Exhibitions 2011

IDENTITY is a many - splendored thing
January 15 – March 6, 2011
Reception: Sunday, January 23, 2 – 4 p.m.
Lecture with Jean Maddison 1:00 p.m.

Jean Maddison’s body of work, ‘Exploring Eden’, is presented as altered digital imagery on large sheets of vinyl in light boxes with a series of silk screen prints. Using the Darwinian theory of evolution as an inspiration for her imagery she observes, magnifies, and distorts biological variations and evolving life forms.
“My work looks at the attempts by science to change the genetic heritage of the natural world.. we are on the verge of producing hybrid forms which could not exist in nature, opening up the possibility of new hybrid humans.”

Jean Maddison is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph in the computer graphics department. She received a Master of Arts degree from the Royal College of Art, London, U.K. Maddison has been exhibiting for twenty years in group and juried exhibitions in Europe and the United States as well as solo exhibitions in Canada. Her work is in over 35 public collections including the Art Bank of Canada, Art Gallery of Victoria, B.C, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London England.

Alejandro Arauz, is also interested in the concept of hybrid forms. Arauz has coined the phrase ‘Cantino’ to refer to his Canadian/ Latino culture and perspective as the product of migration. His interest in bi-cultural experience extends beyond his immediate family to what he calls the ‘fresh’ Diaspora. He questions how personalities are changed and redefined when one is transplanted to another culture. Using family photographs, mixed media, print-making, and performance Arauz explores identity through this hybrid art making process. In two video productions called ‘River Duality’ he makes the poignant comparison between the Rio Grande and the Grand River. He also integrates lithography, computer technology and drawing to continue the time honoured practice of print making. Alejandro Arauz has an MA in Fine Arts from Louisiana State University and a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Windsor. Arauz has exhibited in group and juried shows in the U.S. and Canada since 2005. Arauz was born in Managua, Nicaragua and now lives in Brantford, ON.

Community Gallery Space
Aliki Mikulich has been producing art work that reflects her interest in materials. Using Plexiglas boxes in her installation ‘Housing Project’ she creates a layered landscape of urban sprawl marking the identity of a city. Aliki Mikulich is a Brantford artist and has shown her work regionally, winning an Award of Merit and People’s Choice award at the Art Gallery of Mississauga Juried Exhibition in 2005. She has a BA from the University of Toronto in Art and Art History.

This exhibition is made possible through the support of the City of Brantford, the members of Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant and through the Ontario Arts Council.  

TRANSFORMATION, is an ambiguous condition
March 12 – May 15, 2011

The thread running through this exhibition is that of coming to terms with our lives whether it’s with the big emotions in life, and our socially repressive ways of handling these emotions, or the everyday mundane moments when we are trapped between the comedy and drama of life.

Corinne Duchesne
Ten foot mixed-media drawings on Mylar possess commanding images of animals and humans in disruptive environments. Duchesne combines her reclaimed sketches, layering, glazing, and beautifully drawn figurative work. Duchesne works with the smooth surface of the Mylar to make it glossy, slick and visceral. She manipulates it further with collaged elements, and a variety of dry and wet mediums. The studies that are installed near each of the larger works give the viewer insight into her working process. She makes note of associations and colours that she may use, rethink, and rework in the finished piece. Duchesne is a master of moving the viewer’s eye throughout the work, leaving just the right amount of clear Mylar to contrast with the darks and gesso lights while striking a balance of surprising colour contrasts. Her layering doesn’t stop – there’s so much to look at and react to in Duchesne’s work.

Born in Quebec and residing in Burlington, Corinne Duchesne graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design. She has studied in Florence, Italy and has been exhibiting her work for twenty-five years including the United States, Korea and Europe. She is a recent recipient of the OAC Visual Artist Mid-Career Grant.

Stephen Mazza
Stephen Mazza’s hybrid human/ rabbit sculptures are technically charming, combining tactility with integrated anatomy. Through his ceramic sculptures, Mazza takes us into the world of our mythological, fanciful heredity. We respond to his works with humour in these quiet disarming hybrid forms and with reserve as he touches on the dark side of the mundane, insufferable moments of life. Mazza brings us a body of work spanning four years that transform into a combination of figures with a narrative and installation dialogue.

Stephen Mazza has a BA in Art and Art History from the University of Toronto and graduated from Sheridan College. He has been exhibiting for the past ten years in group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include the Cambridge Gallery and Transit Gallery, Hamilton. He resides in Hamilton, ON

Community Gallery Space
Fleur-Ange Lamothe
Through a series of mixed media works, Brant County artist Fleur-Ange Lamothe investigates the transformation of life in Smooth Rock Falls. Born and raised in this Northern Ontario town, her family worked at the town’s pulp and paper mill for four generations. Lamothe’s work responds to the impact of the demolition of the industry. Fleur-Ange Lamothe’s work has been shown regionally and most recently in Havana Cuba in 2009 as part of a Canada-Cuba collective.

This exhibition is made possible through the support of the City of Brantford and the members of Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant. Fleur-Ange Lamothe thanks The Ontario Arts Council and Shannon Boakes, financial advisor for TD Waterhouse, Paris for their support.

PERMANENT COLLECTION EXHIBITION

June 25 – August 21, 2011

A selection of work from Glenhyrst Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection focuses on landscape from the 1850’s to current day interpretations.

Included in the summer exhibition are new acquisitions by Dundas artist Catherine Gibbon. Gibbon is an advocate for responsible environmental practices and through the medium of lithography, The Tire Fire Suite is documentation of the 1990 Hagersville fire that burned for 17 days and took  600 firefighters working day and night to extinguish. Her Benediction triptych gives an enlarged perspective; a work from a series of chalk pastels with accents of purple, bright oranges and ochre that reflect a beautiful frightening landscape. With Gibbon’s sensitivity to the pastel medium, she presents us with a history of our local environment by both exposing the impact of man-made disasters while praising man’s and nature’s efforts to contain our folly.

Gallery two contains the recent acquisitions of Anne Meredith Barry who was a painter and printmaker, born in Toronto, and who relocated to Newfoundland in 1986. The move changed her work and like Newfoundland artist David Blackwood, was also inspired by the rugged, rocky landscape.

Gallery 3 includes oil paint landscapes and seascapes by Robert Reginald Whale and his descendents.  R. R. Whale (1805-1887) was known as one of the first professional artists to work in the Grand River area. These works are a delight for the viewer for their Romantic approach to landscape and also to contemporary painters who can scrutinize the painterly quality of work by artists of this era who mixed their own pigments and used feathered brush strokes. David Milne and Brantford artist Ethelwyn Carlyle approach the Canadian landscape with water based paints and flowing impressionistic free lines to convey fleeting atmospheric imagery. A booklet accompanies the show that gives an added dimension to the history of these artists and their works.

In the Community Gallery Space, Daniel Hill’s mixed media paintings are a conversion of imagery originally stimulated from aboriginal symbolism. His new body of work has popping colour, grafitti scratches, and acrylic ink paint applied with squeegee bottles. The result is an inventive energized expression of man and nature. Hill studied at the Haliburton School of the Arts and has been the artist in residence at the Brantford Artsblock. Hill originally from Six Nations, has relocated to Hamilton.

This exhibition is made possible through the support of the City of Brantford, the members of Glenhyrst Art Gallery and through the Ontario Arts Council.

MATERIAL WORLD

August 27 – October 23, 2011

Exhibition Reception: Sunday, September 11, 1 – 4 p.m.

Artist talk at 1:00 p.m. with Robin Laws Field

Artists come together with their resourceful perspectives and media to consider the matter of our ‘Material World’.

Stephanie Cormier: The Reconceptualized Universe of The Anti-Logo League Girls

Photography based Stephanie Cormier sheds light on the problem of packaging, and advertising through her process of ‘digital weaving’ made possible by new technology. Cormier is creating new logos for the ‘logoless’ – “like a badge to a secret society.”Stephanie Cormier received her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design. She has had solo exhibitions in Toronto including Open Studio. Group exhibitions include the Gladstone Hotel, Pearson International Airport, Nuit Blanche and she received the first place award at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, 2008. She resides in Toronto.

Robin Laws Field: Surfaces

A renewed awakening to common surfaces has initiated a surge into abstraction for fibre artist Robin Laws Field. Inspired by her travels in exotic places like India, Italy, Spain and Turkey, she transforms photographic representations into textured abstract wall works with an array of innovative fibre techniques and mixed media applications.Robin Laws Field studied fibre arts at St. Lawrence College in Kingston ON.She has shown her work in group exhibitions with the Kingston Fibre Artists, The Canadian Quilter’s Association and with Threadworks, throughout Ontario, PEI and Newfoundland. Laws Field is a Kingston artist.

Arlene Laskey: Interstices

Arlene Laskey thinks of herself as a cartographer who maps energies in space. Laskey has diverse areas of interests in literature, science and
sociology that influence her art. Interstices refer to small or narrow openings that could relate to mapping physical space or to the space of time between events.Arlene Laskey is a Brantford artist who has been exhibiting in the region and has studied with Harold Klunder and Tom Dean amongst many others. She has an extensive background in arts education including Arts Curriculum Coordinator for the Brant County Board of Education, and the Arts Education Officer for the Province of Ontario.

Community Gallery SpaceBrantford Visual Artists Guild

We are pleased to present the Brant Visual Artists Guild in the Community Gallery Space and to collaborate with their mission of providing support, motivation and education for local artists. Members of the Guild will work in a small format to create new works that respond to the theme ‘Material World’.This exhibition is made possible through the support of the City of Brantford and the members of Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant.

NEW GROWTH
October 29 – December 22, 2011

Exhibition Reception: Sunday, November 6, 1 – 4 p.m.

Free Workshop in the Gallery: 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. with Xiaojing Yan

Xiaojing Yan’s migration from China to North America has informed her work and her own identity. Her outlook about freedom and individuality has evolved from the Cultural Revolution to socialism to a more open market in China to her new identity within North America’s democratic system. Using the traditional Chinese materials and techniques of lantern making she reinvents form, sensibility and presentation. Xiaojing Yan’s minimalist sculptures and installations are designed in geometrical shapes from tissue paper and natural reed. Her forms are rhythmical and suspended as though floating or casting shadows to extend their space. 

Xiaojing Yan received her BFA from the Nannjing Art Institute, Jiangsu, China and her MFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA. Her work has been in group exhibitions since 2004 including the Canadian Sculpture Centre, Toronto and she has had solo exhibitions including the IndexG Gallery, Toronto and The Phoenix Art Gallery, Nanjing, China. Lectures in Universities in China have included the subject “Transformation and Reinvention of Chinese Art in a New Century”.

Workshop: Sun. Nov. 6, 1- 2 p.m. in the gallery with Xiaojing Yan

This workshop is inspired by techniques of Chinese lantern making. Xiaojing Yan will modify the process for participants to create works that are similar to practices she uses for her own work in the exhibition. Free.

Community Gallery Space: Karen Piovaty

Paris Ontario artist Karen Piovaty uses language and visual arts to shed light on social issues. Within the exhibition theme, New Growth, she explores various mediums from digital arts to three-dimensional mixed media. Karen received her BFA from the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. Her work has been in group exhibitions since 2000 including Textual Visions at the Tucson/Pima Arts Council in Tucson. Her solo exhibitions include The Other Mother which was part of the Arizona Commission on the Arts two-year traveling exhibitions program and exhibited at the Brantford Arts Block, 2009.

This exhibition is made possible through the support of the City of Brantford and the members of Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant.