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NEWS
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Canada's nouveaux riches bank on art http://www.theglobeandmail.com DAVID PARKINSON From Thursday's Globe and Mail April 24, 2008 |
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Art of Nature 2008 is a fundraising sale of Canadian art inspired by the natural world – or by the degradation of the natural world. Gallery at 129 Ossington is pleased to have four artists donate their work, Rob Croxford, Ben Darrah, Laurie De Camillis and Ila Kellermann. Last year, Art of Nature contributed over $100,000 to Canadian environmental organizations, a splendid result for a first-time event Art of Nature will take place in conjunction with the Green Living Show on April 25, 2008. The Green Living Show is being held at the Direct Energy Centre, Exhibition Place. For more information http://www.artofnature.ca/ |
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Mirana Zuger - interview with CBC radio March 3rd Mirana Zuger recently did a fantastic interview with CBC radio, which aired this morning(March 3rd). please check it out at www.cbc.ca/ottawamorning/art.html
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Ben Darrah - Disruptive Pattern The Globe and Mail / Visual Arts Review Kingston-based painter Ben Darrah makes largely amiable and, at first glance, guileless paintings which nevertheless harbour at their hearts a lurking agenda: that the Canadian identity we have largely come to accept and depend on is - no surprise here - a gradually accumulating construct made up of our own fantasies of cottage-country open-handedness, a north-woods innocence, an innate, lawn-chair wisdom and a lurking notion that, given all those upright mountains, churchy forests and pristine lakes, God must surely be on our side. Darrah's paintings are far from carping or insistent about these matters. Indeed, they are rather on the pretty and languid side: The rural beauty they seem to purvey, their stencilled deck-chairs and picnic tables, and graphic pine trees in outline, appear at first only to embody a sort of national pastoralism. But then you notice that Darrah's implements of ease (the picnic tables, the folding chairs, the bonfires, the telescope aimed up at a non-threatening night sky) are, after all, stencilled, not hand-painted - and exist, therefore, at some remove from us. And the sky that the telescope gazes up to is, in fact, a sheet of camouflaged fabric. And the deep-woods green against which the deck-chair and the pine tree are placed (in the picture Blue Outdoors) is not a heavy scrim of forest but, rather, a carpet of Astroturf. Even Darrah's chickadees - an image recently imported into his work - are stencilled: a mere reminiscence of bird-song. |
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Mae Leong - Red The Globe and Mail / Visual Arts Review Mae Leong's exhibition, Red, is best enjoyed up close. Stand too far away and it begins to look merely decorative: All these panels of red and gold can seem perilously close to the decor of a well-appointed Chinese restaurant. Up close, it's a different story. At close range, you can see that Leong's Red fields are varied, layered, deeply textured and minutely teeming with bodies of rich cultural information - especially as derived from her use of traditional woodblock printing, on mulberry paper, of mythological symbols. Her opulent employment of gold leaf - which she first destroys, crumbles, and then rubs into her surfaces - further enriches her pictures. The earliest works in the exhibition (from 2007) tend to be based on simple arrangements of vertical or horizontal stripes. The newer work, completed only very recently, is mostly based on the geometricized shape (a circle with a square in the middle) of the ancient Chinese coin. "I integrate the heritage of my homeland in Western art," Leong writes. |
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Mirana Zuger - Vie En Rose Congratulations Mirana for your exhibition in Zagreb, Croatia. Marisall Gallery Oct 27 - Nov 17 2007 www.marisall.com |
Centre Of The City Magazine Sept/Oct 2007 issue - Artist Profile by Karen Zabawa |
The nighttime underbelly of the Gardiner Expressway is not the stuff of tourism brochures, but in a Rob Croxford painting, this rather unlovely scene becomes a magical urban landscape..... |
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Where Magazine - Toronto October 2007 Issue - Editors' Picks: by Craig Moy
OCTOBER 3 to 27 In Where the Grass is Greener, Rob Croxford’s paintings put an ironic spin on environmental issues. The Toronto artist’s natural and urban landscapes, such as Conservation/Conversation, repurpose famous quotations as urgent calls to action, while incorporating iconography reminiscent both of optimistic, vintage advertising campaigns and agitative propaganda. |
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Live With Culture / NOW Magazine September 6 -12 2007 Live City Seldom-noticed cityscapes of downtown Toronto are captured in the paintings of Stewart Jones. The back alleys and scaffolding he depicts in his paintings are from the second storey up. It is as though on an everyday stroll to the corner store Jones happened to glance upward at the mundane, take a picture in his mind and then transfer this personal view on canvas creating something commonplace yet utterly captivating. http://www.livewithculture.ca/content/view/full/16126/ |
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Laurie De Camillis at Rideau Hall Thought you would be very pleased to know that the Laurie de Camillis painting has been placed at Rideau Hall. It is the secondary bedroom of the Oval Suite that is used by visiting Heads of State, Royalty, the Queen, etc. I know that Laurie will be delighted with this information. As you know, the Canadiana Fund Art Collection is for display and does rotate, it might be moved to another location sometime in the future. But, for the moment, that is where it is currently on display. |
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Live With Culture / NOW Feb 15 -21 2007 |
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A Panel of Experts/A Jury of Peers Amanda White's comical paintings are the rabbit alternative to a kangaroo court. Her "innocent" bunnies give clueless critiques. The canvas is a platform for discussion as the playful illustrative work has a political edge that challenges the viewer to ask, what constitutes authority to judge -- a mere title or simply the support of cohorts? |
The Globe and Mail / Visual Arts Review |
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| There is clearly too little space left here for an adequate discussion of a handsome exhibition by Kingston-based painter Ben Darrah at this brand new gallery, rather generically called Gallery at 129 Ossington. Darrah’s exhibition, which is titled Sense of Place, is made up of paintings mostly celebrating the joys of the outdoor life. (Although they are painted with acrylics on canvas or fabric, they sometimes appear to be painted on awning material or the stuff they sling on lawn chairs.) The images that inform Darrah’s beautifully painted canvases tend to be presented small at the centre of expansive grounds, usually striped. Delve; for example, offers a yellow deck chair on a scintillating green – striped ground. Respite shows a tiny camp fire – green logs and green flames on a greener ground. My favorite of his paintings here, though, is his Explorer – a white ladder isolated in the centre of a painting all in brushy reds. I love ladders. |
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