak composes floral arrangements from the “garden” of art history, mass culture and paint swatches.
The paintings utilize Matak’s compulsion towards collecting and accumulating cultural iconography to express feelings of life, mortality and human connection.
The artificiality of our current lived environment is heightened with Matak’s collages made of paint swatches, as the colour codes and identification numbers share the same space as the low relief imagery. As his paintings source material are other’s depictions of nature, the collages use depictions of colour used by local paint shops.
Bio
Adam Matak holds an MFA from Tufts University in conjunction with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. His practice centres around making images and objects that complicate notions of the meaning of cultural objects and modes of representation. Solo exhibitions include Le Gallery (Toronto), ARTCITE Inc. (Windsor), Agnes Jamieson Gallery (Minden Hills), and the Thames Art Gallery (Chatham). His work has been featured in the Canadian art history textbook Art Works as well as in The Hamilton Spectator, The Globe and Mail, National Post, and The Boston Globe.
www.adammatak.com
@yomatak
image: Swatch Arrangement (NU10 Black Magic) Paint swatch collage. 6.25”x7.25”
JOHN HANEY
Sea Change / The Garden
February 1st - March 1st
Closing Reception Friday, February 28th, 7-9pm, all welcome.
For his latest exhibition at Assembly Gallery, John Haney presents new work from two ongoing photo series, Sea Change, and The Garden. Sculpture, works on paper, and augmented found objects will round out the space, presenting a meditation on change, both personal and universal. The result perhaps, is a somewhat abstract, somewhat exact visual translation of, in no particular order: love, loss, heartbreak, freedom, replenishment, renewal, disorientation, separation, beauty, homecoming, leaving, disappearance, domesticity, clean air, happiness, darkness, emergence, and ultimately, metamorphosis.
John Haney's work across a range of media has been exhibited and collected in Canada, the US, and Germany. Most often, his subject comes back to being about places, stories, and the people who inhabit them. He lives in an old farmhouse on the upper reaches of the Bay of Fundy in Wood Point, New Brunswick, where two of his most recent efforts are stewarding a patch of Acadian Forest and developing the nascent Wood Point Art Projects.
johnhaney.ca
Image: Ethan (Mask 1) from the series The Garden. 24" x 32" archival ink on paper, mounted to Alupanel, 2019.
Sea Change / The Garden
February 1st - March 1st
Closing Reception Friday, February 28th, 7-9pm, all welcome.
For his latest exhibition at Assembly Gallery, John Haney presents new work from two ongoing photo series, Sea Change, and The Garden. Sculpture, works on paper, and augmented found objects will round out the space, presenting a meditation on change, both personal and universal. The result perhaps, is a somewhat abstract, somewhat exact visual translation of, in no particular order: love, loss, heartbreak, freedom, replenishment, renewal, disorientation, separation, beauty, homecoming, leaving, disappearance, domesticity, clean air, happiness, darkness, emergence, and ultimately, metamorphosis.
John Haney's work across a range of media has been exhibited and collected in Canada, the US, and Germany. Most often, his subject comes back to being about places, stories, and the people who inhabit them. He lives in an old farmhouse on the upper reaches of the Bay of Fundy in Wood Point, New Brunswick, where two of his most recent efforts are stewarding a patch of Acadian Forest and developing the nascent Wood Point Art Projects.
johnhaney.ca
Image: Ethan (Mask 1) from the series The Garden. 24" x 32" archival ink on paper, mounted to Alupanel, 2019.
Nancy Anne McPhee
Solid State
Aug 31st to Sept 29th, 2019
Opening Reception Sat 14th 3-5pm
Inspired equally by home textiles, colour field paintings and the integrity of the fabric, these works are more test than result, a giant, quilted, needlepoint sampler of sorts. This work is about vision and the blurry/buzzy eye that comes with colour field paintings and striped fabric.
These pieces are an experiment in materiality and planes of space that seek to be equally forward thinking and rooted in traditional making. The scope of former works are replaced with a scaling up of traditional textile techniques without becoming an unwieldy size.
nancyannemcphee.com
Instagram mcpheenancyanne
Nancy Anne McPhee is a textile installation artist originally from Alberta and now based in Hamilton, ON. McPhee has a BFA from the University of Victoria, an MFA from Concordia University, an MLIS from Dalhousie University, and has worked as an instructor at Concordia University and NSCAD University. McPhee has exhibited nationally and internationally in commercial galleries, artist-run centres and public galleries, and has received funding from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Recent exhibitions include the Biennale internationale du lin de Portneuf (QC), SUPERCRAWL Hamilton (ON), and solo shows at Agnes Jamieson Gallery (ON) and Grenfell Campus Art Gallery (NL).
ANDREW MCPHAIL
TEXTiles/THIS IS NOT AN AIDS QUILT
August 1st-31st
Opening Reception August 9th, 7-9pm
THIS IS NOT AN AIDS QUILT references the creation of the 54 ton AIDS Quilt which brought together and gave voice to the community of those affected by the devastating loss of loved ones during the early years of the AIDS crisis.
THIS IS NOT AN AIDS QUILT is at once a call to action and an admission of defeat, an attempt to give voice to the sense of urgency and the crushing weariness which coexist in any memorial. The laborious materiality of applying thousands of sequins by hand and the tenacity required for such a futile endeavour demonstrates the uneasy ambiguity inherent in surviving an epidemic that is now measured in decades.
The works in this exhibition are not for sale. However, you may apply for ownership of a piece, in writing, stating the title of the piece you are applying for, your qualifications as an owner and your reasons for applying. Successful applicants will be granted ownership towards the end of the exhibition. Send all relevant information to [email protected]
www.andrewmcphail.com
andmcphail on instagram
blah, sequins on vintage bedsheet, 12x 12 inches, 2018
The Maria's ~ A família das Maria's, 2019
Andrea Carvalho
no flowers, no cake
June 3 -30
Opening Reception Friday June 7th, 7-9 pm
no flowers, no cake is about relationships, tension, discomfort, and longing. The exhibition presents new sculpture and print-based work that weaves between a one sided conversation and objects suspended in gesture.
Andrea Carvalho's practice is centered within a dialogue of space, the built environment, and experiences of the everyday through post-minimal aesthetics, play, subversion, and reconfiguring found objects. She draws on her Portuguese heritage, architecture, and domestic space as an embodied space.
Bio
Andrea Carvalho is Portuguese-Canadian, she holds an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal QC. Her practice is centred within a dialogue of space and experiences of the everyday. She has participated in several group exhibitions at Eastern Edge (Newfoundland), Cambridge Galleries (Ontario), Dare-Dare (Montreal), Art-Mur (Montreal), Burlington Arts Centre (Ontario), as well as solo exhibitions at Forest City Gallery (London), and Latcham Gallery (Stouffville). She has been invited to participate in residencies in Windsor and speak in Newfoundland, Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. She is a member of (F)NOR collective and a founding member of the Assembly Gallery.
www.andreacarvalho.ca
Andrea Carvalho
no flowers, no cake
June 3 -30
Opening Reception Friday June 7th, 7-9 pm
no flowers, no cake is about relationships, tension, discomfort, and longing. The exhibition presents new sculpture and print-based work that weaves between a one sided conversation and objects suspended in gesture.
Andrea Carvalho's practice is centered within a dialogue of space, the built environment, and experiences of the everyday through post-minimal aesthetics, play, subversion, and reconfiguring found objects. She draws on her Portuguese heritage, architecture, and domestic space as an embodied space.
Bio
Andrea Carvalho is Portuguese-Canadian, she holds an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal QC. Her practice is centred within a dialogue of space and experiences of the everyday. She has participated in several group exhibitions at Eastern Edge (Newfoundland), Cambridge Galleries (Ontario), Dare-Dare (Montreal), Art-Mur (Montreal), Burlington Arts Centre (Ontario), as well as solo exhibitions at Forest City Gallery (London), and Latcham Gallery (Stouffville). She has been invited to participate in residencies in Windsor and speak in Newfoundland, Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. She is a member of (F)NOR collective and a founding member of the Assembly Gallery.
www.andreacarvalho.ca
Alef, beh, and other necessities
Abedar Kamgari
May 3-27, 2019
Opening Reception: Saturday May 4, from 2-6 pm
Alef, beh, and other necessities explores the resourcefulness and creativity of growing up in an immigrant home. This exhibition is participatory and kid-friendly, and also features artworks by many talented young artists. All are welcome!
Performances & Activations:
Saturday May 4 from 2-5 pm
Friday May 10 from 6-7:30 pm
Sunday May 26 from 1-3 pm
www.abedarkamgari.com
Abedar Kamgari
May 3-27, 2019
Opening Reception: Saturday May 4, from 2-6 pm
Alef, beh, and other necessities explores the resourcefulness and creativity of growing up in an immigrant home. This exhibition is participatory and kid-friendly, and also features artworks by many talented young artists. All are welcome!
Performances & Activations:
Saturday May 4 from 2-5 pm
Friday May 10 from 6-7:30 pm
Sunday May 26 from 1-3 pm
www.abedarkamgari.com
Sylvia Nickerson
break in to break out/all we have left is this
April 2019 | Opening Reception Friday April 12, 7-10pm
This exhibition features work from the comic book "All We Have Left Is This", in which fourteen short stories about daughterhood, marriage, motherhood, desire, religion, assault, loneliness and aging build up a portrait of a woman that celebrates femininity while also acknowledging its challenges and failures. At the center of the exhibition is the installation "Dream House" in which the psychological space of femininity is explored.
The publisher Drawn & Quarterly has a webpage about the full book "Creation" which is coming out in October 2019.
break in to break out/all we have left is this
April 2019 | Opening Reception Friday April 12, 7-10pm
This exhibition features work from the comic book "All We Have Left Is This", in which fourteen short stories about daughterhood, marriage, motherhood, desire, religion, assault, loneliness and aging build up a portrait of a woman that celebrates femininity while also acknowledging its challenges and failures. At the center of the exhibition is the installation "Dream House" in which the psychological space of femininity is explored.
The publisher Drawn & Quarterly has a webpage about the full book "Creation" which is coming out in October 2019.
David Trautrimas
The Lake Dives Where The Earth Curves/Jan 2019
I grew up in Belleville but spent most summers of my youth in Prince Edward County. I got to know the area from the comfort of my family’s trailer at Martin’s Outlet. During those years I gathered a rich collection of the mythical tales about my summer home.
There was the abandoned Picton airbase and its connection to Ondaatje’s English Patient. The unexploded ordnance peppering the beaches once used for fighter bomber training. The derelict jet engine testing ground built in the middle of a forest. The houses that survived their original purpose as bomber training targets and were given away for free. The story of The Avro Arrow, Canada’s first, and ultimately last, home-grown fighter jet, developed in part in Prince Edward County.
The work of The Lake Dives Where The Earth Curves was produced during a residency at Spark Box Studios in Prince Edward County. During my stay I frequented local archives, conducted site visits, and interviewed people with firsthand experiences of these myths. The result of this research is a body of work that visually intertwines the technology, architecture, history and landscape of a bygone military era. A synthethis of the destructive and preservative effects of a complicated history that still holds influence over the region.
The Lake Dives Where The Earth Curves/Jan 2019
I grew up in Belleville but spent most summers of my youth in Prince Edward County. I got to know the area from the comfort of my family’s trailer at Martin’s Outlet. During those years I gathered a rich collection of the mythical tales about my summer home.
There was the abandoned Picton airbase and its connection to Ondaatje’s English Patient. The unexploded ordnance peppering the beaches once used for fighter bomber training. The derelict jet engine testing ground built in the middle of a forest. The houses that survived their original purpose as bomber training targets and were given away for free. The story of The Avro Arrow, Canada’s first, and ultimately last, home-grown fighter jet, developed in part in Prince Edward County.
The work of The Lake Dives Where The Earth Curves was produced during a residency at Spark Box Studios in Prince Edward County. During my stay I frequented local archives, conducted site visits, and interviewed people with firsthand experiences of these myths. The result of this research is a body of work that visually intertwines the technology, architecture, history and landscape of a bygone military era. A synthethis of the destructive and preservative effects of a complicated history that still holds influence over the region.
Soft Kaur
Mia Sandhu
November 2018
The intended significance of the name Kaur, was to give Punjabi Sikh women “a sense of self-respect and warrior ethos" as we are all equal.
Soft Kaur presents the soft everyday-ness of femininity and sexuality - women embracing their autonomy behind closed doors, while also asserting the control they possess in opening, broadening and closing their personal, quiet spaces to the outside world.
Employing an intricate aesthetic that layers the female figure, foliage, and East Indian motifs, Soft Kaur aims to embrace modern femininity, embodying the personal and communal story that all women share in exploring and embracing their inner Kaur.
Mia Sandhu
November 2018
The intended significance of the name Kaur, was to give Punjabi Sikh women “a sense of self-respect and warrior ethos" as we are all equal.
Soft Kaur presents the soft everyday-ness of femininity and sexuality - women embracing their autonomy behind closed doors, while also asserting the control they possess in opening, broadening and closing their personal, quiet spaces to the outside world.
Employing an intricate aesthetic that layers the female figure, foliage, and East Indian motifs, Soft Kaur aims to embrace modern femininity, embodying the personal and communal story that all women share in exploring and embracing their inner Kaur.
Trouble Light
John Farr, Evelyn Kelch, Brian Kelly
October 2018
John Farr, Evelyn Kelch, Brian Kelly
October 2018
The Miss Philippa Savary Residency, Elton House, Bath UK
Stephen Altena
September 2018
Built in 1799, Elton House is located in the center of the city of Bath, in England. It is a restored period house now under the care of the Landmark Trust. It was bequeathed to the Trust by Miss Philippa Savary, who gradually over a period of decades acquired ownership of the house and operated an antique shop from its front room, which now houses a museum displaying some of her treasures.
In the spring of 2018 Stephen Altena used a stay at this house to construct a fantasy artist's residency, researching the history of the house and the decorative arts of the period with the additional resources of the various museums and collections of Bath. The house itself (and the Landmark Trust) provided a wealth of detail, from period textiles, wallpapers and ornamentation, to the lushly overgrown enclosed garden where Miss Savary escaped the hurly burly of town life and trade.
Using this research as inspiration for his own paintings, Altena reaches into the past and re-establishes a link between this enchanted property, the balm of the decorative arts and his own queer aesthetic, and with the assistance of florists Jessica Payne and Jessica Gale, recreates this pleasant bower in our own fast paced world.
with Jessica Payne, A Fine Medley and Jessica Gale, Sweet Gale Gardens, in conjunction with Canadian Flower Week.
(me)mentos
Steve Mazza
August 3 – August 25, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday August 10, 6:00 – 9:00pm
Art Crawl: July 13, 7:00 – 10:00pm
If this isn’t just a collection of very personalized tchotchkes, then I suppose this is a show about identity. How identity changes over time, or in different situations, or from different perspectives.
This work started with a low resolution digital scan of my head. I then added more detail to that scan with a digital sculpting program before I then start to scale, multiply, blend, deconstruct, and warp the original sculpt into the various pieces that you see here. While some are significantly morphed and can take on an almost monstrous quality (like creatures from a circus freakshow AND the hall of the mirrors at the same time) others might only differ by having an incredulously raised eyebrow, or a marginal shift in scale.
Many many heads. None of them are absolute. None of them are final. While the sculptures exist as unique objects (just as a memory is a unique moment in your life, or a loved one has a unique perspective of who you are), they have infinitely more meaning as a sum or sequence. They are all merely iterations in a process. Each identity evolving from the past and branching off into many different possible futures.
Summer School
Curated by Andy DeCola
June 29 – July 28, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday June 29, 6:00 – 9:00pm
Art Crawl: July 13, 7:00 – 10:00pm
The Assembly Gallery presents Summer School a group show curated by Andy DeCola. The show will feature 15 artists at various stages of their art careers. Artists included in the show are Anna Valdez, Brian Donnelly, Mia Sandhu, Eric Louie, Tyler Armstrong, Mark Puchala, Jenal Dolson, Toko Hosoya, Nicholas Zirk, Manny Trinh, Jason Lee Rhyno, Dave Hind, Rebekah Andrade and Andy DeCola. With a wide range of styles, subject matter and mediums Summer School will prove to give the viewers an overwhelming and fantastic look into the worlds of 14 artists.
About the curator and artist: DeCola graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto in 2002 and prior to that attended the Dundas Valley School of Art, Dundas, Ontario. He is represented by Mark Christopher Gallery in Toronto, an originating member of Assembly Gallery, and also has works available through The Art Gallery of Ontario, and Framesite Art and Project Outpost in Burlington, ON. He has exhibited across Canada as well as in New York City and most recently was included in a group show in April 2018 at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco. In 2012, his show “The Boys from Nowhere” at Neubacher Shor Contemporary was featured in NOW Magazine’s Top 10 Art Shows of the year in Toronto. And the following year received further accolades for his show “As The World Turns”. He currently resides in Burlington, Ontario with his wife and two young boys. [email protected] | andydecola.com
John Haney | The Angel of History
May 4 - May 26
In 1940, Walter Benjamin likened human history to an angel who is blown backwards, blindly into the future. The angel beholds, and is propelled by, the horrors that constitute the past. In the exhibition The Angel of History, John Haney uses this rich metaphor as a lens through which to examine five male generations in his family.
Using various analogue photographic processes, sculpture, and mixed media, Haney works with trace, family mythology, material, and artifacts, exploring ideas of inheritance and implication. He revisits anxieties expressed by Modernist artists and writers, to see how familiar and/or relevant they are to us today.
May 4 - May 26
In 1940, Walter Benjamin likened human history to an angel who is blown backwards, blindly into the future. The angel beholds, and is propelled by, the horrors that constitute the past. In the exhibition The Angel of History, John Haney uses this rich metaphor as a lens through which to examine five male generations in his family.
Using various analogue photographic processes, sculpture, and mixed media, Haney works with trace, family mythology, material, and artifacts, exploring ideas of inheritance and implication. He revisits anxieties expressed by Modernist artists and writers, to see how familiar and/or relevant they are to us today.
April 6 - 28, 2018
Opening Reception Friday April 13, 7-10pm
Light From Two Sides takes its cue from Christopher Alexander’s pattern rule #253. It tells us; that to truly understand each other, one should be sure to meet in full light- out of the glare, out of the shadow. His warning, “...In rooms lit on one side, the glare which surrounds people's faces prevents people from understanding one another.”
The work in this exhibition references architecture and negative space to make a place for the body, the stranger, the friend, and the built environment. Sculptures, colour, and photographs pass into / direct the viewer’s movement in the gallery, asking you to move aside and make room to look, and to be looked at.
About:
Andrea Carvalho holds an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal QC. Her practice, while rooted is centred within a dialogue of space and experiences of the everyday. The work, normally sculpture, draws from post-minimal aesthetics, often using common building materials to draw attention to social powers of constructed space and notions of belonging. She has participated in several group exhibitions at Eastern Edge (Newfoundland), Cambridge Galleries (Ontario), Dare-Dare (Montreal), Art-Mur (Montreal), Burlington Arts Centre (Ontario), as well as solo exhibitions at Forest City Gallery (London), and Latcham Gallery (Stouffville). She has been invited to participate in residencies in Windsor and speak in Newfoundland, Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. She is a member of (F)NOR collective and a founding member of the Assembly Gallery.
The artist would like to thank Kristina Durka, Kaylyn Roloson, Matthew Tegel for their technical support and the Ontario Arts Council for their generous support of this exhibition.
Opening Reception Friday April 13, 7-10pm
Light From Two Sides takes its cue from Christopher Alexander’s pattern rule #253. It tells us; that to truly understand each other, one should be sure to meet in full light- out of the glare, out of the shadow. His warning, “...In rooms lit on one side, the glare which surrounds people's faces prevents people from understanding one another.”
The work in this exhibition references architecture and negative space to make a place for the body, the stranger, the friend, and the built environment. Sculptures, colour, and photographs pass into / direct the viewer’s movement in the gallery, asking you to move aside and make room to look, and to be looked at.
About:
Andrea Carvalho holds an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal QC. Her practice, while rooted is centred within a dialogue of space and experiences of the everyday. The work, normally sculpture, draws from post-minimal aesthetics, often using common building materials to draw attention to social powers of constructed space and notions of belonging. She has participated in several group exhibitions at Eastern Edge (Newfoundland), Cambridge Galleries (Ontario), Dare-Dare (Montreal), Art-Mur (Montreal), Burlington Arts Centre (Ontario), as well as solo exhibitions at Forest City Gallery (London), and Latcham Gallery (Stouffville). She has been invited to participate in residencies in Windsor and speak in Newfoundland, Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. She is a member of (F)NOR collective and a founding member of the Assembly Gallery.
The artist would like to thank Kristina Durka, Kaylyn Roloson, Matthew Tegel for their technical support and the Ontario Arts Council for their generous support of this exhibition.
Grudge is a month long performance and installation which uses post-it notes to repurpose the gallery space into an area of contemplation and a meditation on resentment and forgiveness. This action is an elaboration of the piece presented in the summer of 2017 as part of Hundred Dollar Gallery's Festival of Performance Art.
www.andrewmcphail.com
www.andrewmcphail.com
This work stems from a photograph taken 7 years ago of a boarded up building located near the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario, and has developed into a reflection of post-war housing and the influence of economy on residential areas through boom and bust. The photograph has been digitally altered to shift between superficial “proposals,” of updates or aesthetic alterations. This building is cyclically in a state of neither being completely updated or removed and is meant to parallel the state of a home under constant renovation. A wood 2 x 4 that has been cast in urethane foam is presented in array of colours not unlike colour swatches found in the Home Depot paint aisle. Both the houses and building materials are variants of small-a architecture - the built spaces around us that are in states of flux between disrepair and remodeling.
[email protected]
danielcharlesgibbons.com
Instagram: dangibbons1981
[email protected]
danielcharlesgibbons.com
Instagram: dangibbons1981
January 5 - February 3, 2018
Opening reception: Friday January 12, 7-10pm
“Another Spring” reflects my interest in flowers and plants, found specifically at the Royal Botanical Gardens of Hamilton and Burlington: Hendrie Garden, The Rock Garden and Laking Garden; as well as the Walker Botanical Garden at Rodman Hall, Brock University.
The flowers and plants in the paintings have been taken out of their context, creating a new landscape; another garden, another spring.
“Another Spring” also comes from something my Mom would say at the end of every winter:
“I made it to another spring.”
During the last few years of her life, Mom developed serious ailments during the winter months: a heart attack in 2006, and then pneumonia in 2009. Since then, she would endure the winter months as best she could, waiting for the day she could confidently say, “I made it to another spring.”
In March of 2013, two weeks before her 87th birthday, she passed away.
She almost made it. But her springtimes ran out.
Stephen Altena is cofounder of Hundred Dollar Gallery, with Andrew McPhail, and is a founding member of the Hamilton artist run collective, The Assembly Gallery. He is a graduate of Redeemer College University and the Independent Study Program at Dundas Valley School Of Art. He lives and works in downtown Hamilton.
[email protected]
stephenaltena.com
hundreddollargallery.com
Twitter: hundreddollargallery@hundredgallery
Instagram: stephenaltena
Opening reception: Friday January 12, 7-10pm
“Another Spring” reflects my interest in flowers and plants, found specifically at the Royal Botanical Gardens of Hamilton and Burlington: Hendrie Garden, The Rock Garden and Laking Garden; as well as the Walker Botanical Garden at Rodman Hall, Brock University.
The flowers and plants in the paintings have been taken out of their context, creating a new landscape; another garden, another spring.
“Another Spring” also comes from something my Mom would say at the end of every winter:
“I made it to another spring.”
During the last few years of her life, Mom developed serious ailments during the winter months: a heart attack in 2006, and then pneumonia in 2009. Since then, she would endure the winter months as best she could, waiting for the day she could confidently say, “I made it to another spring.”
In March of 2013, two weeks before her 87th birthday, she passed away.
She almost made it. But her springtimes ran out.
Stephen Altena is cofounder of Hundred Dollar Gallery, with Andrew McPhail, and is a founding member of the Hamilton artist run collective, The Assembly Gallery. He is a graduate of Redeemer College University and the Independent Study Program at Dundas Valley School Of Art. He lives and works in downtown Hamilton.
[email protected]
stephenaltena.com
hundreddollargallery.com
Twitter: hundreddollargallery@hundredgallery
Instagram: stephenaltena
December 8 - 22
Opening Reception: Friday December 8, 7 - 10 pm
The Assembly Gallery's annual group exhibition presents work from each artist that in some way represents the, or an endpoint of that artist's specific quest — not necessarily a "greatest hit" so much as a breakthrough or a turning-point work. This selection of work will be installed in a white cube gallery space. An outside colour meditationalist (yes!), Jen Anisef (@chromavibing) has been brought in to respond to The Assembly Gallery with a selection of hues that will explode the neutral facets of the gallery. The sharpened intentionality of the works will have a head-on collision with the happenstance of the altered space, and what will emerge will be anyone's guess.
A retired academic close to our hearts has said, somewhat pessimistically, of scholarship: "You learn more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing." It is however, those endless pursuits after a kernel, a nugget of information, an idea, an ideal, that turn cold blue steel to red hot magma, that sift through a mountain of grey gravel to procure a gleaming and tiny lump of gold. So it can be with the pursuit of the artist, who toils after some glorious end, peeling layer away from layer or boring through strata to divine the essence of an essence. It is these intensely focused trajectories that make not only the specialist, but the visionary — and the maniac.
David Trautrimas ...itself, by an ellipsis
November 10 - December 2
‘…itself, by an ellipsis’ is a line of text pulled from the Apple Human Interface guidelines, the earliest book published on human / computer interaction as experienced through a graphical user interface. The text refers to presenting an abbreviated version of unknown options to the user through the use of an ellipsis, a visual prompt to indicate a multitude of possibilities.
This body of work uses the ellipsis as a similar stand-in prompt for the unknowns that may profoundly affect human consciousness and the human body. In doing this, Itself, by an Ellipsis places our existence within simulation theory - that reality is artificial and we are a digital life within it. The connection posed by this abbreviation refers to our present human predicament, an existence teetering over an unknown with many multiple outcomes. In view of this, these works endeavor to reconcile the knowable self and the paradoxical influence of the other, solipsistic manifestations in a space where we may exist as endless iteration.
The works come from many places. Sometimes emerging through a process of synesthetic thought in moments of stillness, the eyes closed, the mind at rest. We are formed by culture, though, and as such the works are both conjured and referential: images culled from the infinite image feed, icons of our identities saved from endless simulacra. The colours and patterns are derived from the fashions, short-lived innovations, and cultural icons of the 1990s, such as mall food courts, Ocean Pacific, Andre Agassi, hyper-colour fabrics. Together, the combinations of forms and objects are manifestations of déjà vu, death, and self-awareness; through them, I am attempting to put in order the bits and bytes of an ever-rebooting existence.
With this exhibition Fiona Kinsella presents work in progress - a selection of recent and new oil paintings developed during the exhibition. This work is concerned with the process and stages of oil painting and the progression of a painting to its completion.
Margaret Flood
Something Round
Something Round is an exhibition about walking, solitude and social interaction. Prompted by a curiosity about how people move through and relate to shared spaces, Something Round explores the perceptions and experiences of an unnamed – and possibly not self-identified – community formed by users of the Bruce Trail in Hamilton. Using photographs, narrative and a collection of circular detritus, Something Round considers the Bruce Trail as observed by a community of trail users.
The artist gratefully acknowledges the funding support from CCENA- The Centre for Community Engaged Narrative Arts.
Melissa Neil
smoking lake
Melissa Neil uses landscape painting as a vehicle to explore notions of time, memory and place. A new body of work smoking lake considers the experiences of Ukrainian women who immigrated to the Smoky Lake (Alberta) region in the late 1800’s. Imagery of present day piles of brush, gravel pits and stagnant sloughs allude to the work and experiences of an ephemeral past. Oil paintings on linen and mylar will be presented.
The artist gratefully acknowledges the funding support from the City Enrichment Fund.
Dreamlike images of mis-remembered places, structures and creatures in vivid colour, bold strokes and intricate line-work. A balance between precision and spontaneity melding together these unlikely figures, flora, fauna and architecture in images that are at once familiar but all-too-strange, hinting at repressed material and an archaeopsychic past or a possible future. A choice between resisting a chaotic new era or allowing it to envelop you.
The initial inspiration for these pieces comes from authors J.G. Ballard (particularly his 1962 novel, The Drowned World), Stanislaw Lem, John Wyndham and other transformative visions of humanity’s future. A variety of media and methods were employed, including pen & ink, acrylic paint, silkscreen, lino block print and paper collage.
The exhibition Monuments of a Perfect Future will explore the role of the figurative sculpture in our post-modern age. The sculptures featured in the exhibition will addresses the transformation of human thought, speaking specifically about the role of technology in extending human consciousness. The included works will present a critique on the affects of technology on identity, perception and our sense of wonder.
On February 22, 2017, NASA announced the existence of the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanet system of Earth-sized planets orbiting a single star. Their positions are so closely aligned that they are likely tidally locked in place, with the same side forever facing the sun. Three of these planets fall within the habitable zone of supporting the liquid water needed to support life as we know it.
Within days of this revelation, four Hamilton artists got together at a local bar to plan an exhibition.
Beginning from a new short story written by author and multimedia artist Gary Barwin, The Library of Known Planets imagines a mythology for a planet where time of day is rooted in place. Told from the perspective of a young girl coming of age in a city of endless noon, Barwin’s sci-fi fable reflects the imaginative drive to conceive and comprehend the others who may live in times and places beyond our own.
Drawing on the sun-rusted imagery of Gary Barwin’s short story and a broader cultural language of astronomical exploration, Laine Groeneweg, Steve Mazza and Stephanie Vegh have created new works that extend the imaginative reach of TRAPPIST-1 and its possible worlds in their respective media of printmaking, sculpture and drawing. A limited edition volume of The Library of Known Planets designed by Gary Barwin and printed by Laine Groeneweg will also be displayed for reading purpose
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, performer and multidisciplinary artist and the author of twenty-one books of poetry, fiction and books for children. His latest book is the poetry collection No TV for Woodpeckers (Wolsak and Wynn). His recent national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates (Random House Canada) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Leacock Medal. A PhD in music composition, Barwin will be writer-in- residence at McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library in 2017-2018 and is on the CBC Poetry Prize jury for 2017. He has taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities and is currently writer-in- residence for at-risk youth. Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario with vague and unsettling feelings about Toronto.
Laine Groeneweg Laine Groeneweg is printmaker currently living in Hamilton. He received his BFA from York University in 2004 and subsequently trained at Fondazione Il Bisonte Per Lo Studio Dell’Arte Grafica in Florence, Italy with a focus on intaglio printmaking. Often characterized by themes of dream and play, his whimsical imagery blurs the line between reality and fiction. Laine's prints have been shown both Nationally and Internationally and is held in the permanent collections of the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts (Ekaterinburg, Russia), Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), and in the archives at Fondazione Il Bisonte Per Lo Studio Dell’Arte Grafica (Florence,Italy). In 2012 Laine opened Smokestack in Hamilton, Ontario – a studio that focuses on limited edition printing and the production of print-based artist projects.
Stephanie Vegh is a visual artist and writer who obtained her Combined Honours BA in Art and Comparative Literature from McMaster University before completing her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. She has since served as Artist-in-Residence at the Repton School in Derbyshire, England and written essays and reviews for various galleries and publications in the United Kingdom and Canada. Since returning to Hamilton in 2007, her drawings have been included in group and solo exhibitions in Glasgow, Leeds, Hamilton, Toronto, Kitchener and Winnipeg.
Steve Mazza is a Hamilton artist and maker who makes a lot of things that can usually be classified as sculpture. He uses a variety of traditional building processes, but for some time now has incorporated digital sculpting and 3D printing into his work as well. He enjoys exploring the intersection of handmade and computer assisted art and trying to figure out what that means for the creative process. Steve also applies his skills in theatre as a props builder and is currently Head of Props for the Sheridan College Technical Theatre and Live Entertainment program.
May 12- June 3, 2017
The Assembly presents Andy DeCola's solo exhibition Where Is My Mind? The show brings together two bodies of work that originate from DeCola’s intrigue of how we consume images and how they shape our thoughts, feelings and associations to create the mood of our times.
As described by David Jager of Toronto’s NOW Magazine, “Is it pop? Is it Abstract? Is he quoting Jeff Koons, Neo Rauch or Sigmar Polke? It’s all these things and none of them. While mining the visual grammar of painting over the last 30 years, DeCola forges his own vocabulary.”
DeCola's paintings use a mix of images from old and new family photos, and appropriated images from magazines and social media. The relationship between these two sources is integral in his work and what drives DeCola as a painter. The paintings play with bright clean colours and have a pop sensibility, while being personal. Pop Art is associated with being cold, bright, clean, and favouring the overall design over meaning. However, to DeCola, with his choice of personal and found images along with titles from songs and movie quotes, they are embedded with his own associations.
Social media portrays moments and photos where everything appears amazing and perfect. This aspect of our current contemporary climate is crucial to DeCola’s subject matter, as there is more than meets the eye in both DeCola’s paintings and the images on social media. This show also features DeCola’s new series of photo collage transfers on paper, which take on a fun yet traditional approach.
DeCola graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto in 2002 and prior to that attended the Dundas Valley School of Art, Dundas, Ontario. He is represented by Mark Christopher Gallery in Toronto and is an originating member of The Assembly Gallery. He has works available through The Art Gallery of Ontario, and Framesite Art and Project Outpost in Burlington, ON. DeCola has exhibited across Canada and in New York City. In 2012, his show The Boys from Nowhere at Neubacher Shor Contemporary was featured in NOW Magazine’s Top 10 Art Shows of the year in Toronto, and the following year received further accolades for his show As The World Turns.
He currently resides in Burlington, Ontario with his wife and two young boys.
[email protected]
andydecola.com
The Assembly presents Andy DeCola's solo exhibition Where Is My Mind? The show brings together two bodies of work that originate from DeCola’s intrigue of how we consume images and how they shape our thoughts, feelings and associations to create the mood of our times.
As described by David Jager of Toronto’s NOW Magazine, “Is it pop? Is it Abstract? Is he quoting Jeff Koons, Neo Rauch or Sigmar Polke? It’s all these things and none of them. While mining the visual grammar of painting over the last 30 years, DeCola forges his own vocabulary.”
DeCola's paintings use a mix of images from old and new family photos, and appropriated images from magazines and social media. The relationship between these two sources is integral in his work and what drives DeCola as a painter. The paintings play with bright clean colours and have a pop sensibility, while being personal. Pop Art is associated with being cold, bright, clean, and favouring the overall design over meaning. However, to DeCola, with his choice of personal and found images along with titles from songs and movie quotes, they are embedded with his own associations.
Social media portrays moments and photos where everything appears amazing and perfect. This aspect of our current contemporary climate is crucial to DeCola’s subject matter, as there is more than meets the eye in both DeCola’s paintings and the images on social media. This show also features DeCola’s new series of photo collage transfers on paper, which take on a fun yet traditional approach.
DeCola graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto in 2002 and prior to that attended the Dundas Valley School of Art, Dundas, Ontario. He is represented by Mark Christopher Gallery in Toronto and is an originating member of The Assembly Gallery. He has works available through The Art Gallery of Ontario, and Framesite Art and Project Outpost in Burlington, ON. DeCola has exhibited across Canada and in New York City. In 2012, his show The Boys from Nowhere at Neubacher Shor Contemporary was featured in NOW Magazine’s Top 10 Art Shows of the year in Toronto, and the following year received further accolades for his show As The World Turns.
He currently resides in Burlington, Ontario with his wife and two young boys.
[email protected]
andydecola.com
April 14 to May 6, 2017
RECEPTION Saturday March 6th - 2 to 5pm
Artist bio
I've lived in the Hamilton area most of my life and despite the connection with industry in the core and a dwindling farm community in the hinterland, neither have had much influence on what I do other than both ends involve people who, in the traditional sense, work for a living. My post-secondary wanderings garnered a degree and diploma from 416-based giants but never quite fed my fascination for making "things". I was more affected by the personal experiences of two instructors... Jerry Englar at the University of Toronto and Sam Carter at Ontario College of Art, both working outside the traditions of their respective schools.
I've lived in the Hamilton area most of my life and despite the connection with industry in the core and a dwindling farm community in the hinterland, neither have had much influence on what I do other than both ends involve people who, in the traditional sense, work for a living. My post-secondary wanderings garnered a degree and diploma from 416-based giants but never quite fed my fascination for making "things". I was more affected by the personal experiences of two instructors... Jerry Englar at the University of Toronto and Sam Carter at Ontario College of Art, both working outside the traditions of their respective schools.
Piles
SVAVA THORDIS JULIUSSON
March 10 to April 8, 2017
OPENS March 10th - 7 to 10pm
RECEPTION Saturday March 18th - 2 to 5pm
Observing Objects: Svava Juliusson’s Piles
Svava Juliusson’s studio practice is predicated on the immediate relationship between body and material – an intuitive process through which hands meet media, and resulting forms are made. In the act of making, tensions manifest between moments of control and those of chance, resulting in objects and images that appear at once both known and unrecognizable. Juliusson’s process is one of unrelenting material study. She makes work through deliberate acts of attaching, casting, grouping, binding, and breaking commonplace materials. Other times, her hand is more fluid, activating the performativity of media at points of interaction with the surface of things.
Piles includes a group of new sculptures that make visible trace forms of the ropes, wires, and commercial plastics from which they were made. Upon viewing, their persistent thingness pushes back with an object-based agency that serves to subvert our aesthetic-seeking gaze. Alongside them, a series of gestural monoprints drawn by inks that move fluid across surface, and in stillness, yield images that lead the eye in unexpected ways.
-- Alana Traficante, 2017
Svava Juliusson’s studio practice is predicated on the immediate relationship between body and material – an intuitive process through which hands meet media, and resulting forms are made. In the act of making, tensions manifest between moments of control and those of chance, resulting in objects and images that appear at once both known and unrecognizable. Juliusson’s process is one of unrelenting material study. She makes work through deliberate acts of attaching, casting, grouping, binding, and breaking commonplace materials. Other times, her hand is more fluid, activating the performativity of media at points of interaction with the surface of things.
Piles includes a group of new sculptures that make visible trace forms of the ropes, wires, and commercial plastics from which they were made. Upon viewing, their persistent thingness pushes back with an object-based agency that serves to subvert our aesthetic-seeking gaze. Alongside them, a series of gestural monoprints drawn by inks that move fluid across surface, and in stillness, yield images that lead the eye in unexpected ways.
-- Alana Traficante, 2017
BIO
Svava Thordis Juliusson is a Hamilton, Ontario based artist born in Siglufjörður, Iceland in 1966. She began undergraduate studies at the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1993 and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at NSCAD University in 1997. Juliusson completed her MFA in studio at York University in 2007.
Juliusson has exhibited her work widely, participated in residencies in Canada and abroad. Her work can be found in the collections of Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Nova Scotia Art Bank as well as in a number of private collections. Juliusson is the recipient of grants: City Enrichment Fund, Hamilton, ON; Ontario Arts Council; Canada Council for the Arts; Toronto Arts Council; SSHRC (Canada Graduate Scholarship – Masters).
Svava Thordis Juliusson is a Hamilton, Ontario based artist born in Siglufjörður, Iceland in 1966. She began undergraduate studies at the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1993 and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at NSCAD University in 1997. Juliusson completed her MFA in studio at York University in 2007.
Juliusson has exhibited her work widely, participated in residencies in Canada and abroad. Her work can be found in the collections of Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Nova Scotia Art Bank as well as in a number of private collections. Juliusson is the recipient of grants: City Enrichment Fund, Hamilton, ON; Ontario Arts Council; Canada Council for the Arts; Toronto Arts Council; SSHRC (Canada Graduate Scholarship – Masters).
The realization of the work featured in this exhibition has been generously supported by municipal, and provincial granting programs. Svava Thordis Juliusson gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Hamilton Enrichment Fund.
Nancy Anne McPhee - Still Life with Flowers
February 10 - March 4
Closing Reception March 4, 2-5 pm
The use of stripes has long been an entrée into parallel lives and worlds, a sleight-of-hand that sows confusion and disrupts perspective so that a person or thing may hide in plain view. As the traditional, striped prisoner’s uniform announces the wearer’s citizenship in a shadow-world of confinement and social censure, the Napoleonic “breton shirt” once designated the imperial naval seaman’s nautical world, with its peculiar traditions, global reach and certain peril. Similarly, First World War Allied fleets used zebra-like “dazzle” camouflage not to conceal but to compel enemy mariners and airmen to draw false assumptions about make, speed and trajectory.
Visual artist Nancy Anne McPhee works in this tradition, using stripes, pattern and illusion to immerse visitors in experiential situations in which the optical field is completely enveloped and continually active. Here, the room’s four high walls are fitted out in black-and-white striped wallpaper. Upon each wall is a symbolic vanitas motif, drawn from still-life painting, rendered in commercial wallpaper: a vase and flowers (time/transience), a lobster (decadence), candle (impermanence) and a skull (death). Of these motifs, some are presented in black-and-white stripes, others (the lobster, the flowers) in bright hues.
The result is visually imposing, monumental, yet also ludic, setting the visitor off balance amidst a visual “buzz” created by the sense of pervasive movement. Her visual field taken up entirely by the ubiquitous stripes, the visitor is invited, through the vanitas motifs, to reflect upon certain elements of the human condition (transience, decadence, impermanence, death), which, though always with us, are relegated in our corporatist, consumerist society to an alternate, unspoken realm of abbreviation or elision.
Biography
Nancy Anne McPhee is an installation artist originally from Alberta and now based in Hamilton, ON. McPhee has a BFA from the University of Victoria, an MFA from Concordia University, and an MLIS from Dalhousie University. She has worked as an instructor at Concordia University and NSCAD University. McPhee has exhibited nationally and internationally in commercial galleries, artist-run centres and public galleries, and has received funding from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Agnes Jamieson Gallery (ON) and Grenfell Campus Art Gallery (NL).
February 10 - March 4
Closing Reception March 4, 2-5 pm
The use of stripes has long been an entrée into parallel lives and worlds, a sleight-of-hand that sows confusion and disrupts perspective so that a person or thing may hide in plain view. As the traditional, striped prisoner’s uniform announces the wearer’s citizenship in a shadow-world of confinement and social censure, the Napoleonic “breton shirt” once designated the imperial naval seaman’s nautical world, with its peculiar traditions, global reach and certain peril. Similarly, First World War Allied fleets used zebra-like “dazzle” camouflage not to conceal but to compel enemy mariners and airmen to draw false assumptions about make, speed and trajectory.
Visual artist Nancy Anne McPhee works in this tradition, using stripes, pattern and illusion to immerse visitors in experiential situations in which the optical field is completely enveloped and continually active. Here, the room’s four high walls are fitted out in black-and-white striped wallpaper. Upon each wall is a symbolic vanitas motif, drawn from still-life painting, rendered in commercial wallpaper: a vase and flowers (time/transience), a lobster (decadence), candle (impermanence) and a skull (death). Of these motifs, some are presented in black-and-white stripes, others (the lobster, the flowers) in bright hues.
The result is visually imposing, monumental, yet also ludic, setting the visitor off balance amidst a visual “buzz” created by the sense of pervasive movement. Her visual field taken up entirely by the ubiquitous stripes, the visitor is invited, through the vanitas motifs, to reflect upon certain elements of the human condition (transience, decadence, impermanence, death), which, though always with us, are relegated in our corporatist, consumerist society to an alternate, unspoken realm of abbreviation or elision.
Biography
Nancy Anne McPhee is an installation artist originally from Alberta and now based in Hamilton, ON. McPhee has a BFA from the University of Victoria, an MFA from Concordia University, and an MLIS from Dalhousie University. She has worked as an instructor at Concordia University and NSCAD University. McPhee has exhibited nationally and internationally in commercial galleries, artist-run centres and public galleries, and has received funding from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Agnes Jamieson Gallery (ON) and Grenfell Campus Art Gallery (NL).
The artist gratefully acknowledges the funding support of the City of Hamilton’s City Enrichment Fund.
The field of painting has traditionally approached the subject of place by employing representational strategies to depict the visual features of an environment. Daniel Hutchinson proposes something different: artworks that embrace the indeterminacy of a place in flux. Rather than attempting to make fixed historical documents – documentary pictures of an urban environment in stasis – the aim is instead to make paintings that are themselves indeterminate and even volatile. From the actual imprints of matter and real things, the artist composes formal and discursive elements, creating zones of infinite possibility. As surprisingly unfixed pictures, these painting/printmaking hybrids are as unpredictable and irreducible as the features or characteristics that constitute the identity of the place where they’re made.
These works call attention to dialectical relationships between representation and abstraction; process and intention; colour and non-colour; and minimalism and decorative ornamentation. Working with a medium exhausted by its own traditions and expansions, Hutchinson deprives painting of its legible picture, opting for a frottage technique (rubbing and scrapping paint across canvas over textures) and indexing his immediate surroundings for shape, colour and form. The light from studio windows, the topography of studio floorboards, the shape and line of botanical forms found in a nearby conservatory, and even textile patterns sourced from the neighbourhood garment district influence the deployment of abstraction intrinsically linked to the city of Hamilton.
About
Daniel Hutchinson studied painting at Emily Carr and NSCAD University. Notable exhibitions include solo-exhibitions at YYZ Artists' Outlet (Toronto), Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery (Halifax), in the national survey The Painting Project at L'Université du Québec à Montréal, and in More Than Two (Let It Make Itself), at The Power Plant (Toronto). Accolades include the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, the Brucebo Foundation Residency (Sweden) and project grants from the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Hamilton City Enrichment Fund.
These works call attention to dialectical relationships between representation and abstraction; process and intention; colour and non-colour; and minimalism and decorative ornamentation. Working with a medium exhausted by its own traditions and expansions, Hutchinson deprives painting of its legible picture, opting for a frottage technique (rubbing and scrapping paint across canvas over textures) and indexing his immediate surroundings for shape, colour and form. The light from studio windows, the topography of studio floorboards, the shape and line of botanical forms found in a nearby conservatory, and even textile patterns sourced from the neighbourhood garment district influence the deployment of abstraction intrinsically linked to the city of Hamilton.
About
Daniel Hutchinson studied painting at Emily Carr and NSCAD University. Notable exhibitions include solo-exhibitions at YYZ Artists' Outlet (Toronto), Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery (Halifax), in the national survey The Painting Project at L'Université du Québec à Montréal, and in More Than Two (Let It Make Itself), at The Power Plant (Toronto). Accolades include the RBC Canadian Painting Competition, the Brucebo Foundation Residency (Sweden) and project grants from the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Hamilton City Enrichment Fund.
The artist gratefully acknowledges the funding support of the City of Hamilton’s City Enrichment Fund.
As the year sharpens down to its cold, dark endpoint, The Assembly will, with shaking hands, present offerings of consolation and making. On Hamilton's bumpy corner, look for the window with the milky white lights that shine neither white nor blue, but some thread-bare in-between hue. Inside the small space, the light will be warmer.
New works presented by:
Andrea Carvalho
Andrew McPhail
Andy Decola
Brian Kelly
Brandon Vickerd
Dan Gibbons
David Trautrimus
Daniel Hutchinson
Fiona Kinsella
John Haney
Jamie Lawson & Jacqui Oakley
Margaret Flood
Nancy Anne McPhee
Stephen Altena
Steve Mazza
Svava Thordis Juliusson
Lullaby
My little lack-of-light, my swaddled soul,
December baby. Hush, for it is dark,
and will grow darker still. We must embark
directly. Bring an orange as the toll
for Charon: he will be our gondolier.
Upon the shore, the season pans for light,
and solstice fish, their eyes gone milky white,
come bearing riches for the dying year:
solstitial kingdom. It is yours, the mime
of branches and the drift of snow. With shaking
hands, Persephone, the winter’s wife,
will tender you a gift. Born in a time
of darkness, you will learn the trick of making.
You shall make your consolation all your life.
Amanda Jernigan
The poem "Lullaby" is taken from the collection All the Daylight Hours by Amanda Jernigan and published by Cormorant Books, Toronto. Copyright © 2013 Amanda Jernigan. Used with the permission of the publisher.
