Invite

Participating Artists

Shea Allan-McCachen

Invisible realms made stangely visible always have a parallel in our relationship to our own bodies; it's as we were suddenly allowed to see ourselves from the point of view of our skin, and stare at a previously invisible interior. The result is a hallucinatory image, and a mind expanding one. By referencing the internal space of the mind and body, external spaces are also activated; the exteriors of bodies, their surrounding settings, and the idiosyncratic infinite potentiality of lives lived beyond.

Paul A Carr

My work is often an eclectic collection of subject matter and forms arranged into groups that privilege an examination of the relationships present between their constituent pieces. It explores the various ways in which depiction, delineation, description, and definition - processes inherent to drawing, painting, and writing - might lend their services to the fabrication of knowledge. Recent works incorporate narrative structures into their titles. These fragmented plotlines in their own way parallel the conceptual activity found within the pictorial and/or textual space of the works themselves, simultaneously providing a point of access to the mechanisms of the works without the need for an explanatory statement. Ultimately, the artwork in turn sheds light upon its title, visually elaborating upon what is written. Just as disparate images within a series support each other, so too image and text co-operate. Once a title is applied to a work the two become one.

Jordy Hamilton

Thematically, my practice has dealt primarily with notions of control and chaos, success and failure, and humankind's perpetual drive toward internal and external mastery. It is my belief that as we humans push to overcome and master our perceived boudaries, we are in fact trying to answer and/or overcome the anxiety associated with our most fundamental question; how do we relate to nature? As such, the human drive, the means through which it is expressed, and the inherent absurdity of many of these expressions are my main thematic interests. Linking these various expressions with the idea of making art has been a focus of my practice - for it is through the absurd act of working in the studio that I myself begin to know, to play with, and to respond to the world with all the integrity that I can invest in it.

Nick Lakowski

Phillip McCrum

I am a multidisciplinary artist. My practice has included painting, installation, multi-media, digital, and video projects. My interest in art making revolves around material and construction as an entry point or viewing device towards the deciphering of sub textual content. Material is represented by a variety of media, such as paint, found object installation and other forms. The aesthetic acts for me as a polemic in that the anti-aesthetes of my work is in reference to my understanding of the hierarchical ideas of beauty and my relationship to an aesthetic of working class or 'other' notions of beauty/value. This conecnt ranges from the layering of meaning as it is contained and contextualized by an 'artwork'. I mean by that the experienc the viewing has on the viewer and the culpability the viewer has to the object and the space the object inhabits, materially as well as theoretically. It, my work, hopefully proposes systems that are deconstructed with the execution of the artwork, the formal aesthetic and logic dissolves into a triopic miasmic swamp. A catachresis. In other words it's pretty funny stuff!

Alicia Munro

My paintings explore the complex relationship between media and memory. Through the act of painting, source images ranging from personal snapshots to film stills and news photos are reduced to their most basic forms, and any sense of the photograph as a 'true' document becomes compromised by the subjective exploration and reinterpretation of its formal elements. The personal and the mediated collapse and become indistinguishable, and memory constructed through image and referent triumphs over objective or coherent history. What remain are dreamlike and often arbitrary landscapes that float between realism and abstraction.

Kevin Murphy

The series of works in this show is presented as a valorization of the detritus of process. In the slippage between intentionality and chance, aesthetics can appear as the accidental byproduct of a functional exercise. Plucked from their original purpose, these works appear to me as unintentional simulacra: paintings that appropriate the minimal aesthetic and the vocabularies of geometric and expressionistic abstraction. Obscure yet beautiful in their new context, they explore the much celebrated relationship between art and the everyday, and the way that new meanings always seem ready to come out of the woodwork.

Ryan Peter

Anna Marie Repstock

My work explores the romantic affiliation between painting, poetry and contemporary art. Collapsing representation and abstraction, my paintings draw upon the history of hard-edged abstraction and conceptual, procedural painting. I use language and references to language, especially to poetry, while addressing the space where readability yields to poetic abstraction. In my “Legibility of Being” series the works represent lined papers, which have a physical plane, and emotions, which exist abstractly on the plane of consciousness. What interests me are the relationships between language and visual language, and between intellectual and emotional responses to painting.

Jade Yumang

With the recent authorization of queer marriage, the gay culture in North America has been sublimated into popular culture. This consent or acceptance has prompted me to investigate the new identity of being queer. What do we have to gain in being accepted or tolerated into a society that for the most part has denied us? Radicalism in the queer (sub)culture of the recent past has been replaced by the desire of queers wanting to be part of the white-picket-fence dream. My work examines what those dreams entail.