Open House
Saturday, May 14 and Saturday, June 4, 11-5pm

Including work by Kim Adams, Sara Angelucci, Nicole Collins, Greg Curnoe, Kristan Horton, William Kurelek, Cal Lane, Doris McCarthy, Evan Penny, Ted Rettig, Jaan Poldaas, Michael Snow, Lawrence Weiner.

In our studio we often discover engaging relationships between the works in the collections -a surprising connection between a fine Michael Snow drawing and an Evan Penny bronze study, for instance, or the bold shapes in a McCarthy 1960’s hard edge abstract painting and the and a early conceptual work from the 1970’s Maintenance paintings of Gerald Ferguson.

From time to time we share these moments of visual pleasure and, often, thought-provoking associations through small curated installations as in this current grouping.

Kim Adams, Auto Office Haus, 1997 (Model for Skulptur Projekte ’97, Munster), 2003, HO scale model parts, 6.5″ x 17″ x 8″

As always, Kim Adams harnesses his and our imaginations, melding the everyday: the hardware store, the wrecking yard, the model maker’s shop, etc. to create substantial and thought provoking works.

The sculpture, Auto Office Haus, 1997, a seminal work, was exhibited in the prestigious international exhibition, Skulptur Projekte Münster, held every ten years in Münster, Germany. Adams was invited to make a large scale, semi-permanent sculpture to sit atop a local 1950’s era taxi stand, now Café Gasolin. He envisioned his work as a fictive office and house for the drivers below. The model for Auto Office Haus was made in conjunction with the Munster Project and exhibited originally at the Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster, (Westfalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History). It is encased in a car-shaped, vacuum formed clear plastic cover.

Michael Snow, Appearance, 1963, graphite on paper, 10 x 7.5

The iconic Walking Woman Works were the focus of Michael Snow’s studio practice from 1961-67 while in New York. Snow decided that the contour from the original Walking Woman cut-out would remain constant throughout. The change of materials and methods that he employed was at the core of a tremendously influential, multi-media practice still resonating to this day. The rare frottage drawing, Appearance, with the two juxtaposed stencil rubbings captures the energy of the period.

Kristan Horton, Dr Strangelove Dr Strangelove, dr0027-s012, 2003, black and white ultra chrome archival print, 3.25″ x 15″

In 2005 as part of our Artists Presents series of exhibitions at WTG, Kelly Mark introduced the work of Kristan Horton, in a solo show, Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove. It was very well received and Horton’s work has gone on to be collected and exhibited extensively in public and private collections.

In an article on the Contemporary Art Gallery’s Vancouver presentation of this series in 2007, Robin Laurence states:

Homage, obsession, appropriation–these postmodern impulses are folded into Kristan Horton’s solo show at the Contemporary Art Gallery. The Toronto artist’s series of black-and-white photographs (38 on view here, out of a total of 200) examines and restages scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove. Subtitled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,—.

—The artist’s mimicry is inspired, obsessive, and sometimes ludicrous–a small-scale reiteration of the very qualities seen in the film. —

Each of Horton’s works consists of a still from the film paired with his hilarious mimicry of that scene. Produced in miniature in his studio, Horton’s sets employ the most banal of at-hand objects, such as clothespins, cutlery, screwdrivers, felt markers, plastic bags, twist ties, and bottles of soy and Tabasco sauce. —

 

Greg Curnoe, Zone, 1980, watercolour on paper, 9″ x 7″

Zone, the 1980 multi layered watercolour by Greg Curnoe on one hand references Appolinaire’s poem Zone, (a walk in Paris from one sunrise to another and from one time zone to another). Walks and Curnoe’s immediate and geographical surroundings are central in his work. On the other hand, the Zone overlaying the stenciled text, Tecumseh, might be a reference to the town of Tecumseh and its namesake and/or Zone Township, both places near to Curnoe’s home in London, Ontario. And the bright red circle or wheel encompasses all.

Preceding Zone by 18 years and also available is the rare Curnoe 1962 hand made book The Walk. It was included recently in the important exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto and the subsequent tour across Canada. In this book Curnoe documented with stamp pad ink on paper one of his walks through London, ON.

Jaan Poldaas, Twelve Colour Pair Study 2, 1996, collage, 9 x 15

Jaan Poldaas creates a program of self-imposed rules for each body of work. In his book Abstract Art in Canada, Roald Nasgaard includes a section on Poldaas, in which he states,

Colour for Poldaas was ‘a separate attribute’ to focus on, much in the same way that Richard Long was concerned with length, Carl Andre with area, Richard Serra with weight… [The subject matter of the Twelve Colour Pair series, 1997, is] a kind of game of reward and punishment. It begins with the artist deciding on three shades each of four colours: red, green, blue and grey. The project is to make painting pairs in which each panel will be made up of four parallel bands of colour selected from the twelve options…In selecting and arranging the four colours of his first panel, he allowed himself to indulge his own tastes. [but] the strictest of rules are set in place to determine how the second panel would be composed to ensure that it was a kind of opposite… A constant struggle of will and law

We are located in Studio S27, which is in the SW corner corner of the lower level (if you enter by the west/front doors) or ground floor (if you enter from the east side or parking lot doors).