Janieta Eyre, The Mute Book, opening reception Thursday, May 16, 6 - 9pm at MULHERIN (Toronto)

Katharine Mulherin is very pleased to present The Mute Book, a body of photographs by Toronto-based artist Janieta Eyre. This exhibition takes place in conjunction with the CONTACT photography festival. 

"From the age of 14 to 17, I developed a disorder that made it impossible for me to speak. It had a curious effect on my development, because as a consequence many people gave up attempting to converse with me and instead began to behave as if I didn't exist. They no longer made eye contact with me nor reacted in anyway if I entered or exited a room. And in my silence I began to have strange thoughts: I began to wonder if I was in fact invisible.

The noises people made around me stopped requiring acknowledgement and became distant and indecipherable. Images filled my mind, but no words. And after a time, I became aware of a strange stillness in my centre.

It was during those years I learned identity is not something essential, but interchangeable. It is like a set of clothes.

Some years ago I was looking through an alchemical text and I came on a reference to the Mutus Liber. It was published in France in the 17^thCentury and is a book of images which outlines a method of manufacturing the Philosopher's stone- or in more contemporary terms, a method of achieving enlightenment.

I also stumbled on an old black and white photograph of a person dressed half as a man and half as a woman. The clothes, makeup and hair had been carefully and beautifully divided. I had a powerful feeling of recognition, and this is what made me begin to take the photographs in this series. "

-Janieta Eyre, 2012

View more information here.

Balint Zsako in the Globe and Mail

Balint Zsako at the Gladstone Hotel

A mini-survey of recent works; a parade of Technicolor Gorey-esque perversity and phantasmagoria. (1214 Queen St. W, until April 28)

Bill Burns screening at the International Festival of Films on Art, Montreal

The Dogs and Boats and Airplanes Children's Choir Video Sessionswill be screened at the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) Montréal. Salle Claude Jutra, Cinemateque Québecoise on March 22, 2013 at 18:30. Directed by Bill Burns. Produced by Krys Verrall. Other Dogs and Boats and Airplanes events: Dogs and Boats and Airplanes Children's Choir (100 voice concert version) Junction Arts Festival Tasmania, Australia August 30 - Sept 3, 2013 Dogs and Boats and Airplanes Photo Series (version 2013) Helsinki Photo Biennial Helsinki, Finland March/April 2014 more: The Dogs and Boats and Airplanes Choir has recently recorded a 33 rpm LP pressed at EKS MFG in Brooklyn, New York (2012) produced by Big Pond Small Fish, Toronto. (Available at Art Metropole, Toronto, New Museum, New York, William English Editions, London, and Third Drawer Down, Sydney)

Alika Cooper at Tracy Williams, Ltd, New York

Alika Cooper
Twin Lens

21 March - April 25 2013

Opening reception: 21 March, 6-8 pm

TRACY WILLIAMS, LTD

521 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

info@tracywilliamsltd.com

Alika Cooper, Chain, 2013

Tracy Williams, Ltd is pleased to announce Twin Lens, an exhibition of recent works by Alika Cooper. The artist's first solo presentation in New York, the show is comprised of Cooper's textile-based compositions. Heat-activated adhesive and an iron are used to adhere fabric shapes to the support, slowly building up the composition in a method similar to painting, creating space, shadow and definition. This technique, gleaned from the artist's mother and aunts, all of whom are avid quilters and crafters, connects Cooper's work to a long tradition of female handiwork. The variance between the individual patterns of the fabrics push and pull, giving the picture plane a startling depth. This tension is echoed in the contrast between the homey feel of the mass-produced fabrics and the frequently sensual and sexual bodies they form.

The works invoke and transform photographic representations of women, in particular, the work of Helmut Newton, Lisette Model, Umbo (Otto Umbehr) and Man Ray. For example, Stretch (2013) is based upon a 1941 photograph by Model of a reclining woman on the beach. In Cooper's piece, the image is cropped and flipped horizontal, and this shift in composition gives the figure a more insistent presence. The weft and weave of the fabric creates a paradoxical affect of revealing and concealing, both suggesting the sturdiness of the body it delineates and rendering it opaque. Like the title suggests, the work in Twin Lens seeks to create a doubling and reframing of these iconic images of women to create a space that is more tenable: "Using a set of impossible perspectives, I try to make the perspectives possible again."

Alika Cooper (b. Guam 1979) received her MFA and BFA from CCA San Francisco in 2006 and 2002 respectively. Cooper has exhibited in the United States and Europe with solo exhibitions at venues such as Night Gallery (LA), Eleanor Harwood Gallery (SF, 2011); Hamish Morrison Galerie in Berlin, (2010); and Galleria Studio Legale in Rome, Italy (2007). Other exhibitions include To Live and Paint in LA at The Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2012); Holding Onto Something Slippery, LVL3, Chicago, IL (2012); On Forgery at LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (2012); Gray Day at the Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles, CA (2011). Cooper has been written about in Artforum, LA Weekly, Huffington Post, Daily Candy, SF Weekly, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Daily Serving, Chicago Now, and Frieze. Cooper lives and works in Los Angeles.

MIke Swaney at Noestudio in Madrid

": ·)"

Opening Friday February 15th at 21:00 h 

February 6 - March 7, 2013 

For the first time, Mike Swaney Canadian artist presents his work in Madrid. Although related to previous work, this time Swaney is fully immersed in the paint to address the concept of Post Internet art.

"•)", a computer lopsided smile, title of the show, acts as a starting point from where Mike takes another step against the collages in which he had been working so far.
exposure and residence of the artist are the result of a collaborative project between art space Delimbo, Seville, and noestudio.

Moving to painting on canvas internet codes , Swaney opens a new line of exploration. To do this, working from the imagination, as opposed to an element using photographic images, and intentionally go feed channels as Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut, Outsider Art and Internet art . In this new period reflects his interest in the idea of expression and OutsiderArt.

In his work introduces computer icons, navigation bars, symbology and signs used online. They accumulate and become abstract elements that build, structure and constrain the surface of the painting. Emoticons, language chats and blogs are now noticeable references. The faces of the figures are simplified and remember these signs: •) which Swaney, not without irony, often used as a signature, as an external link on his personal website, on your blog and in your email. The browser toolbar acts as a frame around the contents of the box to raise questions about the online life needs and how we make a computer screen becomes our lens through which we see life.

Mike Swaney (1978, Kimberley, British Columbia, Canada) was formed in Capilano University, Vancouver. Made exhibitions in Brussels, New York, Miami, Toronto or Vancouver , among others. And has participated in group exhibitions in Europe, USA and Latin America. In addition, scholarships have been awarded as the Fountainhead Residency, Miami, 2008 or the recently Residency concedidada by CCA Andratx, Mallorca, you will enjoy from June 2014. Currently working with galleries Alice Gallery ,Brussels , Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Miami ; Delimbo Gallery, Sevilla , and Katherine Mulherin, New York - Toronto .

view more information here. 

John Dickson at Museum London and University of Waterloo Art Gallery

John Dickson in IMAGING DISASTER 

Museum London

January 19 - March 31, 2013 // opening February 1, 8pm

Tour the exhibition with curators Cassandra Getty and Adam Lauder on Sunday, February 10 at 1:00 pm

Organized by curators Cassandra Getty and Toronto scholar Adam Lauder, this exhibition stages an encounter between historical and contemporary visions of environmental and social crisis. At the heart of this dialogue is the work of Canadian historical painter Joseph Légaré (1795-1855), a Quebec artist whose work challenges common-sense notions of landscape, time and adversity by re-engaging with scenes of calamity. Légaré's striking disaster paintings, presented for the first time as a focus of a museum exhibition, set the stage for contemporary artists' interventions within the imagery of catastrophe and activist calls-to-arms.

Political upheaval and public anxiety inform artistic depictions of nature's wrath; likewise art documents emergencies that are man-made. Far removed from the heroic and pristine Canadian landscapes of the Group of Seven, the imagery assembled for Imaging Disaster―including works by contemporary artists such as Martin Golland, John Dickson, Fern Helfand, Iain BAXTER&, Kelly Wallace, and several others―projects a vision of landscape that is thoroughly mediated by technology, distribution networks, and the perpetual threat of tragedy posed by human intervention in the environment.

See more information here. 

John Dickson in NetherMind

University of Waterloo Art Gallery 

January 10 - March 9, 2013

Opening reception: Thursday, January 10 from 5:00–8:00 pm

Tom Dean, John Dickson, Catherine Heard,

Greg Hefford, Mary Catherine Newcomb,

Reinhard Reitzenstein, Lyla Rye, Max Streicher

The NetherMind collective organized four influential exhibitions in Toronto from 1991–1995, in which the original group of eleven artists focused on creating sculptures and installations in response to unique post-industrial environments. The current group of eight artists has remained individually active in the Canadian and international art scene, but it is a shared sense of camaraderie and affinity for making works that address aspects of the physical that brings them together again. Their sculptures and installations tend to be interactive or experiential and appeal directly to the senses through tactility, sound, light or movement. The group also shares a sense of dark humour, absurdity and perverse playfulness in the way that they juxtapose unexpected materials, forms and concepts. For this reunion tour, the group will debut new works made in direct response to the spaces at UWAG, ironically, the original site of Waterloo Manufacturing.

See more information here. 

Carl D'Alvia in The Idea of Realism // L’idea del realismo

Carl D'Alvia & Christian Caliandro / The Idea of Realism-L'Idea del Realismo / Show-Mostra American Academy in Rome/Jan.30-Feb.27/ Opening Jan. 30, 6-9:00 PM

“The liberation?” Berta said. The old man seemed as if he were looking for the best answer, looking in front of himself with happy eyes. “Of every one of us” he answered. “How, of everyone?” “Of everybody, in his own life.” “And our country? And the world?” “Obviously” the old mansaid. “Let it be of everybody, and it will be greater in the world.”                  ELIO VITTORINI, MEN AND NOT MEN (1945)

The question of realism has re-positioned itself in recent months at the center of both the attention and the discourse of the public: in the territory of contemporary art, it is still an object of misunderstanding and conceptual superimpositions. The representation of the real is defused, by too much time, by the same common fear that should set it free: it’s trapped between escaping and the removal of uneasiness. Instead of thematizing this unease, this extraordinary culture in fact continues to dedicate itself to the elaboration of a parallel life utilizing nostalgia ( “the beautiful times of yesteryear”) and consolation (“look, it’s not really that bad”). Rediscovering realism means, for example, means finally adopting a point of view diametrically opposed to that which for years we’ve been accustomed to define as “self-referential”. This has meant essentially negating the existence of external reality (societal, historical, imaginary, economical: the whole life). The difference is in the concepts of responsibility and experience: you are disposable – as an artwork, as an author – to the reality that surrounds you and to critique it; or you are totally compliant in front of it, to the point that you exclude it from your gaze. That which changes radically therefore is the approach, the “disposition” towards the world: trusting in the ability to understand it, and that through this understanding one might produce a change.

The artists included in this group show articulate in different and personal ways this attitude towards reality. Carl D’Alvia has worked for years on the subtle blurred edge between reality and representation, between object and simulation, between permanence and ephemerality, suggesting new effects and states of reality. In the painting of Pesce Khete, on the other hand, materials—pictorial, cultural, autobiographical—don’t collide, but rather blend and condense in an intimate and emotive narration. In Jackie Saccoccio's Portraits, the result initially conveys a human head, or at least a central mass, but finally suggests exactly the opposite - a void, a system dragging over emptiness. The creative world of Ward Shelley is dominated by the hierarchical organization of materials: the potentially infinite archive of information, dates, names, cultural phenomena, temporal sequences, historical processes and the territory that his artistic Infographics choose as a zone of action and space of intervention. Giuseppe Stampone, has been working for years on his project “Global Education”: an ambitious work of collective re-education, in which spectators become transported from the realm (safe, protected, sterilized) of contemporary art to the “outside” of the mediatized reality. The work of Gian Maria Tosatti is a continuous attempt to fasten on to and capture the fleeting and indefinable unease that affects us all, and that is the true heart of the contemporary, the zeitgeist. Nari Ward composes his installations through a system of gathering and transforming objects and materials from his urban neighborhood.