Categories

Opening Reception

Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Opening Reception

April 29, 2011 @ 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm

FREE

KAREN HENDERSON| SOLID LIGHT

In most of Karen Henderson’s recent work there has been some kind of condensing/conflating/cross-indexing of the way that time is registered visually. There have been two inter-related main trajectories: one is an on-going series of consecutive photographic images (often film or video stills) printed onto clear acrylic, which are then sandwiched together to form a solid block, inside which all of the stacked images are visibletime as volume. The other trajectory involves site-specific, gallery installations, which usually document the gallery itself. This reflexive relationship between the work and the space it documents complicates the viewing experience, shifting it towards an area of experimentation for the viewer, by collapsing where you are and what you are seeing into the same thing.

Solid Light (YYZ Walls, North 20 minutes, South 24 minutes, East 26 minutes, West 26 minutes) encompasses both these areas of concern. In the middle of the YYZ gallery is a plinth, on top of which 4 acrylic rectangular blocks are placed so that each of their inside corners are touching. Each one is made up of 26 sheets of acrylic fused together. Each sheet has a photographic panorama printed on it a composite image of the gallery wall it is placed in front of each panorama recording an array of consecutive moments in the walls temporal existence.

The second part of the title, YYZ Walls, North 20 minutes, South 24 minutes, East 26 minutes, West 26 minutes, refers to the time it took to take all of the photographs in all of the panoramas that make up the block of a given wall.

How more-past to more-present relates to the spatial coordinates of the blocks depends on from what perspective you view them. You could think of the construction formed by the four blocks as a kind of maquette of the gallery the space in the middle of the blocks is about 1/20th the size of the gallery floor. Looking through an acrylic block towards the centre of the maquette, the acrylic sheet closest to you contains the photographic images shot furthest away in time to the present time in which you’re viewing it. From this point-of-view you are looking through the acrylic from less recent moments of the gallery wall behind you to more recent. If you were to imagine yourself standing in the middle of the maquette looking through a block to the wall it documents, you would be looking through layered records of time from the most recent past to the perpetual succession of present moments that the actual gallery wall exists in; virtual thens and real nows fusing together in a continuous all-at-once.

KAREN HENDERSON is a visual artist working in time-based media, photography, sculpture and site-specific installation. Henderson grew up in Scotland, leaving there to attend the Central School of Art and later Camberwell School of Art in London, England after which she completed her MFA at the University of Victoria, British Columbia in 1988. She has lived and worked in Toronto since 1989 and has exhibited work in Canada and internationally at various galleries including the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Power Plant.

_

LAUREN HALL| SAIL FAST CLOUD-SHADOWS AND SUNBEAMS

Lauren Hall’s sculptures and installations examine travel, wonder and wilderness through proxies of touristic sites. Her exhibition Sail Fast Cloud-Shadows and Sunbeams imagines coloured sand, soap, and gold lighting panels as sites of natural phenomena. Humour is important in her work, and confusing irony with earnestness seems to be a central problem. She considers stereotypes, clichs, and accepted ideas of the outdoors through sunsets, mirages, and the northern lights. Approaching her work the way one would tackle the set of a school play, game show, or diorama, Hall offers a view that is mostly synthetic, half real, and quite far from the awe-inspiring sites she signals to.

LAUREN HALL received her BA in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo in 2006. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally with recent exhibitions at Modern Fuel, Kingston; Peak Gallery, Toronto; Cambridge Galleries, Cambridge, and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including an emerging artist grant from Ontario Arts Council. She was recently awarded a fellowship to attend the Vermont Studio Center and is a former artist in residence at Ox-Bow School of the Arts. Reviews of her work have appeared in Canadian Art Online, The Toronto Star, C Magazine, and The Globe and Mail.


DAVID COURT+JOSH THORPE| AROUND YYZ

YYZUNLIMITED invites artists to imagine and reinvent YYZ as a site of opportunity through a series of interventions. These interventions engage potential sites outside of YYZ’s regular programming. YYZ is pleased to introduce an audio intervention by David Court and Josh Thorpe.

David Court and Josh Thorpe present the third in a series of five audio tours of the area surrounding YYZ. This walk features a conversation with transportation engineer Margaret Briegmann and architect James Brown, starting at 401 Richmond, heading south to the lake in honor of the approaching summer.

This walk is part of the year-long project, Around YYZ, for the YYZUNLIMITED programme. These audio walks are informal, meandering conversations, offering a casual but analytic inquiry, beginning at YYZ and moving out from there. Each lasts approximately an hour and can be encountered in three ways: 1) on an MP3 player borrowed from YYZ (allows the listener to walk the tour while listening), 2) over a set of speakers at the threshold to YYZ, and 3) on the YYZ website. Taking YYZ as the point of departure, the walks extend the mode of attention of the gallery into its surrounding contexts, seeking to draw attention and add complexity to the experience of public space.

DAVID COURT is an artist and writer living in New York. He has exhibited solo and collaborative projects across Canada and in New York, with current and upcoming projects for Printed Matter (with Josh Thorpe) and the 2011 CAFKA Biennial. David was involved as a contributor for the publication ‘Gordon Lebredt: Nonworks 1975 2008,’ co-published by the Center for Contemporary Canadian Art and Plug In Editions. He has written reviews and catalogue texts for publication in Canada, China and the US, including C Magazine, Fillip, and Art Papers. In 2008 he participated in the residency Making Artistic Inquiry Visible’ at the Banff Center. David holds a Masters in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2009) and a BFA from NSCAD University (2006).

JOSH THORPE is an artist and writer living in Toronto. He has a Master’s in Visual Studies from University of Toronto and he teaches at Ontario College of Art and Design and U of T. His work has been shown in Canada, the US, and Europe. His involvement in publishing has produced interviews, articles, and books, including Dan Graham Pavilions: A Guide (Art Metropole) and a monograph on the unrealized proposals of Gordon Lebredt (CCCA and Plug In ICA).

Opening Reception
Friday, April 29, 2011.
8:00 PM 10:00 PM
YYZ


Details

Date:
April 29, 2011
Time:
8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Cost:
FREE
Event Category:

Venue

YYZ
140-401 Richmond St. W.
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8 Canada
Phone:
416-598-4546