Past Exhibitions Contemporary Drawing, Sculpture and Works on Paper

 exhibitions in the drawers in the gallery commentaries artists catalogs contact

Headbones Gallery + The Drawers

The Drawers, specializes in drawing and contemporary works on paper with a small component of sculpture. If there is workmanship with integrity, evidence of the hand, and we respond to the impetus, we'll give the works a drawer.

The Drawers manages the storage, exhibition, and sales of drawings and works on paper of more than one-hundred visual artists in the gallery. Each artist is featured in a catalogue produced by Rich Fog Micro Publishing with a written commentary by Julie Oakes. Collectors have access to about one-thousand catalogued works in the gallery at any given time.

Headbones Gallery is moving forward with a group of artists under the aesthetic of NeoPriest, an acronym that stands for New Pop Realists Intellectually Engaged in Story Telling.

 The Headbones Awards   Headbones Anthologies   A Traditional Wiggly  

 Marie Arcand , Sangito Bigelow, Robert Bigelow - Alive With Possibility  -  May 4, June 12, 2024

There is wabi-sabi intonation in the clay works and works on paper made in this last year by Marie Arcand. Japanese philosophy is pertinent.

She has made over fifty small clay bowls. Each can be held in the hand and while supported in the palm can receive liquid, an intimate drinking cup. But place the curved bottom on a flat surface and it will tip, roll, and likely spill before eventually coming to rest.

The ink drawings are equally difficult to pin down with energetic pen, brush and pencil marks that are flowing and expressive yet determined like cursive script.

The black and white drawings have a sense of immediacy to them like the pages of an artist journal where diaristic sketching overtakes time. The larger watercolor works maintain this feeling of record keeping, partially secretive and yet shared, left open to meaning, so that the reading is many leveled, poetic. Her landscapes are evocative, misty vistas, sublime settings, sky ghosting land, storms brewing as clouds part. Humans exist as auras, pulsing connections. A black scribble that nears obliteration was inspired by a dead duck. The works - wabi-sabi. 
Marie leads but her back is covered. Works of the late Robert Bigelow and their son, Sangito Bigelow, are exhibited alongside.

The late Robert Bigelow is well known in the valley as having been a prolific and accomplished artist. He was drawing and painting until his last day. Alongside Arcand, and in honor of their thirty-three-year marriage with its ground swell of art, the latest works of Robert Bigelow show a creativity that explored the potential of greatness in overlooked details.

Deconstructing older works, and reassembling the pieces, these drawings combined with collage became shallow reliefs, a combination of architectonic and organic shapes using rich Veronese colors, The Bigelow touch lives on.

Sangito Bigelow is the apple that fell near, into his generation, one where wabi-sabi is explored through Grunge, Pop, graffiti, street murals and tattoos. Practicing the visual arts in a manner that evolved away from the modernist white cube and onto any surface that was available, including one's body - his imagery sharply, wittily and critically attests to the cornucopia of daily experience.

JULIAN DIX and CADILLAC BOB - Provenance  -  Jan 18, 2024 - March 9, 2024

‘Provenance’ is a word often used in relation to fine arts, referring to the labels often found on the back of a painting that serve to document where and when the work has been shown. The dictionary definition of provenance is “place of origin”.

The exhibitions opening on January 18 at Headbones Gallery with a public reception from 4 -7 PM are actually two solo exhibitions - different styles, different mediums - that meet over the concept of provenance.

The exhibition titled DIX: Julian Dix, Ursus Dix, Jan Dix and Otto Dix places the origin of the current and very contemporary work by Julian Dix against the backdrop of two generations who were also involved in painting. Provenance becomes the back story to Julian Dix’s paintings through examples of his father’s, uncle’s and grandfather’s work. Ranging from still life paintings where the sensitivity to composition and tone brings the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi to mind, to the super realistic elements of more surreal imagery, to an abstract-pop styling that leaves the interpretation of what we are seeing open for discussion - Julian Dix upends the apple cart. Even as his still life paintings begin to wobble and dissolve and his surreal works link into universal dreams that seem hauntingly familiar, Julian Dix doesn’t let his masterful hand relax. As a result, the paintings are impressive and engender respect at both the flawless handling of his medium and the psychological implications of the subject matter.

And as to the generational provenance? Julian Dix’s father, Ursus Dix, was with the National Gallery of Canada as their principal art restorer and an artist in his own right. His uncle Jan Dix was a a goldsmith, silversmith and sculptor. Julian Dix’s grandfather was Otto Dix, the German painter whose paintings reflected his shock and disgust at the brutality of both world wars. Headbones Gallery will be including works by Ursus, Jan and Otto Dix as provenance that ekes through the generations to the current paintings fresh from the palette of Julian Dix.

At closer range, the provenance of the works by Cadillac Bob, who for this exhibition is returning to his art name, Hessiah Nettles, is routed right here in the Okanagan performer’s visual saga of a life immersed in music. With his focus on rockabilly (derived from country music and rhythm and blues), Cadillac Bob is an adept guitar player who has brushed shoulders and played riffs with many of the great names of our time. He has stories of Mississippi Fred Mc Dowell, Johnny Shines, BB King, John Lee Hooker and Howling Wolf that give glimpses into the energy that was present in such clubs of the seventies as the Vancouver Cellar Club. What may come as a surprise to many who have heard Cadillac Bob on stage is that he went from two years at The Kootenay School of Art studying commercial art, 1966-68, to the Vancouver School of Art in 1969 where he became a competent printmaker producing a series of lithographs. Headbones Gallery is also bringing to light his photographs, chosen from an extensive archive, that capture inside and privileged glimpses of the charismatic lives of musicians behind the scenes as well as in the limelight. Add to this provenance a spell of working as an animator with Gary Larsen (Far Side) and a diverse collection of his commercial art output. Cadillac Bob AKA Hessiah Nettles may even augment the visuals with a musical interlude.

 ROBERT DMYTRUK & HEIDI THOMPSON - Inherrent Boundlessness  -  Nov 18, 2023 - Jan 13, 2024

“Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from the visual references in the world” (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) Yet the validated definition in The Random House Dictionary yields “ a style of painting in which paint is applied in an apparently random manner producing images that may or may not have  reference to forms exterior to the picture”.

Robert Dmytruk (Summerland) and Heidi Thompson (Vernon) have long term practices dedicated to abstraction, each different from the other in form and composition. They both have used a full spectrum of colors as well as the gray scale. The source of this freedom, the creative spark, differs in relation to the specificity of individuality. And it is this initial action, in the decision to act in a specific way towards the material that embodies the phenomenology, the unique object which is the art piece.

 

 HITHER & YON - Okanagan Group Exhibition  -  June 17 - August 19, 2023

Embedded in philosophy since a worldwide (what a concept!) pandemic raised a specter of the possibility of being unable to share what artists create, separated as we were, there is now a sense of gratitude. The opportunity to appreciate the latest works from our valley (and slightly beyond), in the company of the artists, is welcomed. We also have a surprising increase in the number of artists for during that time of disappearance, new artworks began to appear, and the output is even deeper, truer and more specifically here than ever. We have been and come back. We are more familiar with the hither and yon.

Artworks are ephemeral, despite the diligent work of museums and collectors to keep them safe long after the makers pass. Matter disintegrates and our bodies can leave before the artwork supporting the notion that making art may be a drive towards immortality. With the awareness of a new age, hesitatingly called the Anthropocene, the impacts of human endeavors have been revealed to carry consequences beyond historical imagining or contemporary ken. Yet if anything defines the uniqueness of the human condition, it must be the persistent and ongoing spark to do, to make, to create. Fashioning through justifying words, around concepts as vague as 'progress' or 'mankind', we have pushed in a direction equally unknowable (ahead) while we experience the air and the waters losing their natural authenticity in the stir of our wake.

A daunting haunting but … there is ART. The artist makes with everything or nothing in mind, bowed by the responsibility of being or inspired by the open-ended freedom that has been held as a masthead within the arts.

Does art just add to the bulk of the load or take some weight off? Art is a response to the call to make – a thought blooms into an idea and the invitation to make is accepted. Then the art piece must be seen, passed on in order to connect, from one wandering, wondering pilgrim to another. And since this relatively small geographical area contains a potent well of creativity, we present these insertions into the milieu of things as necessary impulses of visual heat.

Art brings us into the company of angels expelled from a bowdlerizing beyond, shining and attractive by sheer will – chutzpah from hither and yon.

 VENICE HAS THE BLUES - Alana Pierini & DEALING IN PULSES - Julie Oakes  -  May 5 - June 15, 2023

With concert by Lee Holmes and the Beautitones

GIZMO - Chuck St John & Steve Mennie and  DITTO - Ortansa Moraru  -  March 25 - April 30, 2023

There is an implied logic in the way we approach life (there has to be in order to relate to each other) but as if there is a door open at the far reaches of things-as-they-are, there is a light beyond that opening illuminating ideas outside the room of logic.  By willing consciousness towards this light, change brings us into this future room where objects that have never-before-been come to exist. It sounds like a fairytale, but it is the process of life, moving from earliest times through centuries until the Renaissance, then to the industrial age followed by modernity where, notably, the idea of ‘progress’ became the primary driver. The metaphor of passage can also be applied to the creative process.

GIZMOS resides in that realm that moves from the past into the future. Gizmos, those things that we don’t quite have a word for yet and which is so ephemeral that the dictionary definition is just “gadget, thing”. ‘Gadget’ tends to diminish and what exactly is a ‘thing’? That’s a broad term that could be, well, just about anything. Extend the concept into the act of making an art piece and (since art can be just about anything or just about anything can be called art) GIZMOS is a good title for these works by Steve Mennie whose studio is in Salmon Arm and Chuck St. John, who lives and works in Lee Creek. Each artist gathers material from the jetsam of their complicated lives and makes it into art. And Ditto for Ortansa Moraru, drawing ‘things’ in her Toronto studio; hers is flotsam of the mind and these floating bits of drawn things are currently swishing and swirling from Ortansa’s head onto paper. 

HEART - aj jaeger, Pedie Wolfond & Cecilia Stelini -  February 5 - March 19, 2023

Although the origin is unclear, one of the first known heart symbols was found on a Roman coin depicting the seed of a silphium plant. Silphium was employed as a spice or herbal medicine where it was touted as both a form of birth control and as a protective healer and was so used that it became extinct. Ivy leaves or the leaves of the waterlily have also been cited as the first heart images along with a myriad of notions around breasts, the head of the penis and buttocks.

The heart as an organ was accurately described by Aristotle (384-322 BC) as two chambers linked, folding over each other. This model can be extrapolated into the heart shape we know today. Aristotle also first knowledged that the accurate functioning of the heart is the very basis for on-going life.

What of the equation between the heart and love, that most esteemed of emotions, manifest in a variety of forms between humans. In the twelfth century the Sacred Heart began to appear in art, often flaming, shining with divine light and encircled by thorns which indicated the Divine Passion of Christ. Many early images while being based on the physical heart became stylized more akin to the heart shape of today. The literature on the Immaculate Heart of Mary, refers to the inner life of Mary, her joys and sorrows, virtues and hidden perfections which manifested as virginal love, motherly love, and a boundless love for all mankind.

Extrapolated versions of heart iconography are now commonplace from the relentless emojis that pepper messages today to the ubiquitous joys and pressures of Valentine Day.  But ‘love for all mankind’ as a guiding social, philosophical or political principle seems to have been demoted. The personal drive for love as in friendship, family love or the ‘love’ desired in coupling has remained a constant goal, partially as a form of survival, but somewhere in the move from a religious to a secular state the idea of love for all mankind has been misplaced – as Tina Turner sang “What’s love but a second-hand emotion”.

Yet the heart is still deemed worthy of artistic attention although it has become banal, pop and somewhat common, strewn across the internet, merchandise and graphics. Easily drawn by young and old, the heart is a depiction of a ‘good feeling’. The heart as a form was also eschewed by artists for many years as ‘too cute’ until Jim Dine, muscly abstract painter and self-described romantic, used the symbol as a template for exploring colour, texture, composition – tools of the trade – and unavoidably association with the implied meaning and graphic relief of the commonly understood symbol.

Then there is the other side to Heart - the wounds and scars. Bonaventure wrote: "Who is there who would not love this wounded heart?”. Just as the loss of valentine love can create a break in spirit, the sense of life-giving, growth and love associated with the steady pumping of blood, miraculous as it is, also contains the opposite - the cessation of the heart’s functions and ultimately, death.  The significance of the heart shape is, indeed, all encompassing.

Julianna Joos - Mutant Melodies & Alan Glicksman - Contents of the Green Box  -  Nov 19 - Dec 31, 2022

Julian Joos, a printmaker who has expanded her practice to include Jacquard tapestries, appears to have developed an exculpatory relationship to the grey-headed flying foxes (vegetarian bats) during a residency at Art space in Sydney, Australia in 2008. She came back to her home and studio in Quebec and the pesky leaf-eaters found themselves memorialized. Headbones Gallery will have a diptych of these large tapestries and two depicting close ups of the intriguing giants at Headbones Gallery November 19 to December 31. The images on the tapestries are close to life size. Julianna Joos doesn’t tackle her subjects lightly and it is partially the story behind each of the series that adds body to the works.

Alan Glicksman is a storyteller who is so full of characters and scenes and action that cinematic scope is captured in everyone of his detailed drawings like  feature length movies within two dimensional planes. Sometimes it is a black and white film, but most often a full chromatic technicolor describes the narratives. His works would fall into a folk or fairytale genre if they were books, perhaps even sci-fi. If the story had been framed as lyrics, they would be a jazzy riffing traces of city life or sweetly warbling classical compositions where the upper scales trill so that the characters trip about on tip toe. There is a range of emotions talked around in these tales but nothing overtly abrasive for the characters are  held securely within the four edges of the papers. The landscape is shallow but not hollow, and everyone fits into the picture.

Naivete at its most authentic and guilelessly refreshing, Glicksman’s work contains a sense of being near a fount of creativity, a well spring that is thirst quenching and revivifying. It is as if someone has said “make me a painting, a drawing, color me something about what you are thinking“ and the resultant imagery became a picture which had generously been gifted to just you, as familiar as your own family story. The branches on a Glicksman tree join together mankind and the animals to fashion an existence that is fulfilling, mutually supportive and sustaining. Diverse, without exceptions and open to engagement, Alan Glicksman pours images onto his drawing board honestly, allowing the hic-cups to provoke a laugh while serious matters are turned over with awestruck, wary curiosity. The other Ecclesiastical quote that is also aired is “A time for every purpose” and this is the purposeful time that Glicksman draws and also draws from.

NADINE SCHEMMANN - SOUND OF THE PALE TREE -  October 8 - November 12, 2022

Predominantly working with large-format linen and various techniques, Nadine Schemmann’s work translates encounters, conversations, and moments in diverse shades on the canvas to engage in emotional interactions. The process involves dying or bleaching the material to then be covered with ink, oil paint or chlorine bleach, resulting in striking, but unexpected color paths forming organic, endlessly changeable edges on the linen canvas. With a desire to expand her color palette, Schemmann materializes feelings as different shades to create an expressive and sensory visual language translating encounters as the deepest and most honest form of dialogue.

Reflecting the fragility of interpersonal relationships, Schemmann's paintings find their origin in the interstice that results when two people meet – crafting the space which remains free of color and that which is delimited by cut edges and seams. Only sometimes she stretches the linen fabrics on frames, never banishing them behind glass. Often, they hang freely in a space, or in nature, where they are exposed to wind and weather, where the color and fabric change with time. Just as interpersonal relationships cannot be preserved and made durable, Schemmann does not place this expectation on her paintings.

MAHMOUD MERAJI - PANDEMIC HEAD TO HAND -  October 8 - November 12, 2022

What were you doing during the pandemic? Going a little crazy? Mahmoud Meraji, never content to rest in just a depiction of the physical, grapples with the human condition. Headbones Gallery will be presenting over thirty of his unframed drawings, fresh from his Toronto studio.

MICHAEL BJORNSON _ HEAD ON & The Achromatic Flame Playing With Fire November 27 - Feb 7, 2022

The Drawers Gallery will be featuring drawings by Michael Bjornson from Vancouver in an exhibition titled HEAD ON.
For many years in addition to being an architect, artist, painter, art dealer and fabricator, Bjornson has drawn faces, heads, portraits and character studies of real or imagined persons. From stacks upon stacks of drawings, Headbones has made a selection of one hundred drawings and will create a catalogue in time for the exhibition.
Featuring works by Don Carr, Fern Helfand, Scott P. Ellis, Joice M. Hall, Byron Johnston, Molly March and Julie Oakes, Headbones Gallery has pulled from the stacks and looked to a few artists for artworks that reference fire.
It is with some dark irony at having been placed on evacuation alert this summer from the White Rock Lake fire that this show is up on the walls. Now that the skies are clear, the air is once again fresh and with the achromatic hues of the changing season,  viewers can expect works with fire and flame as the consistent theme.

SOS OKANAGAN RAMBLING- Group Show - June 20 - August 13, 2021

DAVID WILSON - Water Paintings & JULIE OAKES - The Eighth Day -  March 1 April 27, 2021

MANWOMAN - HOLY SCREEN TIME!   -  March 16 extended to October 3, 2020 due to Covid 19

The line between Art and Life for ManWoman (February 2, 1938 – November 13, 2012) was thin, brilliantly colored and drawn with expertise. He embraced his calling as an artist, an activist, a writer and - it must be said - as a performer. He was known to dress in yellow, drove a yellow van and a yellow Cadillac convertible, championing the good and eschewing misrepresentation. He had a third eye tattooed on his forehead and his body covered in over 200 renditions of the swastika, reclaimed from indigenous and religious cultures. He worked at banishing the stigma that the symbol had acquired since The Holocaust while maintaining to advocate against all the evil that image had born under Hitler. Needless to say, he got into trouble for his views but throughout his career, he managed to impart an extreme positivity.

This is not the first time Manwoman’s work has been in Vernon. He had a show at the first Headbones Gallery in the 90’s when he delivered his large pop paintings in his yellow van. He returned for the first Headbones Fashion Show where his yellow suit with flying hearts was modelled. His works have been in the Headbones Drawers and shown in our exhibitions both here and in Toronto. This is the first time that such a quantity of his silk screen prints have been shown together and is the most comprehensive as some editions have been sold out and are no longer available.

The exhibition, consisting of sixty-six silk screened editions and three paintings, bears testimony to an artist whose skill was exemplary. The clarity and depth of color is profound, his registration meticulous, and his imagery articulate and often humorous. ManWoman died at 74 in his home-town of Cranbrook, surrounded by his works and artifacts and leaving behind children and grandchildren. Loved by many, respected and befriended by even more his work was fueled by visions, inspired by religions, as creative as the hours of the day allowed – his work speaks for him now.

Flyfoot Press published three books by ManWoman that will also be available at Headbones Gallery – Homesick for Eternity: ManWoman Autobiography, Gentle Swastika: Reclaiming the Innocence, and Midnight Freak Show: Poetry, Art and Dangerous Mysticism.

SYRIAN CONTEMPORARY ART & Molly March   -  March 16 extended to October 3, 2020 due to Covid 19

This exhibition of paintings and sculpture first came to Canada in 2016 after Paul Crawford, curator of the Penticton Art Gallery, and Humam Alsalim, Director of the Cyrrus Gallery in Damascus, opened a conversation on-line. From there, and over two years, the works were spirited out of Syria and found their way to Canada. Some of the artists still reside in Syria and other have found homes in Europe. Humam Alsalim currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

After the initial selection showed at the Penticton Art Gallery in 2016, it travelled to museums, galleries, schools and churches in Vancouver, Victoria, Duncan, Salt Spring Island, Mill Bay, Nanaimo and Grand Forks. It has shown at the Military Museum in Calgary and at the Yukon Arts Center in Dawson Creek as well as in the great hall of The Reach Gallery in Abbotsford where a full color catalogue was produced including Arabic translations of the text.

While the situation in Syria still remains crucial and precarious, Syrian Contemporary Artists: Behind the Lines reveals the undercurrents of a culture that has sadly experienced violence and dislocation. The imagery reflects this with grand-scale abstract and expressionistic paintings and small, solid, figurative sculptures. The works, often eerily beautiful, reflect the sublime allocation of will over circumstance. This exhibition speaks of strength and endurance in concert with remarkable empathy. The insistence of an authentic visual voice commenting on upheaval has historically spoken out in many iterations. Syrian Contemporary Artists: Behind the Lines is a current expression of life experiences that we have been spared in this peaceful valley. We invite you to celebrate these artists at an opening reception on Friday, March 13 (no friggatriskaidekaphobia or paraskevidekatriaphobia at Headbones…) as spring settles in. 

The artists exhibiting are Juhayda Albitar, Ali Almeer, Humam Alsalim, Mahmoud Al Daoud, Fadi Al-Hamwi, Aya Al Medani, Khaled Dawna, Lina Malki, Maiesam Mallisho, Alaa Sharabi, Reem Tarraf, Omran Younis, Mohammad Zaza and Obaidah Zorik

OkanAWEgan   -  December 7 - February 22 , 2020

Having just returned from the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, Berlin, London and FIAC in Paris, it reinforced our determination to showcase work done right here in the Okanagan because it stands up. To be contemporary in an arena that is shouting with digital distractions while still using traditional means – painting, drawing, sculpture, is a challenge and commitment. This roster of artists has infused liveliness, energy and authenticity into their explorations. There is an array of styles and yet a depth throughout. That is why this exhibition is titled OkanAWEgan, because the works inspire awe as does the Okanagan, where those feelings of reverence and admiration are prompted by the physical landscape. The skies here are clearer - especially without the fires, a lucky year – and the prospects open to good living. It is an atmosphere conducive to creativity as this exhibition proves.

Overall, OKanAWEgan is an opportunity to view diverse works of a high calibre all under one roof, much like an art fair or biennale but all made right here the Okanagan. OkanAwegan opens with a public reception on Saturday, December 07, 2 – 5 PM, 2019, and continues until February 22, 2020. Headbones Gallery is located at 6700 Old Kamloops Road, Vernon.

CAUTIONARY TALES -  Diane Feught & MINDING... -  Johann  James Feught - October 10 - November 30, 2019

A frame provides not only a separation from extraneous matter but also contextualizes the content within the frame. It serves to organize and focus the attention, drawing it away from myriad alternate possibilities. It is a form of dictation. Diane Feught and Johann Feught, each working on separate bodies of work from respectively secluded studios, bring attention (frame) illuminations of the mind. Johann clusters, combines, encompasses: Diane Feught, orders, beautifies and presents. Each offers a wealth of visual information accomplished within practiced disciplines so that the results are impactful yet respites against the overflow of stimulus that life brings. Each offers personal insights. 

Johann Feught has titled this new series of prints minding … and the naming furthers the impact; he has managed to conquer a startling array of contesting factions and bring forth a collection of individually cut gems. Feught uses two mediums, each with very different processes. The digital prints are made on a computer and require hours of selection, importing, sizing and assemblage. These prints are colored and Feught has been permissive towards his palette showing his command of a range that is often denied by the traditional printmaking processes. The marmoleum-cut prints are black and white and show his command of a skill practiced over decades. 

With gouache on paper and with consideration, Diane Feught’s series Cautionary Tales sets a complete stage. She has designed the proscenium to each act through a wide patterned border that compliments the subject. The work is polite; it is introduced by a patterned prologue in preparation for reception. With formalist dignity, each piece is also ruled by black lines, the sheen of the paint slightly reflective. Led into the central imagery by this visual ritual, the exquisite-ness of the subject gains rapt audience, one that is primed to be receptive, and alert to intriguing nuance. She has allowed room to wonder and despite the relatively diminutive size of this window, each work is completely unalterable. 

And although Diane Feught and Johann Feught had no awareness of the body of work the other was completing during their respective processes, like osmosis, messages drifted between the two studios in a way that validated equanimity yet sustained individuality. 

Cautionary Tales featuring Diane Feught and minding… featuring Johann James Feught opens at Headbones Gallery, Saturday, October 5, 2-5 PM. The public is welcome and the artists will both be in attendance. The exhibition closes November 30.

COLOR + Featuring David Cantine and Robert Dmytruk -  August 10 - September 28, 2019

Vision carries color. Although the other senses have used color metaphorically to describe auditory, tactile or sensations of smell, it is only through vision that we can experience color. We cannot discern red through our touch nor hear it although it may come to mind when we touch something hot or hear a siren.  Color is an intrinsic definer that allows us to conceptually realize subtle shades of variation in the physical world, in order to distinguish objects one from the other. An orange may disappear in an orange-colored bowl for instance or a green snake in green grass. Nature uses color to differentiate, attract, signal, and in nature the ability to recognize the significance of color can be a matter of life or death – once again that snake…

Visual artists use color as one of their tools, one that is very specific to the discipline. The upcoming exhibition at Headbones Gallery features two practiced artists where color means more than its name. The recent works of Summerland’s Robert Dmytruk and Edmonton’s David Cantine are brought together under the title COLOR +, each artist having added their personal touch onto color.

David Cantine has worked with four circles and hundreds (maybe thousands) of variations of colors within a rectangular format for over forty years. Within a philosophy of the many permutations and sheer engaging interest, of focusing within a model, Cantine explores the very essence of color which is color’s variance and relational impact. Color theory, which first appeared in the renaissance, has been a base-in-trade during art education but despite the urge to pin color down to a pattern, because of the many color theories formed on patterning that work in contest, the area has remained still open for exploration in a way that appeals as much to the mind as to the senses. It is this methodical, open-ended variance that sparks David Cantine’s work.

Robert Dmytruk first studied under David Cantine and their friendship and professional liaison continues to this day. Dmytruk uses color as nature does. He explores a number of patterns, sets up relationships between ground and object, size and composition, edges and insides so that although there is a mechanical method – as in a repetition of shapes or the repeated use of cut-outs, templates and screens, the artist-at-play with the wit of circumstance is evident.  His work reflects engagement and as if cleaning up a potential for chaos employs the trait that so often calms stress – play. It would be hard to attribute angst to Dmytruk’s works. Patterns grant regular or intelligible forms that coincide with the desire for stability. They mark space and lend reference. Dmytruk’s patterning gives the illusion of relief as he visually plays with the vertical surface.

Gathered at the same table once again for COLOR +, Dmytruk is generous and gives a lot from a full banquet array.  Cantine has culled and with precision offers a wealth of options from a spare plate. The meat of the matter, the common staple for each, has been color. The plus sign is personal; for Cantine it is a basic recipe, for Dmytruk a cacciatore. But the main ingredient remains the same – COLOR.

 COLOR +  with David Cantine and Robert Dmytruk opens at Headbones Gallery, Saturday August 10, 2-5 PM. The public is welcome and the artists will both be in attendance. The exhibition closes September 28.

FGH - Performance and Art -  Cesar Forero, Ron Giii and Janelle Hardy -  April 13 - June 8, 2019

Three solo exhibitions, all distinctly different works but with a common bond, these three artists are travelers - travelers upon the earth, making cosmic journeys and intakes into the recesses of the mind. The aspect that this trio holds in common is that each is actively multidisciplinary; bridging the distances between writing, dancing, choreography and the visuals arts while rooted in practices that are translated visually. They each have a committed practice in painting and drawing. 

Cesar Forero is a Colombian born Canadian whose performances have been aired in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Finland, Germany, Japan, the UK, and America. He will be travelling from Ontario to present Tarot. In the work to showcase at Headbones Gallery on June 15, Forero has included dance, poetry and acrobatic movements set against a suite of twelve paintings that are based on the Tarot’s Major Arcana. The dance Tarot which he will perform with Alex Bouldreault is performed to a poem written by Forero and set to music by July Arboleda-Forero.

Janelle Hardy has taken a voyage into the internet and produced 100 portraits along her way which Headbones Gallery will present in the Foyer Gallery.  The portrait subjects are all referenced from the What's Underneath Interview Series, created by the mother/daughter StyleLikeU team. Born and raised in the Yukon, Janelle Hardy has an MA in Dance and a BA in anthropology. Her video River Dance Song was created originally for an exhibition at the Yukon Art Gallery in 2012 where she improvises to Michel Kiwanuka’s song “Home Again ”.

Ron Giii’s drawings are delicate yet hip like an insider’s view of the complexity of life’s journey. He first went to art school in Nairobi but then returned to Canada and graduated from OCA in Toronto. He has lived in New York and  performed his works at Franklin Furnace and A Space. He has performed in Warsaw, Poland  and at the legendary Joseph Beuys Free University at Documenta 77 in Kasse,l Germany when conceptual art was at a height. He founded TRY organization in Toronto, a theatre company for ex mental patients, where he wrote the text for The Schizophrenic Opera, House with No Rugs and The Inner and Outer Universe.  He will be showing a series of small drawings  titled Geometry Street In Headbones Drawers Gallery. At  the opening June 15, Ron Giii will perform, accompanying with his ukulele, the piece  Internet Christ which he wrote in a mental hospital in 2017 and performed at Cinecycle in Toronto. Ron Gii is living now in Vernon, an avatar of his genre. He is represented by Paul Petro Gallery in Toronto.

June 15 will be the opening for these three exhibitions from 2 - 5 PM when Cesar Forero and Alex Boudreault will perform Tarot at 3:30 PM. Ron Gii will perform Internet Christ at 4 PM and Janelle Hardy’s River Dance Song will be showing throughout the duration in the Video Room.  

 

FIVE NYC WOMEN - WILLING THE DISTANCE

Susan Austad, Heide Hatry, Cynthia Karalla, Katia Santibanez and Robin Tewes -  April 13 - June 8, 2019

The works of five female artists, Susan Austad, Heide Hatry, Cynthia Karalla, Katia Santibanez and Robin Tewes, who live and work in New York City will make up the next exhibition at Headbones Gallery from April 12 to June 08. In The Drawer’s Gallery, Julie Oakes, whose engagement with museums began at the MET in New York will show her latest gouaches from her series, One Cracked, Two Broken, based on drawings sourced there in December, 2018 - willing the distance smaller between New York City and Vernon, BC.

Each woman has a committed studio practice in New York sustained while juggling family, teaching and maintaining active and extensive exhibition schedules both in New York and internationally. Each has ‘gone the distance’.  It is important to state the context, NYC, for it means they are working in the most sophisticated, and as yet unrivalled, art scene in the world and equally important to acknowledge gender as they contribute towards an ongoing evolution as women artists strive towards a more equitable positioning in the arts. The exhibition is amended (with Julie Oakes) who lived and worked in New York and still has a personal, artistic and political affiliation with these women.

Susan Austad’s studio is in the heart of Soho where she produces large-scale, multi-media, kinetic wall reliefs based on imagery from the cosmos.  Using photographs of nebula, flocullant galaxies and Megallanic Clouds as her source material Austad creates pictures in watercolor on arches paper. She furthers her process by translating the visuals into relief:  mesh, three dimensional structures covered in layers of paper, tinted and then enhanced in palette with kinetic lights.

Heide Hatry is known for her performances, often translated into videos. The immediacy of performance is not lost in translation because the content is so poignant. She has used unusual mediums (pig skins, chickens, eggs, blood) to construct physical spaces, figurative sculptures and as performance props. Headbones Gallery will present her latest video, Politics. Hatry brings a feisty female perspective into poignant and pertinent focus. She is represented by UBU Gallery in New York.

Cynthia Karalla is a photographer who uses not only a sharply honed technique to capture subject matter but often pushes the medium to another level as she manipulates the photographic itself.  Headbones will be presenting works from the series The Girls aka Cracked Ribs and Bleached where memory and spirit are revealed through ghostly shades and the wear of ages suggested through patina. I Ching explores repetitive constructs affected by chance, as in the Asian game of fortunes. Her latest series, The Developer Sketches move into a chemical origination of the imagery so that much like an abstract painting the gesture of the photographer comes into play.

Katia Santibanez works with hair-sized brushes to make sensuous compositions, often within a geometric composition.  Her extreme attention to detail could be compared to miniatures of old but rather than depicting a tiny scene or portrait, her delicate strokes are testament to the care and facility of a human touch, personal and intriguing. The shapes are not gestural however but more like a pattern where each element is given equal due and is absolutely necessary to the whole. She is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York.

Robin Tewes, like many great feminists, concentrates on imagery often sourced from the home. She uses the architectonics of place to set the scene and then moves through narrative variance to reposition the point of view. These new works depict a country home where we are separated from the life inside but are able to realize by the changes that are seen from the exterior that there is more than one story, in fact the plot continually develops.  Using a perspective with a human edge, Tewes grants to the ordinary and extraordinary an aura that lifts what could be deemed ‘mundane’ up to a phenomenal stature.

 TWICE BITTEN -  Alexandra Heaseker and Davida Kidd -  February 16 - April 6, 2019

What we see and believe to be real is often a pact between social mores and individual perception. Brought up to understand the world as a set of circumstances that can be trusted to be secure, is of course necessary to maintain an order that encourages positive participation. What the eye sees, depends upon what we have been coached to see.  What we believe, depends upon what we have been coached to believe. With the advent of technological skills that are as handy as a cell phone, or computer images that can be manipulated to the extent that the original content is skewed or even falsified altogether, a sense of unbalance results. An alteration in perception can refresh the take on subject matter or it can undermine it. It can also work to enchant or challenge with the option to succumb to the new apparition or be challenged by it, which may in turn cause an impetus towards investigation.

Alexandra Haeseker’s shaped printed panels register as having a photo-based origin: what is seen is hard to recognize as anything from reality. The colors are seductive, often brilliant and acidic. The forms within the cut-out silhouettes appear to have been reconstructed, overtly saturated. These vestiges of manipulation give a foot-hold into the work; but still there is a puzzling sensation that there is something more resonating than has been discovered, that there is more evidence of the human in these shapes than is discerned at first glance.

Davida Kidd conversely doesn’t hide what is seen so much as reveals what we might not have considered as connections between the subject matters. Often within an intense or ominous contextualization, there are visual clues that point in the direction of narrative but leave an openness that allows for individual interpretation on the part of the viewer. The subject matter is familiar. There are people and things for which we have names, definitions and contexts, but she sets up scenes where the order is slightly off, the tempo syncopated, the words of visual phrases rearranged. The ground is precipitous, precarious, but as if in high alert, the consciousness inclines towards a super awareness over and above the usual call to be present.

TWICE BITTEN is an invitation to the cautionary tale that lies between the experience of memory and consequent apprehensions that stir in the heart of both artists’ studio research.

CORRE; Contemporary Okanagan Rank-and-File registered Exhibition  -  December 2 - February 9, 2019

Headbones Gallery is again mounting an exhibition with an overview of works born and bred in the Okanagan Valley.

Contemporary means with-the-times, in-the-now. It connotes a position in history against the back drop of what has come before and prefixes what is to come next. The fine arts have often been associated with concepts of the avant-garde – in advance of time.

Okanagan is the featured place and from Penticton to Salmon Arm, the artists assembled for this exhibition live and work in the extended valley framework. We see the same skies, breathe the same air and feel the same atmospheric temperature fluctuations within a similar range but still with astounding diversity; we have all had the experience of being in one  spot under sunshine and yet looking at a vista where the dark clouds pour. And just like the weather, within the valley is a simultaneous artistic variety.

Rank-and- File is membership in a club and the visual arts is a ‘club’ where the stylistic variables are tied together by an unavoidable belief in the importance of art.

There is no official roster, the ‘group’ is not so much organized through art as immersed in art. There is a small r word, registered, after the capitalized Rank-and-file of our title which indicates Headbones Gallery’s ongoing commitment to cataloguing each exhibition.

Exhibiting the work especially in the context of a yearly show has a long history in the visual arts from famous salon shows of Royal Academies to the historic public and private investments made to establish galleries and museums in which art is made accessible to a greater audience.

Glenn Clark - GIDDIEEYUP   -  October 5 - November 24, 2018

Glenn Clark’s exhibition Giddieeyup at Headbones Gallery promises to engage. Glenn Clark will be in attendance at the opening reception on Friday October 05 from 6 to 8 PM.  RUBY BLUES, where “Catch your Dream”  rides the lintel of the winery door and “the tasting fee is a smile”  will cater the evening, an apt pairing for Clark has caught his dreams in paint.

Glenn Clark is a realist because his style is such but his subjects – and this is where the artist holds absolute sway - appear outside of reality. Even an old car rusting in a field carries more of the aura of the past, an implied story, than a sensation of immediate presence. The cars have been overtaken by the artist, claimed for a storyboard that has now become specific in another, more auspices way than that which makes up virtual reality. There is a strange vermillion cast on the front hood of the old Pontiac eight. The bloody cast seems to creep forwards and out of the frame as the tail of another car, the exact same suggestive hue, occupies the foreground like a rumbling wave - not lost and forgotten but found and refreshed.

Clark deals with time masterfully. Clark saw Gustave Courbet’s painting Girls on the Banks of the Seine and “it blew my socks off!” he says. Courbet’s detail is not stultified but liquid, the figures relaxed, their physical being in tune with nature so that even the intricate patterning of the dresses feels endemic to the scene. With an eye for treasures, Glenn Clark came across his mother’s wedding dress and knew that he had to make a painting based on Courbet’s Girls.  Clark has girls of his own and as a contemporary man, seated in the surrounds of family and the stuff of this age he lifted the idea of the melding conversation between beautiful young women in their physical prime and a natural setting. Using the wedding dress, his daughter and her friend posed for him and Clark struck as chord as resonant with authenticity as Courbet’s work. By assuming the air of a painter from the nineteenth century through subject matter, Clark’s affect is fresh, eye-opening and rejuvenating.

Clark took another step. He painted the same two women in clothes that reflect their age and interests in a setting as contemporarily urban as it gets. There is the same spirit shining forth but the garb, gear and graffiti impart a new, defiant, almost warrior-like aura to the two women. With a tattoo of a wolf on her thigh and the black eyes of a raccoon masking the other, Clark has inserted their brazen beauty into the conversation so that there is no room to consider them flowers-for-the-picking as the Courbet might suggest. Courbet had relished his gazing position on prone female bodies and sealed his voyeurism with L’Origin du Monde. Clark’s reversed text, Sex and Death, on the wall behind the women affirms the holistic portrait, making contemporary a reference that though well known to art lovers, was censored at the time.  L’Origin du Monde hangs in the Louvre, its place and accessibility solidified by time.

Clark is a realist who takes chances with his subject matter, as if challenged by enticing sirens who prompt his direction like hostesses whose invitations to dance he accepts just in order to bring about a different translation of a trope secured by time and repetition.

The knights on horses that he has rendered over three paintings reference historical portraits and like Tolstoy’s War and Peace they enter an echelon of images based on ideas of battle, protection, aggression, and the gaining of ground. Yet each rendition is awry when examined with more than the cursory glance that often arrives on historical paintings around battle scenes.

There is wonder and innocence in Clark’s work. A demure girl peers cautiously but with interest into an implied abyss.  Clark is not entirely a realist for his perspective is enchanted despite his willingness to tackle the grand themes.  Not frightened but encouraged to look and question, Glenn Clark plays with the message underneath the cacophony of established norms and his response is reflected back at us with just enough room to appreciate.  His technical expertise is sure to convince any wary nay-sayer that art is awesome, pertinent and yet way out there from the furthest reaches of an imagination that is accustomed to flying free. Like Clark’s self portrait, launching ferociously into the air, riding a broom stick like some kind of male witch is true to form. Glenn Clark’s potion is bubbling and boiling over with exuberance.

 

NTERLACING   -  June 16 - September 23, 2018

INTERlacing: Oskar Gorzkiewicz, Tomasz Matczak, Alicja Habisiak-Matczak, Witold Warzywoda and Jolanta Rudzka Habisiak. Headbones Gallery is proud to host this exhibition of artists whom have just arrived from the Strezminski Academy of Fine Art in Lodz, Poland.   

Canada and Poland have had a longstanding and fortuitous relationship as we discovered through both the academy and the Canadian embassy in Poland.  INTERlacing, distills this cultural essence through a high caliber contemporary exhibition that dissolves the boundaries between countries to present a united front of excellence.

Oskar Gorzkiewicz links into an alternative culture couching his imagery in cityscapes. With a style that is reminiscent of tattoos or illustration, he uses a focused excessive detailing.

Tomasz Matczak also presents  a detailed surface where reference is gleaned through the title for the first impression is of a color field, atmospheric and layered. The perspective is vague and the dimensions of space infinitely possible.

With a strong architectonic structuring of the picture plane, Alicja Habisiak-Matczak creates urban-scapes that are utopian with futuristic promise but the allure seems shady, more an invitation for trouble than comfort.

 Works by Witold Warzywoda examine both natural and historical resources within a pop context. He has been head of the Studio of Lithographic Techniques since 2000 and is conversant with the beneficial interchange of international exposure.

 Jolanta Rudzka Habisiak’s practice has been rigorous with large scale installations in paper, silk and mixed media that can occupy immense museum galleries. By using multiple elements, she establishes a large area of influence with an aesthetic of beauty so that order, harmony and balance over-takes the chaos of modern living. 

The public opening reception for INTERlacing is on Saturday June 16 from 2 – 5 PM with Oscar Gorzkiewicz, Tomasz Matczak, Alicja Habisiak-Matczak and Jolanta Rudzka Habisiak in attendance for a summertime Royal High Tea with our visiting art dignitaries from Poland.

INTERWOVEN (HEADBONES)  -  April 26 - June 9, 2018

INTERwoven (Headbones) New Canadian Perspectives in Textile and Printmaking- Mark Bovey, Davida Kidd, Walter Jule, Karen Dugas, Liz Ingram+ Bernd Hildebrandt, Derek Besant, Julie Oakes, Sean Caulfield, Tracy Templeton, Guy Langevin, and Alexandra Haeseker, opens at Headbones Gallery on Thursday, April 26.

The exhibition shows works that originate from the Canadian coast to coast. Thirteen artists were “invited to challenge their personal practices to produce new works for an exhibition at Kobro Gallery in Lodz,  Poland that somehow looked to both textile and print references in creative ways,” said Besant, the curator and also one of the artists. Furthering a long standing liaison between Poland and Canada, most of the artists, including Julie Oakes of Vernon attended the opening in Lodz. Headbones Gallery’s presentation of Interwoven extends the exposure to touch ground in Vernon.

Derek Besant is no stranger to Vernon. He has already had an exhibition at the Vernon Art Gallery and another is opening on May 24 – July 18, Dark Woods Revisited.  With an engaging perspective on life in general, he encourages connection.   Because there was an enthusiastic reception of the works in Lodz in the springtime of 2017, INTERwoven traveled that fall to The National Cultural Center Art Gallery in  Warsaw with the support of the Canadian Embassy.

Mark Bovey (Nova Scotia) has also had an exhibition at the Vernon Art Gallery and this new work develops his long standing themes and use of digital technology. Currently with a solo show at The Reach Gallery in Abbotsford, Davida Kidd’s poignant, intimate photographs of marginalized people in alternative spaces caps off the west coast. From Edmonton, Walter Jule, Karen Dugas and the artist team Liz Ingram + Bernd Hildebrandt have pushed the boundaries of textile and printmaking.  Sean Caulfield’s current exhibition at the Vernon Art Gallery, Active Workings, (March 08 – May 16) an eloquent and extensive exploration, opens the possibilities of printmaking to grand dimensions. Tracy Templeton is now based in Indianapolis but hails from the Canadian prairies and her works bring the chill of winter back into view. Guy Langevin, from Quebec brings a sensual sensibility – subtle, visionary and toned by his expertise. Alexandra Haeseker and Derek Besant (Calgary) both who have an artistic history of expanding the methods and imagery of  art making bring the best of Alberta onto our BC  walls, with a slant  inclusion and un-jaded by politics. Julie Oakes Interwoven piece, a flag titled Striving in the Pink Lane sports the image of a woman swimming “in the pink lane”.

To keep the Polish Canadian connection open, on June 15, Headbones will be hosting INTERlacing: Oscar Gozkiewicz, Tomasz Matczak, Alicia Habisiak-Matczak and Jolanta Rudzka Habisiak. The Poles will be coming to Vernon.  And in March 2020, an exhibition opens at KOBRO Gallery in Lodz focusing on women’s rights - Julie Oakes and Jolanta Rudzka Habisiak.

Jane Everett, Destanne Norris, Reg Kienast, Amber Powell - Running With The Ball     March 11 - April 21, 2018

The expression ‘running with the ball’ has the intonation of a previous activity that has been passed on so that in the ongoing holding of the ball, a new height has been achieved. Headbones Gallery presents an exhibition of works by artists who have in the series which they are showing here, arrived at new plateaus.

The beginning impetus is a challenge, a ball passed which must be caught. For Jane Everett, Destanne Norris and Amber Powell this was the challenge of showing in a public gallery and the opportunity that exhibition affords the artist to gathering together a body of work. Reg Kienast challenged himself - tossed, caught and ran.

When the Kelowna Art Gallery invited Jane Everett into the exhibition Drawing from Life and she understood the size of the space that she could occupy, Everett caught the ball and ran with it. In this drawing coyotes run the length of wall with an energy that charges the air and shifts preconceptions of covering space into a new dimension.

Destanne Norris has a visceral connection between the physicality of existence and spirituality that is brilliantly composed in her Stellar series which showed at the Vernon Art Gallery in 2017. These large scale and adept translations of the cosmos bring the phenomena of stellar space into a human perspective. By focusing on the unique forms of constellation so far and vast that they assume near incomprehensible dimensions, Norris grants an experience similar to that of catching a falling star.

Amber Powell’s exhibition Third Drawer Down that showed at the Vernon Art Gallery in 2017 is an artistic culmination of more intimate prospects. The title suggests a commonality to the flotsam and jetsam of personal things and alludes to the inner realm of memory as well as to an outer physicality where the exercise of ‘stuff management’ are brought into play. Ruminations of her well-grounded intellect match the comedic with the poignant.

Reg Kienast’s new body of work marks a step outwards and up into different materials with expanded techniques that necessitated a delicate balance between spontaneity and planning. Using glass as his palette and brush, his abstract compositions glow with informed decisions, the outcome of having travelled to over 60 different countries with the purposeful agenda of being exposed to art and ethnicity.  

 

When the ball is in hand and the artist is running, the outcomes of the process can be powerful. Running with the Ball opens at Headbones Gallery on the afternoon (2 – 5 PM) of Sunday March 11 with a royal high tea. Jane Everett, Reg Kienast, Destanne Norris and Amber Powell will be in attendance.

Wanda Lock - A Studio Of One's Own                                       January 11 - February 25, 2018

When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, a series of extended essays that she had given at two British women’s colleges she explained her premise - “a woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction.”  She wrote this in 1929 following on the heels of the great novels where women had principal roles but very little agency or bargaining power other than their beauty. These female characters created by men – Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Grushenka in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Balzac’s La Cousin Bette, or Zola’s Nana cross between re-enactments of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden when woman tempts man to his demise or a tragedies that result in the death of the female, often at the hands of a jilted lover. Too often when man said “yes”, he entered a sphere where he was bound for ruin and when woman said “no”, she was made to suffer. Virginia Woolf, once she had her room, went on to write a body of work that added unmitigated voices of female characters to the history of literature.

“A Studio of One’s Own”, the exhibition by Wanda Lock, January 11 to February 25, 2018, opens on January 11 with a reception from 6 until 8 PM. This exhibition demonstrates where a woman can go to when she has the liberation of an open slate and place to work.  Lock works from a large well-lit studio that is attached to her home in Lake Country. She graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1992 and moved back to the Okanagan soon after where she has pioneered her unique imagery influenced by grunge music and coming-of-age movies. She exhibits across Canada.  Her latest body of multi-media works are based on the covers of harlequin romance novels. Lock’s mother having been a fan of the genre, she grew up with these idealized images of what a woman could expect from romance. Just as Man and Woman in cultural history was depicted from a variety of perspectives now Lock has turned her gaze to the pulp fiction rendition of the dance between man and woman  to make a statement, objectifying the imagery and ‘having her way’ with it. Her unabashed translation of muscled males and wilting women turns the tides on cliché role playing.

Headbones introduces this new series from Wanda Lock with earlier works where she used her son, then a young teen, as a model. These large, accomplished, emotive paintings of her offspring bring the fulfillment of mothering into the visual arena. The result is as strong and poignant as Dostoyevsky’s War and Peace – the novel that Woolf cited as being based on an impossible subject for a woman writer for Woolf’s time, a woman was not a soldier, her place was in the home and that is where Woolf set her novels. It is interesting that the woman artist of today creates works from the relative banality of the home that commands the gallery so absolutely. With a background rich in imagery acknowledging the intellectual wealth of a woman’s perspective, Wanda Lock rules.

Wanda Lock will be in attendance at the reception at Headbones Gallery on January 11, 2018, 6-8 PM. We hope you can join us.

Julie Oakes - Using The Moon To Fuel The Stars                          November 2, 2017 - January 6, 2018

Using the Moon to Fuel the Stars opening at Headbones Gallery on November 02 will show new works by Julie Oakes created in Europe, Russia and New York.

The Lunar Cycle is 28 gouache paper works framed in pairs that look at the lunar cycle as understood from an Eastern perspective. The Lunar Cycle was completed during a two-month residency in China in 2014. The Lunar Cycle tells the story of a woman who was banished to the moon where she found a rabbit that she took under her care. The rabbit was being literally ‘dogged’, bitten by a dog that badgered the rabbit. The woman would nurse the rabbit back to wholeness, but the cycle would begin again as the dogs attracted by the full shining and healthy rabbit nipped. Hence, the moon waxed and waned under the surveillant female’s care. The lunar cycle is regarded as feminine, her power hypnotic and influential.

Using the Moon to Fuel the Stars is a show about cycling, changing lanes and moving into the next roadway. Preparing for an exhibition of new works for the Tom Thomson Museum in Ontario in 2019, Titled SHE SHE – a double affirmative of the feminine, that will bring out women’s issues, women’s work and a superstar role of woman as home maker and keeper. Using the Moon to Fuel the Stars is an exhibition about reaching for the stars because the moon is just that much closer to them …

Headbones Gallery invites you to join Julie Oakes for the opening of Using the Moon to Fuel the Stars on November 02 from 5 – 7 PM, while it’s still light, before the moon rises and the dogs howl.

Hand-Picked Okanagan                                   August 3 - October 20, 2017

Doug Alcock, David Alexander, Glenn Clark, Carin Covin, Briar Craig, Robert Dmytruk, Jen Dyck, Leonard Epp, Diane Feught, Johann Feught, Joice M. Hall, John Hall, Fern Helfand, Angelika Jaeger, Byron Johnston, Ann Kipling, Patricia Kushner, Mary Smith McCulloch, Steve Mennie, Rhonda Neufeld and Rodney Konopaki, Herald Nix, Julie Oakes, Gary Pearson, Stephen Lee Scott, Heidi Thompson, Laura Widmer and David Wilson

On Wednesday, August 02 Dave Soroka stops in on his way to Arts Wells to refresh our ears with his original songs. Hailing from Grand Forks, this veteran musician is a well-known figure on the music circuit, famous not only for his song writing but also for his coffee with his portable coffee wagon churning out lattes and cappuccinos at local festivals. Dave Soroka has a lot of energy and though he swears he’s not on an all-day coffee break, he has written over 350 songs as of the count just before he played for 24 hours straight as a fund raiser for MOM in Fort St. James last August.

And on Thursday, August 03 Hand-picked Okanagan, Headbones’ annual exhibition of Okanagan artists - a selection geared to WOW - officially opens with a reception from 6 to 8 PM and many of the artists in attendance.

Christian Bernard Singer & Rose Sanderson - Pins & Needles Feather & Fur             June 1 - July 25, 2017

The obsessive attention to detail that Mother Nature practices is impressive - trees with thousands of leaves or needles, grasses in abundance, the fine delicacy of a furred coat or the exquisite patterning of plumage. Surrounded by the display, we are apt to lose attention and miss the phenomena.

Headbones Gallery changes the focus first zooming in with the work of Rose Sanderson and Christian Bernard Singer - Pins and Needles, Feather and Fur and then zooming out to David Wilson’s Water with a premier presentation of four large acrylic paintings.

Rose Sanderson was the artist in residence at Headbones Gallery in the spring of 2015. Hailing from Bristol England, she works with brushes so tiny, the hairs seemed to disappear as she strokes on color. Each feather, eyelash and claw has been detailed using a range of North American animals as her subjects.

Christian Bernard Singer lives in Owen Sound Ontario where he is Senior Curator at the Tom Thomson Gallery, one of Canada’s core galleries named after the maverick break-away artist who inspired the formation of the Group of Seven through his transformative portrayal of the natural world. Singer doesn’t paint the forest, however. He uses the forest to build his sculptures, reliefs and installations. He builds with pine needles, the details of conifers.

Don Carr - ELECTRIC PRINTS                          April 13 - May 27, 2017

The discovery of the printing press marks the age of the industrial revolution. It was the melding of a more sophisticated understanding of the workings of the physical world and the desire to communicate beyond a one-on-one and extend into the concept of mass production. Stained glass windows in churches served a similar purpose and they have inspired Don Carr’s oeuvre.

Carr’s imagery has been a blend between science fiction and social/political commentary. Within fantastic settings, narratives are played out and a story is told of the human condition that is reminiscent of images created following Perestroika in Russia.

Don Carr lives and works in Toronto and Italy. He is ambitious in his vision and has produced many layered works. Like a scientist, he has not rested in his discoveries but continued along the road between science and the arts creating complex lithographic prints and then moving into digital photomontages.

Carr further actualized his imagined worlds by moving into the third or perhaps it could be called the fourth dimension. Once again, it was a step that furthered the imagery through science. He created a hologram, Wired Dionysius, which Headbones Gallery will present. Referencing classical thought in the same arena as advanced technology, Carr confronts us with an image from the future. The hologram was a collaboration between theatre designer, Catherine Hahn and Michael Page and the technicians of Photon, a hologram facility in Toronto.

Locality 3 Curated by Carin Covin - Nora Curiston, Brenda Feist & Laura Widmer   January 28 - March 30, 2017

“For me as a viewer, these three artists, Nora Curiston, Brenda Feist and Laura Widmer, have compelling creative practices that reflect the ideas which also reflect a range of contemporary concepts and issues found in the contemporary art historical and critical discourse today. All three artists sustain a creative practice outside of large cultural centers.” Carin Covin

Herald Nix - The Long View                                                      December 10 - January 16, 2017

Herald Nix’s new paintings, titled “The Long View,” at Headbones Gallery form a musical rhythm of repeated motifs.  Like music, passages repeat, but our perception changes each time it’s heard, or in this case seen.  For this series, Nix, who is also a musician, painted one view of Shuswap Lake over and over again, and as he noted, “it doesn’t change as much as your perception of it does each day.”

At Headbones Gallery, Nix’s small oil paintings on wooden panel line the long narrow gallery space.  The same scene of the Shuswap repeats, yet with each image, shifts in weather, light, and mood are conveyed materially in thick or thin paint, bright color or grays, deeply carved lines and scraped surfaces.  Walking through the gallery is like experiencing a year on the Shuswap as the days lengthen in spring, then a dark rain cloud moves overhead, only to clear into a hot, sunny August day.  The artist began each panel on a new day with its ensuing shift in perception affecting his methods.

Landon Mackenzie and Paul Mathieu - RIGHTSIDE UP                          September 16 - October 16, 2016

Rightside Up reinforces the scope made possible when two artists with evident mutual affection and respect for the other’s works exhibit in tandem while in turn their works inspire others.  Informed and confident, each artist maintains a mature practice that can helps us to override the cacophony of modern dissonance.

Shh! Good Art Up & Down The OK Valley     (Group Show)                          July 22 - September 10, 2016

Samuel Adhi, Doug Alcock, David Alexander, Glenn Clark, Carin Covin, Briar Craig, Robert Dmytruk, Jen Dyck, Leonard Epp, Johann Feught, Diane Feught, John Hall, Joice M. Hall, Fern Helfand, Angelika Jaeger, Byron Johnston, Ann Kipling, Patricia Kushner, Mary Smith McCulloch, Steve Mennie, Amy Modahl, Rhonda Neufeld and Rodney Konopaki, Herald Nix, Julie Oakes, Gary Pearson, Crystal Przybille, Stephen Lee Scott, Heidi Thompson and David Wilson

This valley is rich but it is not necessary to keep it under wraps for art itself is generous – it’s made to be shared. Up and Down the Okanagan Valley there is a cultural treasure and we don’t have to go to New York to see it - though in the end it may be where it is eventually exhibited. Rather than going away to find art we can use it to bring people here. Destination museums, galleries and residencies have become a viable option when real estate values soar. Larger spaces can be had that show the work to better advantage. The viewing audience brings people, often internationals to locations outside of the big city centers and they come because the word has spread that there is something to see that makes it worth taking the trip.

The opening reception of the Headbones’ Okanagan show is an exhibition when works are brought forth from the seclusion of studios and presented to the community, an important connection made from the roots. Shh! Good Art Up and Down the Okanagan Valley cautions that there is something to sneak up upon, something cool to see.

'SCAPES featuring Mary Smith McCulloch, Paul Roux, Rhonda Neufeld & Rodney Konopaki  June 4 - July 16, 2016

Man’s current relationship to the land is complicated, mitigated as it is by the dominance of our species. To encounter untrammeled wilderness is a privileged experience, now few and far between yet the desire to connect with a purer earth is ever present. The artists within ‘Scapes acknowledge man’s presence within the landscape. They approach landscape from different personal perspectives so that the interpretation of the ‘scape is authentic and original.

Collaborating artists Rodney Konopaki and Rhonda Neufeld engage in a direct human involvement with landscape as they create their works together. Over the past nine years, they have been meeting in various locations across Canada to create art. Headbones Gallery is showing their Chatham Spin portfolios, two beautifully bound suites of linocuts each containing eight prints.

Mary Smith McCulloch’s orchards and vineyards have been transformed by the positive facets of her technical expertise. McCulloch’s monoprints exude warm glows of radiating rich tones of light and her colours break apart in places like light being dispersed by a prism so that the lively properties of colour and light become dominant.

For South African born Paul Roux, the sea is his muse and despite his attempts to meliorate the powerful ocean with a couch or two, the vistas overcome our consciousness and also function as a metaphor for the prevailing conceptual separation between 'nature' and 'civilization'.

‘Scapes. They surround us, affect us, we control them and turn to them for a refreshing escape. The landscape tradition with the fine arts has changed, updated. As man has become more invested - arguably imposing - within the landscape, these artists have maintained a respect for the subject that translates into beauty.

PENDULUM / PENDULA featuring Alexsandra Haeseker & John Hall                       April 16 - May 28, 2016

A pendulum swings back and forth, marking time energised by the pull of gravity, an unavoidable physical stake we all share to the earth and an apt metaphor for collaboration between two painters.

From Calgary, Alexander Haeseker was born in Holland and is Lecturer Emeritus from ACAD and John Hall now living in Kelowna, BC is a Professor Emeritus from the University of Calgary.

During the creation of this body of work, both artists divided their time between San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Canada. The title, Pendulum / Pendula, is in the two languages of Canada and Mexico and as the nuances of a culture are oft defined through the specific articulation of the language, this is also an apt titling for both cultures are evident within the imagery. The rules were that Hall and Haeseker each covered 50% of the canvas. The project lasted from 1991 to 1998. Their work before the project had been veering towards each other: Haeseker had been creating compositions using partial portraits, dime store objects and bright pop colours while Hall had used masks, Mexican cha-chas, and a panoply of reflective foil and plastic papers.

Haeseker and Hall came to grips with the explosive potential of realist painting by subsuming their individual identities in the name of the phenomenal object - each of the twelve paintings of Pendulum / Pendula. Together, and by virtue of their technical virtuosity, they took stuff and made it “such stuff as dreams are made of.”

Pendulum / Pendula will be opening at Headbones Gallery, 6700 Old Kamloops Road in Vernon on Saturday, April 16, 6 – 8 PM with the artists in attendance and the exhibition continues until May 28.

MO'JO featuring Joe Fafard                                                  February 11 - March 26, 2016

When the mojo’s working, there’s a whole lot going on and Joe Fafard’s got it happening.

Fafard has drawn, painted, printed and sculpted using the farm as subject matter over the breadth of a lifetime. His often-life-size sculptures of horses and cows are seen in public spaces in grand cities and cherished in private collections, a heritage to pass on to future generations. Fafard revolutionized sculpture by turning his attention to family, community and animals, creating works that edify a quotidian country life style.

Headbones Gallery is pleased to present MO’JO including “Le Renard Malgre Lui” and thirteen bronzes that have never been shown in the Okanagan by the internationally acclaimed Joe Fafard.

In the Drawers Gallery, Headbones is presenting five works - a hen house of clucky moxie - by Megan Mansbridge. Five paintings of hens, each named after a prominent female artist and each showing attitude, add to an already vivacious atmosphere.

A FLOURISH OF FEATHERS featuring Crystal Przybille            November 28 - January 16, 2016

With works by Joe Fafard, Gabriel Orozco, Julie Oakes, David Wilson, Doug Alcock, Steve Mennie, Stephen Lee Scott and Rose Sanderson

Birds, feathers, and flight have long fascinated from Greek tales of Icaurus, to Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of flying machines, through to contemporary resolutions of man’s entrancement with the skies.

Wish is the featured presentation of a Flourish of Feathers for it is the sweeping expansive reach of this piece that suggested the title. Crystal Przybille was commissioned in 2010 to create the piece for the satellite airport space of the Kelowna Art Gallery in which she utilized a sparseness of form within a postmodern melding of diverse materials. Complimenting Wish will be alternative takes on feathering ways by Joe Fafard, Gabriel Orozco, Allesandra Exposito, Doug Alcock, Julie Oakes, Rose Sanderson, Stephen Lee Scott and David Wilson.  

Crystal Przybille is a graduate from the Bachelor of Fine Arts Program at the University of Victoria . In 2014, she was awarded the Okanagan Arts Award in the Visual Arts Category for her significant achievements and contributions.  

Exposure to the collections of European museums and galleries can be seen in Przybille’s figurative, monumental public sculptures, large accomplished bronze works such as Father Pandosy at Kelowna ’s Pandosy Mission Heritage Site. The Father Pandosy maquette and her maquette for Chief Sʷknc̓ut (Sookinchute) showing the Chief standing and raising a feathery plume towards the sky will also be exhibited at Headbones Gallery.  

This exhibition is definitely not ‘for the birds’, though it calls into play our bird-like affiliations. To add to the holiday festivities, three birds of a feather, The Dharma Dolls,’ undoubtedly plumed and pumped’ will be performing December 27 at Headbones Gallery in their fifth annual Glitter and Glam Holiday Concert. The exhibition runs until January 16, 2016. 

DANIEL HANEQUAND Ghostly Yours & MAHMOUD MERAJI Truth Seeking            October 17 - November 15, 2015The 1920 Manifesto of Surrealism defined their aim as being "to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality." Daniel Hanequand named one of his signature pieces Ghostly Yours as if signing a letter from the other side. Mahmoud Meraji when asked what his painting consisted of stated that he was “truth seeking.” Both of these affirmations speak of making a connection with an unrealised (not made real or actual) idea and then transferring it into a form that can be realised by another. It is a daunting yet obsessive task to turn the nebulous inner states of mind that escape definition into a piece of art. Impressions and philosophies, are sifted through the developed technique of the artist like a strainer that deposits upon the picture surface an image that connects with the unrealised.

Both Daniel Hanequand and Mahmoud Meraji have been composing visual letters, communicating with another dimension that is occupied by spirits, dreams, imaginings, ideas. They have been sending their missives religiously in an attempt to communicate the ‘great incomprehensibles’ in a form that can dissolve our separateness.

OK BE ST.                                                                                      July 10 - August 29, 2015

OK BE ST. is an Okanagan group exhibition with works by:

Doug Alcock, David Alexander, Glenn Clark, Briar Craig, Jen Dyck, Robert Dmytruk, Leonard Epp, Diane Feught, Johann Feught, John Hall, Joice M. Hall, Fern Helfand, Byron Johnston, Jim Kalnin, Ann Kipling, Mary McCulloch, Steve Mennie, Julie Oakes, Gary Pearson, Bryan Ryley, Heidi Thompson, David Wilson.

In this fast-paced tech-based age, we have become used to reading abbreviated messages while concepts and potential for new technology widens. Perhaps by saving time and firing out the words in short, animated clips we make room to receive information that requires a greater depth of attention. OK BE ST. presents recent and significant works by artists whose oeuvre is mature. 

During the summer months when the Okanagan enjoys an influx of visitors OK BE ST. brings an exhibition to the fore that enables an overview of works produced in the Okanagan. The valley is unique with a high concentration of professional artists, many with national and international exhibition schedules. Headbones Gallery’s OK BE ST. although not representative or entirely inclusive of all the great work being done in the Okanagan, is proud to present of selection of the some of the best from July 10 to August 29. The opening reception is July 10 from 6 – 9 PM with many of the artists in attendance and the public welcomed.

BRIAR CRAIG & SPEPHEN LEE SCOTT - Urban Clever, Urban Cool            April 3 - May 30, 2015

Briar Craig - Urban Clever

Seated in an urban context, Briar Craig gleans from society and as if analysing the pottery remains of an ancient civilisation, he asserts his findings with didactic assurance. He takes the scraps from our cultural condition and bring them back into the realm of appreciation.

It is important to note that Craig's practice employs a sophisticated process, one that has advanced along with our technological progress, an urban privilege. Briar filters his findings and then applies his technical expertise to the material so that we are convinced of its veracity. Alongside of the solid authenticity of Craig's works runs a continuous line of humour.

Briar Craig teaches print making at UBCO where his affable manner and rigorous knowledge inspires students towards printmaking. He is an expert in his field, the founder of The Okanagan Print Triennial which is currently on exhibit at the Vernon Art Gallery and exhibits his prints internationally.

Stephen Lee Scott - Urban Cool

Stephen Lee Scott also gleans from a definitive urban lifestyle although his material is drawn from counterculture rather than mainstream sources.

Text is a component, both visual and as part of the implied narrative that is his subject matter. The complex signs and symbols that make up tattoos have historically carried messages, be it the names of girlfriends, the love of Mom or a complex hierarchy that indicates social ranking, spiritual accomplishments, magical capabilities and respect embedded in foreign cultures with traditions of tattooing. Gang and prison tattoos communicate esoteric status and insider information. The urban hip adopted the practice.

Stephen Lee Scott completed a BFA at UBCO and Briar Craig was his print making teacher. Stephen's etchings and lithographs have a presiding darkness that is in line with the sci-fi, biker, tattoo images that he employs. The messages are oblique as if Scott has laid down the glove, challenging comprehension through an invitation to duel minds. 

ANNA GLYNN & ORTANSA MORARU - New Mythologies New Allegories        February 19 - March 28, 2015

Anna Glynn - New Mythologies

Active in the emerging Australia - Sino art scene with her home studio perched in the rainforest at Jaspers Brush, Australia, Anna Glynn has worked and exhibited extensively in China. With her frequent exposure to China, Glynn uses the advantageous contingency of both countries to create a body of work with a universality of appeal in line with current concerns centering on environmental precariousness. There are states of mind that seem personified by a visual that seamlessly marries sensibilities from each culture.

Anna Glynn broaches the diversity of being in the animal world through simplified characters, filled with semitransparent layers which are then presented as elegant scrolls, making animism a friend rather than a foe. Glynn characterizes the animal with recognizable human traits providing a bridge between a complex sophisticated take on the otherness of species with a more child-like, approachable rendition. She has referred to her creations as “hidden worlds”. Glynn calls forth the white from the black, the light from the heavy, the delineated from the suggested, and allows a broader range of interpretation. Like Dylan's lyrics, “She can take the dark from the night-time”.

Ortansa Moraru - New Allegories

With a PhD. in printmaking, woodblocks being her specialty, Ortansa Moraru was born in Corabia, Romania and immigrated to Canada. In addition to an active art practice, Moraru currently works at the Marvin Gelber Print & Drawing Study Centre at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Her interlacing of the knowledge of her homeland with that of her Canadian life is set within allegory. There is a European air to her imagery as if it is fuelled by tales from her origins. A keen treatment of the subject under the guise of a playful rendition brings complex notions into a more pleasurable contemplative range. Both magical and whimsical in aspect, the intricate interwoven lines leave little room to doubt the solidity of her visual meanderings.

Ortansa Moraru's philosophy is couched in a format that can be light and serendipitous calling to mind childhood illustrations. The baroque nature of fairy tales where evil is acknowledged emerges much like the twisted thorns that accompany a rose. Her imagery, although woven in splintered lines which woodblock printing is perfect for the capture, evokes friendly spaces acknowledging the wonder of Nature's achievements.

GLENN CLARK - Wackem Sackem                                                                          December 19 - February 8, 2015

Dealing out accolades for the great game of hockey has long been a Canadian preoccupation. Hockey has segued into the realm of high art on occasion (Haute Hockey) and in our upcoming exhibition Wackem Sackem, the work of artist Glenn Clark brings hockey out of the arena, out of the TV and onto the walls of Headbones Gallery.

Clark raises his schtick and blocks the puck mid-air while focusing on penalties. It is not a stretch to say he ‘glamorizes’ the infractions with shiny appealing aplomb. With works like Whackem, (over the head) Sackem (in the groin) and Face Wash (apparent) the misdemeanors enter the annals of art history. Clark has always been an adept painter and the technical achievement in the latest new cut-out works is high. He takes this another step further with the addition of interactive components.

Many who embrace hockey also have open arms for art. Between sports and the fine arts, we could use more crossovers and Glenn Clark’s work has nostalgic populist appeal without having to stoop.

Clark studied art at Okanagan College in Kelowna, and then completed a BFA at the University of Calgary in 1991. The artist has exhibited his paintings in several public galleries in British Columbia in both solo and group shows. He currently lives and works in Penticton, BC. Wackem Sackem continues until February 8, 2015.

ANN KIPLING - Headspace                                                                             October 30 - November 30, 2014

Ann Kipling’s drawings record a vibrational liveliness. Her mark-making is diligent, filled with energy and presence. In her ongoing works of portraits this perception of energy is especially acute. Every inch of space, empty or occupied, is alive.

With the discipline that demands a balanced headspace and a willingness to engage, Kipling acknowledges the restlessness of creation while still dealing with the permanence of the resultant art object. Kipling’s heads are recorded over time. The sitter was required to pose in one position as Ann Kipling recorded her impressions. She recorded the small shifts in the movement of the sitter to produce the portrait. In later portraits, she invited the sitter to move and this change of position was recorded. It is an intense cooperation between the sitter and the artist.  

Ann Kipling was born in Victoria, British Columbia in 1934. In 2008, Kipling received an Honorary Doctorate from the Emily Carr University in Vancouver fifty-three years after she attended the Vancouver School of Art in 1955. Working exclusively on paper, Kipling has established herself as an important figure in Canadian art. Her work can be found in public and private collections across the country.

Headbones Gallery is pleased to show Headspace, an exhibition of portraits by Ann Kipling. The opening reception is October 30 (the night before Hallowe’en when shape shifting and identity changes are rampant) from 6 to 9 PM.

DIANE FEUGHT - Broken Spell                                                                                September 13 - October 25, 2014

Broken Spell is Diane Feught’s third solo exhibition with Headbones Gallery.

Having grown up immersed in Buddhist teachings while living in the western world, Diane became an artist and worked in graphic design while keeping up an active painting practice. That she should turn to miniatures follows suit. Traditionally miniatures depicted scenes from religious stories but because of their portability, they were also used for portraiture and scenes from daily life, sometimes of a personal nature.

These twenty-five small, well-done, gouache on paper paintings are powerful pulls towards consciousness. Each painting is set up as an interior. The figures are within a space, behind a mask, enclosed or boxed. The wallpaper is a substitute for the outside, the exterior. The hallways, stairwells, narrow door frames resemble the convoluted recesses of the mind - elements of incomplete mystery reigns. It is the wall paper that writhes or speaks to the estranged nature. It is in code, just understandable now - but with the potential for knowledge. It is the objective reality that refers to the undisclosed subjective personality. It is Freudian, associative.

Feught’s psychoanalytical visual approach to the human condition in painting is alluring as well as mystifying because she sets up her scenes with the trappings of beauty, like a film noire.

These may be little works, but visually they deliver a Goliath-like punch.

 

CHAK MAN LEI - Ink Paintings                                                                                  August 1 - September 6, 2014

Animation Artist Tian Xiaolei in the Video Room
Cut-outs by ZiRan in the Drawers Gallery

 Chak Man Lei’s exhibition, Tung and Sootzpah will open at Headbones Gallery on August 1 with a reception from 6 to 9 and the artist will be in attendance – all the way from China!

 Born in Hong Kong, Lei grew up in Macau (Cantonese language) until he was 12 when his family immigrated to Canada. Lei became a Canadian citizen, went to OCAD, and after six years in Vancouver dealing Chinese antiquities while maintaining his ink art practice, Chak Man Lei bought a one-way ticket to Beijing.  He learned Mandarin, set up a studio in one of the new art districts and now says “I feel more Chinese than the Chinese.”

 Lei’s work is based on Ink. In Chinese art, ink was used for elevated work with an intent to connect with the spiritual, seated in calligraphy and painting. Traditionally, a landscape was not begun plein- aire but by walking through the landscape. In solitude, from memory, the painting was created. Ink came from tung derived from burning pine trees so the essence was soot with added elements increasing longevity for image making.

 Headbones Gallery will also introduce the work of Tian Xiaolei, a video animation artist working with themes of generation and alienation. His videos explore a gamut of changes from birth to death, serenity to confusion, ancient to contemporary, the myths of the country folk to the plight of the modern Chinese. Refined yet expressive, the imagery is beautiful.

 Small hand-made books and collages by the street artist, ZiRan, will also be displayed. Billed as “councillor of discoveries”, one of “top ten art celebrities in China” and “contemporary artist innovating paper cuts” on his personal business card, Ziran’s work lives up to his name.

MICHAEL BJORNSON - Beyond Narrative                                   June 21 - July 26, 2014

Headbones Gallery is pleased to host “Beyond Narrative” an exhibition by Michael Bjornson with an opening reception on Saturday, June 21 from 6 until 8:30 PM with the artist in attendance. 

Born in Vancouver, Bjornson went to UBC for a degree in Art History and then a second degree from UBC in Architecture. He was a practicing architect for many years as well as being involved in the film business in Vancouver. He opened the Third Street Gallery which he curated and directed for ten years and then joined forces with Sherri Kajawara in Bjornson Kajawara Gallery. Both galleries were renowned for contemporary and often edgy art works. He subsequently attended and graduated from Emily Carr at the same time as the Young Romantics.  When the gallery closed in 2010 he immersed himself in creating. His philosophy is inclusive and he has a working relationship with artists Kitty Blandy and Geoff Carter collaborating on paintings, drawings and installations. “Beyond Narrative” brings to the fore recent solo paintings. 

Bjornson's haunting portraits, somewhat reminiscent of the work of Edward Munch or Francis Bacon, depict man in a sociological framework that points to a potential for isolation. He also brings a psychological presence into the picture that is as palpable as the portrait. The feeling of psychosis is not an active, violent, or disturbed concentration, however, but a poignant and beautiful appreciation of melancholy. Like Goethe’s young Werther the sentiment is drenched in perfumed romance. 

Perhaps it is the time spent working in film that brings a sense of drama to his paintings. As Bjornson endeavors to develop visual narratives, he frequently moves back and forth with images, ultimately reaching an edited and/or reconstructed version that suggests a time of acceptance. Michael Bjornson’s identification with story-telling moves beyond the physical plane to evoke a more colourful and complex set of personalities. He creates a world peopled with characters who appear to have colourful foibles and in doing so he invites us into the picture as well. 

 

FOUR WAY - Kelsie Balehowsky, Sarah Anne Franklin, Lucas Glenn Co., Malcolm McCormick      March 7 - March 29, 2014

Friday March 07, Headbones Gallery is introducing four new artists with a verve. To celebrate their arrival with aplomb - the popular Kelowna band Joyful Door - James Balehowsky, Zac Gauthier and Steven Wickenheiser - will add a musical dimension at the opening reception between 6 and 8 PM.

4-Way is an exhibition from March 7-29, 2014 of works by Kelsie Balehowsky, Lucas Glenn (Co.), Sarah Anne Franklin, Malcolm McCormick - each approaching the making of art from different perspectives yet possessing a common contemporaneity. Each artist is informed, currently and rigorously pursing a degree from UBCO in the Creative and Critical Studies department. The two women have chosen photography as their disciplines. The men use less technical art practices, McCormick being a painter and Lucas Glenn (Co.) using collage and found objects.  Making this four way stop, slowing down and looking carefully in the different directions, grants a better understanding of where we have been culturally as well as providing clues as to where we may be heading.

To feel the touch of the present as it filters through the refresh buttons of both visual art and music, Headbones Gallery  Friday, March 7 between 6 PM and  PM – text your friends! 

ROAMING PERSPECTIVES - Photographs by David T. Alexander and Leonhard Epp      January 23 - February 22, 2014

David Alexander and Leonhard Epp have each used the camera as a tool of reference rather than as a medium until recently when the long practice of recognizing that which has the potential for artistic merit was arrested, re-examined and chosen to exist not as a tool or a step but as an art object by virtue of its own intrinsic value. Since neither artist uses digital manipulation to a sizeable degree, the ‘art’ in these photographs comes directly from their individually developed sense of perception.

Alexander as painter and Epp as ceramicist are artists who have honed their disciplines to the extent that they have gained significant recognition in their respective areas. David Alexander has a national profile. He moved to the Okanagan where he sequesters and paints between his trips to exhibitions or into nature to work directly from the surroundings. Leonhard Epp, emigrated from Germany to Canada in 1951. After receiving a degree in Sculpture from The Vancouver School of Art in 1960 followed by a professorship there until 1972, he moved to the Okanagan where he set up his ceramic studio near Falkland.

SALONUS PAPYRUS                                                                                        December 7 - January 11, 2014

Headbones Gallery’s next exhibition will be an extreme paper salon. We’ll be refreshing and decking the walls with works on paper from the drawers. 

Hosting a paper salon, Salonus Papyrus, is akin to a celebration in the art world. It means the walls are laden with works on paper and on the delicate surfaces we find the more intimate offerings of artists. Whether it is a detailed pencil work or a gestural expression, paper-works beg closeness. 

Special guest Colleen Venables will perform a selection of classical works at 3:30 during the opening reception. Admission is free.

Notable awards: Colleen Venables has received include a 1st place prize at the Canadian National Music Festival – (2012) and the 2nd place prize at International Stradivarius Violin Competition – (2013). Other highlights include Soloist, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (2010) and Junior competitor, Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition, Beijing (2012).

JOE FAFARD, JOEL FAFARD, JOEL SCHWARTZ                                                                    October 24 - October 25, 2013

Headbones Gallery is proud to host this special two night exhibition by renowned Canadian artist and sculptor, Joe Fafard and a concert by Joel Fafard and Joel Schwartz.

Joe Fafard has created a new series of seventeen works that will debut on his Canadian tour that includes two locations in the Okanagan Valley. 

A Tune To Art: Sculpture and Song will start at 7PM with a short concert by Joel Fafard (son) and Joel Schwartz followed by an artist reception. 

A Tune To Art: Sculpture and Song is a ticketed event. Tickets are $25 and can be reserved by calling Headbones Gallery 250-542-8987 or Summerhill Winery 250-764-8000.
Doors open for A Tune To Art: Sculpture and Song at 6:30PM

Heidi Thompson - CLARITY                                                                                      October 3 - November 9, 2013

Working for the last decade in an abstract style that is known as “color field”, Heidi Thompson’s explorations into the spiritual sensation of colour and texture continue to define her own distinctive painting style.

 In this form of painting, a viewer has only to stand with openness in front of a work to experience a visual realm replete with all of the lushness and subtleties that such clarity of purpose can enable. The result is a focused, pristine perception where each piece becomes a new spectacle upon which to build associations of abundance, wholeness, wonder and – yes, joy.

OK THAUMATURGY a.k.a. Okanagan Wonders                                                    August 15 - September 27, 2013

Headbones Gallery has assembled works for the yearly definitive exhibition that focuses on exceptional output from the Okanagan. We often associate great art with the big city but we have giants here in the Okanagan. It is as if the combination of sun, water, the great outdoors and the headspace of artists meet on another plane to create works above and beyond the specifications of locale. 

This year Headbones Gallery addresses the over-the-topness of our slate in OK Thaumaturgy With “the working of wondrous materials or magic”, OK Thaumaturgy aka Okanagan Wonders addresses the exceptional.

Also, on September 15th at Headbones Gallery, Curator Emeritus of the Genbow Museum, Patricia Ainslie, will launch her book Okanagan Artists in their Studios,  featuring13* of the artists exhibiting in OK Thaumaturgy.

David Wilson - Paintings                                                                                    June 27 - August 11, 2013

David Wilson is a member of the Okanagan Nation and the winner of the BC Achievement Awards in Aboriginal Art for 2012. His exhibition David Wilson Paintings opens at Headbones Gallery on June 27 with a public reception from 7 – 9 PM.

Wilson’s work speaks of the identity and origins of the Okanagan. It articulates traditional motifs executed in brilliant acrylic paint - often on drums. Drawing from pictographs, stories and indigenous imagery influenced by the Mauri, North West Coast or Egyptians; Wilson’s paintings can be seen as contemporary icons.

Using vibrant colours with a quick-read graphic style, the paintings are clear and enlivened. Fresh in concept and design - crisp - the combinations of geometric and organic shapes create an energy that makes the paintings dance.

Wilson riffs on the imagery from these ancient roots, transforming the wisdom of an earlier time into a brightened version. By reinventing the narratives, the stories gain in relevance. Because he has an impeccable sense of balance and composition, the resulting pictures reverberate with tones from our modern existence. Wilson’s work connects to the spirits of the animals, the elements and seasons.

 To celebrate the opening, at 8PM on June 27, Headbones Gallery will host A Procession of Colours, a performance created by Molakira’z Dezignz. A Procession of Colours presents the wearable art of Mollie Bono of The Okanagan Nation and Akira Hanson who is Metis. Drawing on the tradition of the ancestors who used all parts of the deer and other game, the garments are made of natural fabrics, wool with finishing touches of bones, beads and leather.

With Mollie Bono commentating and The Earth Sisters drumming and singing (led by Robin Redhawk with Carolyn Anele, Wendy Chambers, Judy Wessel and Akira Hanson), the powerful voice of women will resonate from the traditions of the people of the First Nations.  

Headbones Gallery is proud to present the work of indigenous artists as the main exhibition for the Okanagan summer of 2013.

Steve Mennie and Jen Dyck                                                             May 11 - June 22, 2013

On the outskirts of Salmon Arm, in an adobe home with straw-bale-thick walls is the home of Jen Dyck and Steve Mennie. Jen Dyck is a jazz pianist and a collage artist. Steve Mennie is a printmaker, drawer, painter and jazz drummer.  The couple is creativity personified. 

Built on her dreams, Jen Dyck’s collage works depict interior spaces constructed of snippets from National Geographic, Life, ladies journals and whatever magazine is worthy of her cull. Dyck’s scenarios are peopled with characters engaged in zany situations charged with the illogical inventions and happenstance of her remembered sleeping state. With an uncanny familiarity, the work haunts, like a nudge in the ribs of awareness. 

There is an obsessive bent to Steve Mennie’s art works that are carefully tuned through his particular process to result in a solid end, each piece is worked. Veering between finely crafted figurative work and painterly psychological abstracts – and now and again combining the two realms – each piece is both created and conceived. Mennie’s visual acrobatics overcome the desire to understand process as he overwhelms any disbelief with a brilliant slight of hand.

Carin Covin & Alistair Rance - This That                                                             April 6 - May 5, 2013

Two abstract painters, Carin Covin and Alistair Rance can be brought within the same frame and yet their work is vastly different. Because they have perspectives at odds from one another, yet operate in the same arena, the pairing of their works in This That creates a rich conversation that is informed, intelligent and personable.

 

Covin examines an aspect of physical reality and then transforms it into non-objective painting. Rance’s work may suggest the physical plane after the fact - as in the architectonic overtones – but it is aesthetically divorced from the real world so that an open-ended relationship is permitted to the person who is in front of this series. Rance has not given any clues to representation. Covin’s work also holds a secret – the initial impetus, the source. Rance lets us know where his arm has been as he swings his drips. He records his physicality in this way. Covin paints where her mind has gone to, holding back information on her physical movements. Alistair Rance is expressing. Carin Covin is considering. Rance is an action painter; Covin, an abstract painter.

 

Having paired the painters in the exhibition, This That, Headbones Gallery presents two approaches to non-objective, abstract art that are diametric to one another although not opposed. The exhibition brings forth two committed identities working in the same genre.

Robert Dmytruk - Un Art - David Samila                                                      February 14 - March 17, 2013

Robert Dmytruk - Transmissions

When medium (paint) and the exploration of it as mark-making becomes the image, the painting becomes an entity unto itself. Robert Dmytruk has a large visual vocabulary and he speaks volumes with his lines, textures, patches of colour and undulating greys.

David Samila - Recent Paper Works

David Samila cuts loose from formality and expresses levity in personal daily drawing narratives. Samila’s free-form lines blended with wash and collage float on the page with humorous abandon resulting in a quirky aesthetic balance.

Un Art - Lee Bale, David Cantine, Karen Cantine, Robert Dmytruk & Sylvain Voyer

Un Art is a visual conversation in small sculpture between Lee Bale, David Cantine, Karen Cantine, Robert Dmytruk and Sylvain Voyer on the subject of colour harmony. Using various materials and collected objects over time, ongoing investigations and play occur with the removal of one of the primary (Red, Yellow, Blue) or secondary (Green Purple and Orange) colours.

OKANICON ICONAGAN                                                                              December 8 - January 20, 2013

There are a number of reasons why the Okanagan works for artists. The Okanagan lifestyle provides the opportunity to work without distractions, the physical environment is spectacular, even inspirational, and there is enough of a community of artists here to dull the edge of isolation, making the area more of a respite than a retreat. Okanicon Iconagan is an exhibition which attempts to gather together, under the bright blue roof of Headbones Gallery one iconic piece from each artist and it has resulted in the makings of a spectacular exhibition.

Jim Kalnin - Intrinsic Habitats                                                                  October 4 - November 3, 2012

Jim Kalnin (aka Feather) paints reminders of the encroachment of man upon his fellow creatures and Earth which we all share in common. He maintains his connection to the intrinsic properties of this altruistic, idealistic habitat. He has witnessed the compromise between man and his environment both virtually and creatively. Kalnin’s paintings (and works on paper) are poignant, sincere and humbly concerned with man’s place within the cosmos.

Kalnin doesn’t slap us towards consciousness, he eases us towards it. Yet Kalnin is not - nor has been - heavy handed in his approach to the issues of global sustainability. He has the ‘Feather” touch, as light as a serendipitous nudge towards awareness. His orientation to the sacredness of place remains intact. As modernity moves in, the flora and fauna are forced to move out–a testament to man’s excess.

 To compliment, and in the spirit of the same ideals as those that fuel Intrinsic Habitat, Headbones Gallery is pleased to host Kelowna busker and Little Creek organic gardener, Dale Zeich for his performance Zeich Does Dylan during the opening reception from 6-9PM October, 4th.

Byron Johnston - Begins With Zee                                                                  August 11 - September 27, 2012

Johnston’s choice of materials is often from sources that we wouldn’t associate with the making of art. For the Headbones exhibition, Johnston will be mounting pieces that include such diverse elements as an antique canoe, a chair and green apples – not altogether mind you. There will be sound elements, movable parts and a large outdoor piece. 

Byron Johnston has been a professor of sculpture in the University of British Columbia Okanagan’s creative studies department for many years. Not only through his own work, but also within his teaching practice, he has inspired many students who have gone on to create works that expand our concept of Fine Arts. 

Without forfeiting invention, curiosity or plain old “fun!” – Byron Johnston pulls up what could be termed ordinary, daily materials into the realm of fine arts with such assurance that the acceptance of his unique and inventive art is impossible to contest. Yet above and beyond the marvel of his daring – he keeps a firm hold on the object as high art.

 
12 Midnite - The Future of the Past  /  Stephen Lee Scott - Servicemen                    June 30 - July 28, 2012
12 Midnite - The Future of the Past

12 Midnite will be here for an opening night POP ART extravaganza, June 30th. At 7PM Midnite's alter ego, Cow-punk pop star "Billy-Bill Midnite" will be performing music as colourful, fun and energized as his art work.

With a paint style as slick and shiny as a souped-up hot rod, flourishing fire, hearts, bones and a quirky parade of comic characters; Midnite’s technical expertise lends class to his power pieces (literally for many have neon attachments). He’ll set the summer a-buzz as Headbones Gallery throws the switch up a notch.

Come join us as SMASH Gallery’s resident Lord of Lowbrow, 12 Midnite, brings his Future of the Past show to Vernon’s Headbones Gallery.

Stephen Lee Scott - Servicemen

Hailing from Kelowna, Stephen Lee Scott’s January show at the Vernon Art Gallery gave art lovers a taste of this up-and-coming artist’s accomplishments. Scott is a draftsman. His hand is confident. Meticulous pen and ink work provide the graphic details that define Stephen Lee Scott’s take on a culture that is tattooed, decorated and tribally young. Not afraid to include images of death and invention, Scott’s visual world exhibits an eerie beauty.

Stephen Lee Scott looks forward to presenting Servicemen and will be in attendance at the opening reception on Saturday June 30 from 6 – 9 PM @ Headbones Gallery. 

Robert Bigelow - A&B Drawings and Sangito Bigelow - Prints                      May 29 - June 27, 2012
Robert Bigelow - A&B Drawings
A follow-up to his recent series of more than two-hundred obsessive Red Blue Black Bic pen drawings, Robert Bigelow continues his freestyle mark-making explorations this time using ink marker pens. Sub-doodled pastels and organic free-flowing forms add depth to his retro pop California funk style of the 70’s.
 
Born in Los Angeles, California, Robert Bigelow graduated in 1967 from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. He collaborated on print editions with Josef Albers, Jim Dine, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Tony Onley, Man-Ray and Frank Stella. In Montreal, he was Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal (1978-95) where he pioneered safe printmaking methods. He now lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Bigelow's works are in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Pasadena Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum.
Sangito Bigelow - Prints
With the bravado of bold colors born of a graffiti practice and a conversation with design through his music, Sangito's imagery is as current as his latest infusion of youthful exuberance.
 
Sangito Bigelow, pop and street-visual savvy, brings the advantage of a cultural upbringing to the fore in his printmaking. The youngest son of Robert and Marie Bigelow (both artists), he is currently working and studying in Vancouver BC.
 
At home in cultural diversity, Sangito Bigelow is a founding member of the Zimbabwean Mamba, Afro Cuban band Kutapira, a band whose West African rhythms, reggae, samba and jazz, all contribute to a fusion of styles intelligently selected, seamlessly blended and produced by his brother Myles Bigelow.
 
Stanzie Tooth - Surfacing and Ruth Waldman - Mellifluous                      April 26 - May 26, 2012
Stanzie Tooth lives and works in Toronto where she paints sheltered glades that are more akin to Manet’s garden than the gritty cement-scape where they are created. When it is copasetic to interrupt the fecundity, she peoples these bucolic settings with vague figures, coming, going or sinking into the fronds with relaxed simpatico. Tooth uses teal, magenta, perse and the rare thalos - colours that veer to the more refined supernal shades of the primaries - as if conjuring the better side of life.
 
Hailing from New York, Ruth Waldman charms with biological imagery as she tells tales with a visual vocabulary set in a surrealist space. Biomorphic creatures cavort with animated vegetation, wisping and wending their way across the virgin expanse of pure white paper.  The coloured-pencil fantasy describes mutations between the floral and sinuous. It is the fronds and ferns of woodlands translated into a more designed order than the divine had devised. In bright pastels, wriggly things play within a dreamy perspective as Seuss-like illustrated botanicals, futuristic aliens and beings of otherness are distilled through tubes to burst into bloom.
Surfacing, an exhibition of paintings and paper works as lush as a blousy spring, will be showing in Headbones Gallery adding bloom to the season. Stanzie Tooth will be in attendance for the opening.
Doug Alcock, Ortansa Moraru and Briar Craig                      March 20 - April 21, 2012
The rigour of steel will compliment the ethereal lightness of Japanese paper with Doug Alcock’s and Ortansa Moraru’s exhibition Hammer and Spoon at Headbones Gallery, March 20 to April 21.  Foldform is a massive crumpled shape enveloping itself. Doug Alcock used a tool to leverage his task and create the relaxed volumes. He used a bobcat to shape the pieces. Printmaker, Ortansa Moraru, will also feature a large scale installation piece approximately 6 x 18 feet, titled Down on the Danube. It was accomplished by rubbing a spoon to press the image from a woodcut onto the handmade Japanese paper.

Coinciding with the 2012 Okanagan Print Trienial, March 31 – June 17, Headbones Gallery presents OPT co-founder Briar Craig - Through the Screen in the The Drawers Gallery with a series of silk screen prints, vivid in hue and rich in innuendo. Finding images from old National Geographic magazines, memos, notes, street flotsam and media detritus; Craig layers the coloring so that the end result is as subtly exquisite as a medieval tapestry. With a knack for discovering new meanings and associations to words and phrases, Craig’s work provides opportunity for mind games that challenge preconceived concepts and perceptions.

Katie Brennan - Chasing Waves - Lorne Wagman - Stone Lichen Weed         February 14 - March 17, 2012

Katie Brennan - Chasing Waves

Katie Brennan has named her exhibition Chasing Waves but Brennan has been making waves ever since she picked up a paint brush. Having grown up in the Okanagan, she graduated from Emily Carr with a BFA in 2005 and in 2009, she received her Masters of Fine Arts from The University of Guelph. In 2010 and 2011, she was an instructor for drawing and painting at UBCO. During this time, she set into motion oook.ca an on-line arts and culture magazine with extensive and up-to-date events listings.  Currently, besides an exacting painting practice, Brennan is the curator at Lake Country Art Gallery where she is causing a splash with her energetic programming.

An introductory exhibition was previewed in the Headbones Drawer’s Gallery in October with Brennan’s large paper pieces based on corporate car logos on display. These stripe-y monochromatic works laid the ground for a new series that first appeared during her Banff residency.

Challenged by the grandeur of the surrounding landscape, Brennan’s head turned from the concerns of materialistic signifiers to nature. Sounds of the mountain streams were pervasive and seeped into her work. The stripes became water runnels, currents and effervescent bubbles.

Lorne Wagman - Stone Lichen Weed

From Ontario, Lorne Wagman’s watercolours and ink drawings bring the ragged, bushy, overgrown and blousy side of nature into contrast with Brennan’s architectonic handling. Wagman looks closely and recognises every weed, lichen or stone with consideration.

Wagman lives near Tom Thompson’s Owen Sound and it is as if the spirit of the famous painter inhabits his personal aura. Wagman’s world grows from his paper pieces, overflows from his lush canvases and is deservedly recognised by Ontario’s art elite as authentic and inspired. Yet Wagman’s practice is down to earth and connected to the flora with a near intimate proximity. Wagman breathes nature.

.Subtle Slurs - Fern Helfand and Cynthia Karalla         January 10 - February 11, 2012

The body of photographs titled About Looking by Fern Helfand and Fat Lands by Cynthia Karalla fly the subversive flag in Subtle Slurs with a flare that could be termed “sociological feminism”.

Each examines a different aspect of sociological phenomena but they are tied by more than their photographic medium. Both artists objectify an accepted sociological norm and in doing so point out a disconnect in our symbiotic relationship with the natural world. Helfand addresses a current and acceptable relationship that man has to the animal as she presents depictions of animals from the wild within a museum framework. Karalla turns her attention to the animal, mineral and vegetable and presents it in the arena of consumerism.  Each arrives at a similar conclusion.

Kevin Spetifore in the Drawers Gallery       

Kevin Spetifore is clean cut. He is an aesthete. He is as far away from the mess of existence as is possible while still inhabiting this earthly plane. His conduit to this world of perfection is fine art where minimalism provides the vehicle for his journey into self expression. Spetifore's work inhabits the spiritual realm, undoubtedly acknowledged as a rung above the physical. It occupies the airy regions of unadulterated space. Even the medium is light - paper.

 Afar Per Se - Amar From Afar and Diane Feught         November 11 - December 31, 2011

We look towards the far distant for a sense of something other than the hum-drum existence that often takes over our routine lives. Vacations, videos, reading, music – all become the escape routes to enrichment. Afar Per se fulfills the wanderlust and slakes the thirst for exoticism, transferring a National Geographic mind frame into the refined halls of high culture.

 Amar from Afar is actually residing and working quite close for his studio is in Lumby, BC – yet that fact could translate into a rather exotic imagining for a New Yorker. Headbones Gallery visited the artist’s studio in the fall and were rewarded with a revelation as expanding as that of visiting another country. Amar’s work is not static. It reaches backwards in time as it projects forward and seldom is there only a surface meaning. But this is not a plea for nostalgia or even a reinforcement of exotic otherness for Amar doesn’t let the image rest. He pokes at it, jabs at it with the dissonance of virtual life and in doing so pulls his visual story line into the theatrical realms. There is a taste of intrigue, plot, climax and even the potential for a narrative resolution. He gives us sufficient clues but doesn’t reveal the ending.

 Diane Feught’s actual past, present and future have rarefied beginnings. Feught grew up in an Anglican home. As an adult, she lived in a Buddhist priory in Edmonton for seven years where she experienced the lush overlap of philosophical, spiritual and cultural diversity while still living in the heart of a ‘typical’ Canadian milieu. Her oil paintings and gouaches leave room for study as well as speculation as to their narrative source. Often with a strong composition that supports the drama of the imagery, her technique – impeccable and practiced – supports the strangeness of her subjects by granting an immediate viability to the juxtaposition of elements. The overwhelming perfection and balance take over any doubt at the unusual imagery. Feught also backs her innuendos with information, detailing with a precision to provoke applause.

 Afar Per se - what does it mean? Per se does not only mean “intrinsically” but also, “by, of, for or in itself”. It seems a fitting description of the works of Amar from Afar and Diane Feught with all of the allusions to otherness that they inspire.

Zachari Logan & Katie Brennan           October 7 - November 5, 2011

It is hard to resist the appeal of Logan’s large scale, infinitely and beautifully detailed drawings so that once blown over by the largess and gorgeousness - his small, also infinitely detailed pieces draw attention to become equally appealing. Headbones Gallery will present Zachari Logan’s Fable/ous, an exhibition centering around a grand powerful drawing depicting a gentler rendition of a country moment than the usual masculine didactic that could accompany such a large scale. The fine detailing of flora, fauna and human (Zachari is one of the men) gives cause for wonder. Since he often uses his own persona as subject, he has sculpted his body for this purpose so that his Apollonian physique is close to being an art piece in itself.

 Zachari Logan, visiting from Saskatoon, will give a walk-through tour and artist’s talk at 8 PM, during the opening reception on Friday, October 07.

 Headbones Gallery will also present the work of local artist, Katie Brennan whose impressive scaled works on paper, exhibition titled, Residual Cues, riff off of a different aspect of contemporary life. Based on car logos, these oil wash drawings trace the route of a hand held brush, as wide as the band of a stroke and in doing so transform the familiar into an art icon.

Aleks Bartosik - A Requium for Passion         September 1 - October 2, 2011

Come and watch Bartosik and Oakes in the drawing performance - Cat Fight BC

A Cat Fight - There’s something about the spectacle of a cat fight that’s hard to resist. The appeal is in the messy way that females fight with scrappy jibes, hair pulling, eye scratchy, green-eyed fury. September 01 at Headbones Gallery, Aleks Bartosik from Toronto (feisty paintings and bold big drawings) will stand up to the Vernon she-cat Julie Oakes.  This is not the first time the two have curled their lips back and meowed, Headbones at Art Mur Gallery, Montreal, also witnessed their furious dynamics in April, 2010 as the crowd jeered and cheered.

 A Cat Fight - Making a drawing feels like that sometimes. It begins with scratching away at the paper, trying to make a dent in the overwhelming white-space of aesthetic existence. The drawing may seem to be getting somewhere, hitting that stride, grooving in a space where the sun has come out and there is nothing to do but purr. Then a snag. A rustle in the leaves perhaps. A rodent-like, bird-brain of an idea crosses the path of vision and with a stretch and flex, it’s time to rise to the occasion. Eyes narrow to slits for better focus.  A leap, a dive, and a close brush with annihilation that could erase the entire project. The claws come out. It is time to get serious, to tackle. Is it ego against id or artist against paper? And with both sides so similar, it’s hard to tell the difference between the two once those claws have appeared.

Melina Moore, the renowned opera soprano and Judy Rose, jazz torch, (both of the famous trio Venus Headlights) will perform Rossini’s Duetto Buffo di Due Gatti (Cat Fight) to inspire the spar. These power-packed felines are likely to begin to caterwaul around 7 PM.

Okanagan Eyes Okanagan Wise Okanagan-ise  June 24 - August 20, 2011

Doug Alcock, David Alexander, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Glenn Clark, Leonard Epp, John Hall, Joice M. Hall, Byron Johnston, Jim Kalnin, Ann Kipling, Geert Maas, Steve Mennie, David Montpetit & Bruce Taiji, Richard Suarez, Carolina Sanchez de Bustamante, Carl St Jean, Heidi Thompson

Viewing through the lens of proximity can develop a slant, a ‘local vision’ and since art is about perceiving with an immediate awareness; those who live and work in the Okanagan, could be attributed with ‘Okanagan Eyes’.  A tour of the exhibition, Okanagan Eyes Okanagan Wise Okanagan-ise, will bring about a state more ‘Okanagan wise’. Since this exposure takes place here, in the Okanagan, this taste of cultural fare will enable an understanding and, once acclimatised, provoke identification – ‘Okanagan-ised’ … 

Jazzing it up during the reception, Jen Dyck on keyboard, Bill Lockie on bass and Steve Mennie on drums.

Breathing Room                                                   March 26 - May 8, 2011

The Picture Gallery -Donna Kriekle
Drawer's Gallery - Robert Farmer
Paper Gallery - Daniel Hanequand
 
Nothing but clear skies for our new exhibition titled Breathing Room on view until June 19th at Headbones Gallery.

From Regina, Donna Kriekle wisps eloquently with twenty-six sky paintings on canvas. Featured in The Picture Gallery, which is a long space, Kriekle’s sky paintings set the mood for springtime. With the optimism of the subject matter elevating the gamut of the skyway, lyrics come to mind that raise the spirits like the budding breath of a brand new day – “nothing but clear skies…”

Candy coated bunnies are falling from the sky in the Drawers Gallery with oil paintings by Winnipeg native Robert Farmer. Farmer’s tongue in cheek ‘splatstick’ resonates with the nostalgia of a less complicated era fallen prey to the havocs of chaos. His detailed renderings and technical virtuosity bring a world with a foot in childhood into the more complicated realms of gaming and advertising media.

With plenty of breathing room, nineteen individual miniature paintings by Toronto artist Daniel Hanequand are hung salon style in a three-foot-square space in The Paper Gallery. Their mini-counterparts form couplets, trios and rows of under-hand-sized, sci-fi, surreal and - sometimes - haunting little pictures.


From Venus to the Gods                                    March 26 - May 8, 2011
The Picture Gallery -Srdjan Segan
Drawer's Gallery - Dagmara Genda
Paper Gallery - Judy Chicago
Textile - Carolina Sanchez de Bustamante
 

Refresh - The Colour Experience                    February 10 - March 20, 2011

The Picture Gallery - Heidi Thompson
Drawer's Gallery - Scott McEwan
Paper Gallery - Robert Bigelow, Steve Rockwell, Katia Santibanez
Design -
Carl St Jean
 

Headbones BC Gala                                              December 10 - February 6, 2011

The Picture Gallery - Pass The Buddha
Drawer's Gallery - Scott P. Ellis
Paper Gallery - Erik Jerezano & Tony Taylor
 
Additional works on display by:
Doug Alcock, Ghada Amer, Daniel Anhorn, Damian Aquiles, Guy Boutin, Karl Heinz Boyke, Bill Bragg, Susan Brandoli, Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, Briar Craig, Billy Copley, Franco DeFrancesca, Sophie DeFrancesca, Adrian Doura, Leonard Epp, Alessandra Exposito, Robert Farmer, Sergio Finamore, Ed Giordano Jr., Jim Hake, Steve Jackson, Reg Kienast, Donna Kriekle, Bob Kingsmill, Bodo Korsig, Ann Kipling, Donna Kriekle, Jeffery Thompson, Geert Maas, Tom Mackenzie, Jennifer MacKlem, ManDad, Jesse McCloskey, David Montpetit, Judith Page, Maurizio Pellegrin, David Constantino Salazar, Kenny Scharf, Reinhard Skoracki, Srdjan Segan, Christian Bernard Singer, Fred Tomaselli, Wing Yee Tong, Stanzie Tooth, Ruth Waldman, Deborah Wilson, Tom Wren and Z’otz* Collective

Robert Bigelow C-RBB 6x6                                          July 2 - August 1, 2010

Ashpa Naira Gallery and Headbones Gallery invite you to celebrate the automatic renewal of the moon with artist Robert Bigelow in attendance from 2-7pm for the opening reception of his exhibition Sunday, July 11, when the dawning of awareness is most potent.

The New Moon is a time of regeneration when the creative pulse is nascent, a seedling with a host of possibilities for growth. It is akin to our subconscious.

Robert Bigelow has called his work “abstract automatism”. The spark that lights the flame of creativity lies in the subconscious. By clearing the mind and erasing any vestige of association with physical representation, the abstract is made manifest.

 A ‘Bigelow’ is like a connection between the world of the spirit and virtual reality. It is a visual map of intuitively recorded energy emitted over time.

Michaele Jordana Berman                                                   April 8 - April 25, 2010
Cyborg: The Human Condition - Michaele Jordana Berman, a multiplatform artist, is a name that many know, perhaps from different contexts, for she has excelled in more than one discipline to memorable effect. You may remember her as the sylph-like actress in Stefan Czernecki’s film Green Veridian Green. Then she bowled the Toronto art scene over with her exhibition Oceans of Blood at the Isaacs Gallery in 1976. Her large-scale airbrushed photorealist paintings related to her stay in the Arctic, where she drifted on the ice floes with the Inuit and the narwhal. The National Gallery purchased her monumental painting from this period, I Cry Tears of Blood.. As the lyricist /singer Michaele Jordana in the new wave/punk band The Poles with Doug Pringle (originator of the “electronica” group, Syrinx) her fragile physicality, ethereal looks and riveting performance of songs such as CN Tower are graven into the musical archives of Toronto.

CYBORG, The Human Condition, like Michaele Jordana Berman’s previous acts of self re-invention, is as memorable as it is absolutely contemporary.

Pulled (A Print Show)                                                             March 19 - April 4, 2010

Headbones Gallery has Pulled together an exhibition of fine art prints by artists and printmakers featuring: 12 Midnite, Robert Bigelow, Don Carr and Steve Mennie.

This multi-person print show includes works by twenty-five different artists and printmakers. Varied techniques including lithography, serigraphy, etching, aquatint, drypoint, colograph, woodblock, lino-cut, embossed, rubber stamp, digital and hand colored prints prove that great printmaking is timeless with prints ranging from the sixties right up to today.

View additional print works by: Angus Bungay, Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, Briar Craig, Franco DeFrancesca, Larry Eisenstein, Johann Feught, Elizabeth Forrest, Tyler Bright Hilton, Jeffrey Little, Bodo Korsig, Jesse McCloskey, ManWoman, Ortansa Moraru, Ed Pien, David Samila, Katia Santibanez, Dave Sheppard, Daryl Vocat & Nancy Watt.

NeoBeast - Beastly Explorations Aesthetically Stating Truisms    Feb 19 -  March 14, 2010

NEOPRIEST, an exhibition at Headbones Gallery in March, 2009, was based on an identified aesthetic that was expressed with an acronym to more succinctly impart the essence of thirteen artist’s work. From this original exhibition an over-riding identifiable subject has revealed itself. And in order to pin it down through language and to carry on the intellectual rigour, NeoBeast has been coined - Beastly Explorations Aesthetically Stating Truisms.

Man’s separation from the order of species due to modernisation and technology is a realised dilemma. That these artists chose ‘beast’ as the metaphor that encompasses feral, carnal and primitive as well as cute, whimsical, elegant or stylised: depicts the struggle that the contemporary atmosphere imposes upon our relationship to animals.

Man and beast - the story line of countless artworks, operatic to quietly penned - has occupied the attention of civilization since the otherness of the beast was first scraped on a cave wall in a Paleolithic attempt to depict the relationship. The works in NeoBeast show that the subject, far from having been exhausted, is still relevant today.

Cesar Forero - Home and Jungle                               January 29 - February 14, 2010

Gallery Installation and two dance performances featuring Cesar Forero with dancer Michelle Moylan, dancer Sandra Clarke, and soprano singer Pam Patel.

Cesar Forero’s exhibition is aptly titled Home and Jungle for his vivacious work encompasses a wide range of imagery embracing everything from the quotidian to the exotic. Forero’s work is truly multidisciplinary and accomplished across the disciplines. Originally from Colombia, Forero is an architect, figure skater, dancer, choreographer, costume designer, painter, sculptor and relational fabricator. He enthuses. His infectious creativity feeds from the normal humdrum to transform into spectacle as he stitches, pastes, welds, rehearses and details. It is difficult not to use superlatives in the face of his prodigious output and once seen, his productions are hard to forget.

Having presented the performance and exhibition The Box in 2008, Headbones Gallery anticipates with pleasure the presentation of Home and Jungle.

Jim Hake - HARDERFASTER                                     January 8 - January 27, 2010

Jim Hake, a sculptor whose work is well known in Italy where he spent eleven years, will present his work for the first time in Toronto at Headbones Gallery, January 8 to 27.

It’s more than manipulating the space and it’s also more than repetition that ties together the overall oeuvre of Jim Hake’s work - although both of these components are ties that bind the diverse imagery together. Multiple meanings from multiple objects are illustrated perceptively.

The exhibition will occupy the gallery space with a large personality. Hake within all of the pieces has inserted another powerful lifeline – that of the lightness of being, humour, play and a joy derived from the bounty of existence.

Harder and Faster.  Hake is working in Canada now and his work is working. We get it and it spurs us to spur him on – harder, faster! This is exciting work.

Paper Salon with new Collages by Scott P. Ellis    December 11 - January 4, 2010

Celebrate the holiday season at Headbones Gallery and get a ten dollar drawing?! Headbones Gallery is hosting a paper salon from December 11 to January 3 and in order to stimulate the holiday festivities with good old fashioned seasonal commercialism, there will be a slasher sale with prices slashed on the spot! Why wait for Boxing Day? Items in the paper salon can be found at the website beginning Dec 9 where offers can be made for the works before the slasher even comes on board!

Yes folks, at the Grand Opening December 11 from 6PM until 9PM and on Saturday from 12 until 6,
celebrity slasher salesman Jay Ould
(Dec.11 only) will rip through the regular value of works on paper from your favourite artists! December 13, the prices go back to normal so dash on over to 260 Carlaw Avenue and somewhere in the midst of the helter skelter, a ten dollar drawing will be revealed! Which is the ten dollar drawing!? Only the slasher knows, but before 6 PM on December 12, a lucky collector will walk out of Headbones with a ten dollar purchase (worth far far more…)!

In tandem, Headbones will be showing the works of the great collage fabricator and visual statesman,
Scott P. Ellis in conjunction with the social/political audio/video shorts by RX (the party party) whose works buzz the circuits of youtube popularity..

Spunky Rooms - Aleks Bartosik and Robin Tewes   November 13 - December 7, 2009

 
On November 13, Friday, Headbones Gallery opened an exhibition of works by two women artists; Robin Tewes, a mature New York artist who deals in images derived from domestic environments and Aleks Bartosik, who’s autobiographically based, narrative drawings were introduced at the opening reception with a drawing performance.

Spunky women - Tewes’ quiet resignation breaking out with military fierceness and Bartosik’s seemingly virginal demeanour kicking her heels with spirited naughtiness, ready to be frisked. Unseemly women, their work is not in keeping with standard norms of taste and form. Each is rebellious. Neither is ladylike.

Tewes brews on her boundaries, hysteria lying just below the surface of her placid rooms – a figment of her imagination or the visual documentation of her particular prison? Are the walls, corners, furniture, a private picture of a woman’s castle or an artist’s confinement? Tewes acknowledges the solitary confinement of easel painting in a living room while the child plays on the rug. Tewes is painting camouflage. There is a perverse insinuation lurking in the ordered sameness – a quiet ‘fuck you’ whispered with a sly smile of victory. Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, first published in 1869 because men went to war - a grand theme. Virginia Woolf in 1929 delivered a series of essays to two women’s colleges at Cambridge University titled A Room of One’s Own wherein she questioned whether women could write a great work for they were denied the same opportunities as men to experience the world - women stayed at home. Tewes works from home and is effective.

Bartosik is the younger generation. Messing about. Her women do all the unseemly acts that lie beneath the surface of Tewes’ brew. Rubrical acts with reddish smears as lipstick blotches. Bartosik’s bad little girl is not about to give in to a ladylike resignation. She too is caught in the examination of women’s world, the psychological range openly acknowledged - narcissist to nymphomaniac. She dons her war paint, saddles her horse, kisses her girlfriends and shows what she has been told to keep private.

Minutial Matters                                                       October 16 - November 9, 2009

We are exhorted to “pay attention to details” and by doing so the larger endeavours will fall into place. We have been counselled to acknowledge “the power of one” and to focus on the importance of the individual, no matter how small or inconsequential. Conversely, we have also been advised “not to sweat the small things”. Man’s fascination with minutiae extends into the sciences where microscopic discoveries illuminate health, engineering and physics. The ability of the eye to delve ever tinier has been aesthetically grasped in carvings on grains of rice, Roman enamels, Persian miniatures and renaissance religious icons. The applied arts have grappled with such preciously miniscule treasures as tapestries made of hair and beaded carpets.

Six artists reveal their obsessive ability in Minutial Matters at Headbones Gallery. From New York, Ruth Waldman’s works has been honoured in exhibitions that ranged from a concentration on size and detail to spotlighting the disguised eroticism of her characters. Katia Santibanez, also from New York where Pace Editions is currently showing her work, speaks an erotic visual language as well but hers is one of tickling hairs and sensuous wavering. Daniel Hanequand’s miniature paintings on panels reveal an intimate futuristic realm that has been executed with such care that wonder follows on perusal. He is an accomplished master of his own universe. Two emerging artists introduce their latest works. Cole Swanson who was trained in India in the art of miniature painting airs his skills with a contemporary subject matter. These paintings must be exhibited under glass for so delicate is the surface that even a drop of moisture can disturb the perfection. Mitsuo Kimura, from Tokyo, presents small paintings on stretched paper that recall Japanese animation, fabrics and design wherein he tells of his reactions to the western world in lively saturated colours and stylised characters. And re-emerging from Toronto is Larry Eisenstein’s full-on obsessive doodles of evolving forms and obfuscated narratives.

Clearly, these artists have “sweated the small stuff”, spent time with a magnifying glass and exerted patience born of dedicated practices.

Back to the Garden                                                  September 11 - October 4, 2009

Joni Mitchell, raised in Saskatchewan, wrote “Back to the Garden” and in 1969, forty summers ago, it was performed by Crosby, Stills and Nash at Woodstock. Held by baby boomers and successive generations of eco-minded youth as a rallying chorus for affirmative positivism; the song focused on the need to reconcile the impact of progress with holistic idealism. As Torontonians return to the city where cultural inspiration replaces the natural regeneration of summertime, four visual artists - Angiola Churchill, Donna Kriekle, Ortansa Moraru and Christian Bernard Singer - extend the season in Back to the Garden, opening - pointedly - on September Eleventh at Headbones Gallery.
 
In Angiola Churchill’s pristine white paper installation, Sacred Grove, a fresh breeze rustles the floating, feminine florals as Singer’s moss installation infuses the gallery with a deep earthy smell. Moraru’s woodblock or tempera prints of, aptly, trees stands firm with the solidity of her master technique. And from Saskatchewan as well, Donna Kriekle presents fulsome berries, crisp ripe apples and the niggle of grasshoppers under prairie blue skies.
 
Beauty is presupposed in a garden visit, pleasure anticipated. Back to the Garden at Headbones Gallery will fulfill the expectations.

BRONSON, THE PRISON DRAWINGS                                 June 17 - June 27, 2009

Bronson, The Prison Drawings is a solo exhibition of drawings by one of Britain's most notorious inmates, Charles Bronson.

Bronson, The Prison Drawings - Courtesy of the Princess, are a play by play visual documentation of a prison romance from 1997 - 2000 told in graphite, ink and coloured pencil. The drawings are brutally revealing. Bronson's hand is controlled but his subject matter is not. The Princess is his muse, foil and interlocutor. 

In late 1995, The Princess, Canadian woman prisoner TG0786 and Ontario College of Art (OCA) graduate, found herself incarcerated in the United Kingdom on a six year drug smuggling charge. With an interest in art therapy, she began writing to Bronson after seeing one of his drawings in a British tabloid and a romantic correspondence of drawings both singular and collaborative, was begun. Eventually, the happy couple pledged to be married, never having personally met, and the British tabloids went wild with their sensational story of love and commitment. 

With a curiously sweet candour, brushed with naughtiness, Bronson tells his story, confined by the size of the paper and materials made available to him. With no emotional holds barred, Bronson tells it as he sees it from within prisons of cement blocks, spied upon by surveillance cameras and tortured by his very active imagination. This sociological, psychological and diaristic presentation of the life of an inmate is an exhibition that encourages study and contemplation, yet also rewards both the curious and the art lover.

The catalogue and exhibition could not be made without accomplices. I would like to thank the Princess for the chance to host this exciting exhibition and together we gave titles to Bronson’s drawings. I would also like to thank Ben Portis for his introductory essay and Julie Oakes for her help with the installation and lastly, I would like to congratulate Charles Bronson on his engaging practice of drawing and sharing his life on the inside.

Figuration                                                                                May 7 - June 16, 2009

There’s something about the honesty of one’s circumstance that sets the scene for powerful images. We are all imbedded in figuration but the personal range of specific experience is varied.

Mahmoud Meraji harkens to his Iranian roots with the use of symbols framing portraits of his family, self and friends. His son, Mehrad Meraji aggrandises friends and family with a positivism born of the undaunted belief that talent lends to a fresh artistic career. Zachari Logan’s triplet nude self portraits radically poise the mundane with sensational eroticism while Susan Low-Beer’s ceramic children leap in trancelike suspended animation. Each artist, ’figuring’ it out, brings to bear the authenticity of personal practices and life orientations.

(ab strak' tid)                                                                           March 26 - May 2, 2009

Ram Samocha’s energetic drawing performance, Abstract Peace, ignites the exhibition as his gestural spontaneity flares.

Intellectual underpinning removes abstraction from the physical so that mental and spiritual practice is as evident as the artistic. This coupling of idea with color, form, material and the personal visual vocabulary of each artist makes ab strak tid an exhibition of rarefied thought.

The architectonic light and monument works of Khaled Mansur, the rich, shimmering and seemingly bejeweled fabric of Heidi Thompson’s and Scott Taylor’s layered colors, the lyric illusions in Mahmoud Meraji’s and Cesar Forero’s dancing shapes, the humourous sense of play with David Samilla and the visceral plasticity of Bodo Korsig’s woodblocks & Karl Heinz Boyke’s paintings and bronze sculptures; spurned on by sensation, resonate within the intellect.

NEOPRIEST   New Pop Realists Intellectually Engaged in Story Telling    February 13 - March 21

The identification of an aesthetic can serve various positive purposes. For the artists, it affords an objective from which to consider why the name is applicable. For the appreciator, it allows for roads of association to be traveled that might not have been self generated and therefore discover correlations that run within these works. To the art writer, critic and curator, it gives a platform upon which to comment, theorize, criticize and organize. It can also position neopriest within historical and philosophical contexts or neopriest can, like a sauce, add new flavour to an already sufficiently nourishing dish.

.The Dark Side and Snow                                           January 3 - February 11, 2009

As the depth of winter plays havoc with our perceptions, Headbones Gallery serves it right back with "The Dark Side". This exhibition of drawings and works on paper, along with sculpture by John Farrugia, features artists working primarily in black & white with macabre subject matter augmenting the brew.

We will present the annual 2008 Headbones Award. Made by last year's winner, Srdjan Segan, the 2008 Headbones Award is a unique cast bronze sculpture, sponsored by Artcast Inc. The winner will be announced at 8PM during the opening reception on Saturday, January 3, 2009.

Human Sacrifice - Julie Oakes (A selection of drawings)   December 13 - 23, 2008

View a selection of drawings from three exhibitions with novellas; Quercia Stories, The Revolving Door and Conscientious Perversity, documenting the libertine adventures of Justine Quercia as told by her sister Juliette.

We invite you to join us in a traditional Wiggly for the opening reception on December 13, from 7 – 10 PM.   Neema Bickersteth, the celebrated opera diva, will perform at 8:30.

Guests are encouraged to wear a wig, hairpiece, toupee or merkin. Garage One Media will be present and providing guests with complimentary professional digital portraits in their Wigs.

Primal - Ashley Johnson (Solo Exhibition)                          November 1 - 29, 2008

Ashley Johnson’s first solo exhibition in Canada at Headbones Gallery will leave indelible impressions on the psyche of viewers. These powerful paintings have the ability to bridge synapses in the deep recesses of the brain and permeate the core. Johnson has successfully captured the essence of human/animal instincts addressing topics of evolution, reproduction, life, death, sexuality, dreams, customs and rituals. 

Johnson has created work that harkens to a spiritual root of first importance, fundamental to the psyche. Humans shape-shift into animals, interact with the beastly and attach to areas of the subconscious. This delving into the basic impulses, much like Freudian psychology, allows for a confrontation with the nether regions where, by visually speaking the unspeakable, knowledge is gained.

The exhibition will consist of approximately sixteen works that span from 2001-2008. A catalogue will be available including pertinent writings by Ashley Johnson.

Fresh Pop NYC (Three Person Exhibition)             September 11 - October 25, 2008

Jesse McCloskey is the young renegade. He freely emotes, applying a pop consciousness to a New England narrative. The result - fresh pop. 

Billy Copley has been working with popular imagery from the west coast to New York City, where he was a friend of Andy Warhol. His snappy cartoon-ish style is a fresh take on pop. 

Ed Giordano, with humanitarian angst shows the plight of the common man in his most disadvantaged insecurity. With a sculptural technique that relates to the work of George Segal (he had studied with him), he presents the popular dilemma with the freshness of a well placed slap.

10 Cent Hot Dogs - Robert Farmer (Solo Exhibition)             June 5 - June 28, 2008

Toronto visual artist, Robert Farmer, steps up his work and delivers an exiting body of new paintings at Headbones Gallery commencing Thursday, June 5, 2008. Aptly titled, 10 Cent Hot Dogs fits Farmer’s surreal carnival-esque pop style paintings with a turn-of-the-century faux finished feel. With his cotton candy palette and pop-social messages, humour and spectacle prevail. Bring a lucky dime and join Robert Farmer and Headbones Gallery for a ‘real’ 10 Cent Hot Dog in the alley during the opening reception.

Warnings - Scott P. Ellis (Solo Exhibition)                                May 1 - May 31, 2008

The jarring imagery in Scott P. Ellis' constructed photographs and collages have the power to provoke memories relating to atrocities from current and historical events. From the point of view of artist as interpreter, these works make associations to corporate, religious and political corruption. Ellis delivers a strong visual punch in this exhibition of photos created during the radical Montreal punk scene of the 90’s along with current intricate collages born of mass media hyperbole..

Revivified                                                                                April 3- April 29, 2008

It has been a long winter, cold and denying the relief of an irreversible melt. When the smells from the street become pungent and the snow banks piled by ploughs turn grimy from pollution, spring harkens.  

Headbones Gallery is hosting spring in the heart of the east end.  With floral sprigs, the wonder of the constellations, verdurous sweeping vistas, and the miniscule details of foliage, the rites of spring adorn the walls in paper works, a magnificent painting by Lorne Wagman and creep across the floor in an installation of moss and flying paper by Christian Bernard Singer.

WWW.Women                                                              February 16 - March 20, 2008

In this exhibition, women have staked a self conscious claim within a nourishing field of dreams (art) and in doing so, broken ground that grew a different female form of artistic avatar. Often political in approach, women have used their bodies, their intuition, their ability to nurture and multi-task and their grand operatic voices to shatter many a glass tower. This Valentine month, WWW.WOMEN follows on the day of paper hearts and cliché promises with a spectacular show of solid womanhood.

Work'n It                                                                      January 10 - February 14, 2008

The energy needed to promote the work is equal to the energy needed to produce the work. Not only with the consistent driving of their practice and openness to opportunity, but also promotion can be integral to the work itself. With strength of image, format or a sheer graphic blast of power, the artists in Working It have noticeably been investing their talents in positions destined for high returns. The imagery and execution broadcasts a combination that clearly equals excellence.

The presentation ceremony of the 2007 Headbones Award sponsored by Artcast Inc. will be at 8pm.

Weird Queer Freaky Xmas                                           December 3 - January 8, 2008

'Christmas’ has morphed into ‘Xmas’ and become outlandish in aspect. Commercialism reigns with high-end demands for better gifts as children loose perspective (children!?) of the inspiration for the holiday season. Art too has found its seat in elfin freaky realms peopled by crazy characters, strange in countenance and design. Rather than becoming jaded, our grab bag presentation is a joyous holiday celebration, straight from the ‘art with a wrestling extravaganza for the opening reception on December 1, replete with freaks, queers and weirdos. 

Project Room - Scott McEwan

It’s worth being ringside at 7PM when Headbones presents Queer Wrestling, a colorful collaboration of showmanship, ritualism, choreography, and the performative aspects of pro wrestling amidst an exhibition of Scott McEwan’s Neo-Psychedelic paintings. Defiance Pro Wrestling grapples with Christmas in wrestling gear by fashion designer Matthew Simpson.

Srdjan Segan (Solo Exhibition)                                                November 1- 30, 2007

It is as if we are now familiar with another species, for the large drawings of Srdjan Segan are becoming a recognized shape on the horizon of Toronto's art landscape like a subliminal giant or an archetypal figure. The tall beings dangling from Woolfitt’s Art Supplies on Nuit Blanche arrested passer-bys as they gaped at the giant drawings. Concurrently, a solo exhibition was held at the Detroit Industrial Project Gallery from September 15th - October 20. Several 33 foot long drawings hung with their feet from the rafters dipping into Headbones booth #825 at the Toronto International Art Fair. On November 3, Segan's solo exhibition at Headbones Gallery opened to an enthusiastic crowd where once again exclamations of wonder and awe resounded in the space transformed by the paper visitations.

Two time recipient of the John B. Aird drawing competition, Segan has put charcoal and coffee (simple necessities of an artistic practice) to use to expand the parameters of size with passionate deliberation and delivery.

On November 21 at 7:30, Headbones the Drawers will host an 'artist talk'. We extend a warm invitation to join us at Headbones Gallery to listen as Segan illuminates the creationism that led to the birth of these larger-than-life humanoids.

Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto          September 8, 2007
Abstract (Colour)

Color can be the sole focus of abstraction as in the color field paintings of Heidi Thompson. It can differentiate between elements and describe space as in the work of Steve Rockwell or it can carry geometric associations as with George Dewitte's dot works. Color serves to express a display of emotional states, symbols and conditions in Cesar Forero's paintings and choreographed performances. And then there is color as a team member, a component in a symphony where form, composition and color combine to celebrate a new vision as in Klunder's, Bigelow’s, Noestheden’s and Meledandri's work. In this exhibition, the component of color is as necessary to the work as the spirit that carries life.
 
Gykan Project Room
The Gykan Project Room will be featuring colour abstract paintings by George Dewitte
October 6 - November 1
Robert Bigelow
George Dewitte
Cesar Forero
Harold Klunder
Nina Meledandri
John Noestheden
Steve Rockwell
Heidi Thompson
 
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto          September 8, 2007
Abstract (B&W)

Abstraction – an opportunity to ignore the pressing concerns of representational thinking, loaded as it is with meaning – delves into a freer vision. By paring the flight of freedom down to black and white, Headbones Gallery opens its fall season with a power packed slate of artists whose diversity exemplifies numerous visual possibilities with an astonishing range of greys in between the polarized opposites.
Gykan Project Room
The Gykan Project Room will be featuring colour abstract paintings by Gertrude Kearns
September 8 - October 4
Karl Heinz Boyke
Angiola Churchill
Alan Glicksman
Gertrude Kearns
Ortansa Moraru
John Noestheden
Bryan Ryley
 
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto          May 17, 2007
Bona fide

Have you ever felt when looking at a piece of art work that you might be falling into the state of one of those silly peasants who were fooled into believing that the Emperor had on clothes and that perhaps there was an element of fraud in the work? “Bona Fide” is a presentation of work that is absolutely real and without fraud. We have gathered solid, earnest artists that have made work in good faith that attests to an inherent veracity, rare hits of substance in a world prone to a quick fix.
Gykan Project Room
The Gykan Project Room will be featuring animated vignettes by: Paula Jean Cowan
May 17 - June 28
Paula Jean Cowan
Diane Feught
Johann Feught
Ed Giordano Jr.
Susan Hamburger
Jenny Laden
Jeffrey Thompson
Nanna Vonessamieh
Ruth Waldman
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto          April 5, 2007
For Font's Sake

Before the Tower of Babel fell, it attempted to reach heaven but the confusion of language brought the grand ambition to a crumbling close. Text based work, often dry visually has a critical bite that clearly is picking up on a chaotic chatter. Transferred into didactic sayings or cryptic clues to the meanings of societal mores; the messages seem to be working as visual configurations in league with the shapely fonts.
Gykan Project Room
Stephan Bircher and Patrick Mimran along with story telling by Allen Merovitz will be featured in the Gykan Project Room. Headbones Gallery would like to thank both Gykan Enterprises Inc. for the use of the space and SML Graphic Solutions for their generous support in printing the large banners for this project.
Apr. 5 - May. 15
Carin Covin
Briar Craig
Scott Ellis
Stephan Erasmus
Patrick Mimran
Christopher Olson
Ed Varney
Daryl Vocat
Stephan Bircher
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto          February 22, 2007
Ethnic Convergence

There is an ethnic convergence within the art world that makes it a far richer place in which to appreciate cultural and characteristic diversities. By bringing together the work of ten artists whose nascent cries were first made in far distant lands, Headbones, The Drawers, pays homage to cultures other than Canadian, and like a global bazaar, the sights are astounding.

Feb. 22 - Apr. 3
Rana Bishara
Ellen Butler
Adrian Doura
Saroj Jain
Erik Jerezano
Ashley Johnson
Goro Kadoi
Victor Klassen
Mahmoud Meraji
Srdjan Segan
 
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto          January 11, 2006
Highly Recommended

The most enthusiastic, vociferous and intuitive audience for art is the one made up of artists. They stay the longest, discuss the most, pinch pennies in order to acquire, boo the loudest and leap the highest in standing ovations.

Headbones, The Drawers has turned to the artists from 2006 for their recommendations. How apt for the title of the exhibition that coincides with the presentation of the HEADBONE AWARD to be Highly Recommended, referring to the fact that the current choice of paper works was chosen from Headbone's artist's recommendation, for who has a better and more concerned finger on the pulse than the artists themselves!
Jan 11 - Feb 20, 2007
Billy Copley
Mitchell Friedman
Sybil Goldstein
Karina Kalvaitis
Jesse McCloskey
Becky Parisotto
Laurie Sponagle
Anthony Taylor
Kathleen Vance
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto          December 9, 2006
An Exotic Erotic Christmas

In a season when clichés abound, Headbones, The Drawers is stepping outside of the norm and presenting a show of exotic works that are striking and unusual in their effect and appearance. With paper works both suggestive and explicit, a fire performance, the titillation of eroticism amongst an exotic crowd and the swinging jazz of Joe Sealey and Paul Novotny on opening night - an Exotic Erotic celebration is in place.
Dec. 9 - Jan. 11
Tom Ackermann
Michaele Berman
Irina Dascalu
Andy Graffiti
Bogos Kalemkiar
Donna Kriekle
Zachari Logan
Julie Oakes
Gord Smith
E.J. Wickes
Ivan Yovanovich
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto          November 16, 2006
Indie-Picks (Independent Curator’s Selection)

With the recommendations and commentaries from perspectives other than our own, Headbones Gallery is stirring the mix by inviting curators to select or comment on a phenomenal drawer. This refreshing show that ignites through spontaneous combustion once again attests to the wisdom of 'two heads'.
Artist followed by Curator: David Pirrie by Julie Oakes, Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo by Zachari Logan, Dakota McFadzean by David Garneau, Robert Malinowski by Monika Burman, Andy Moon Wilson by Andrea Pollan, Ron Giii by Oliver Girling, Guy Boutin by Daniel Erban, and Charles Bronson by Headbones.
Nov. 16 - Dec. 9
Charles Bronson
Guy Boutin
Osvaldo R. Castillo
Ron Giii*
Robert Malinowski
Dakota McFadzean
David Pirrie**
Gord Smith
Andy Moon Wilson
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto          October 12, 2006
X-Country Selection

From July 1st to August 31st, Headbones, The Drawers, took to the road, driving from Quebec to British Columbia taking the Canadian route on the way there and the American on the return, exposing artworks presently held by Headbones from a portable drawer containing over one hundred works on paper and reviewing new work. From this exploratory viewing program, we have selected the works of ten artists for our “Cross Country Selection” with an opening reception on Thursday, October 12 from 4 until 8 PM.

The fact that Halloween falls within this show seems to have spookily worked its way into the content. From the skeletal sculptures of Stephan Bircher, to the macabre blood drawings of Daniel Erban, even extending into Sue Rusk with her Sonata series or John Noestheden's meticulously rendered night skies, the atmosphere in the gallery will be charged, 'all hallow', and in tune with the spirit of magic.
Oct. 12 - Nov. 16
Thomas Ackermann
Stephan Bircher
Angus Bungay
Daniel Erban
Mary Hrbacek
Michael Lane
Jefferson Little
Khaled Mansur
John Noestheden
Sue Rusk
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto           September 7, 2006
Beauty & Obsession
 
Beauty and Obsession meet each other in the realms of love and art, realms where an allowance is made for the indiscretion of indulgences. Headbones, The Drawers addresses Beauty and Obsession through the subject, the technique, the aesthetic and the body in the works of Aleks Bartosik, Carin Covin, Johann Feught, Alan Glicksman, Catherine Hahn, Shelagh Keeley, Jodi Panas, Heidi Thompson, Gord Smith, and Kerry Stevens. Each of these artists has their approach and specific concern where the obsessive nature of creating art is placed at the beck and call of our notions of Beauty.
 
Headbones, The Drawers is beginning the fall season by addressing two great themes. You are invited to the opening from 4 to 8 PM on Thursday, September 7 when we will be presenting the work in our new street level location at #102, 260 Carlaw Avenue with a project room featuring the large scale drawings of Aleks Bartosik and Carin Covin and an alley installation by Scott Ellis celebrating the completion of his fiftieth collage from The Political Series.
Sept. 7 - Oct. 10
Aleks Bartosik
Carin Covin
Alan Glicksman
Johann Feught
Catherine Hahn
Shelagh Keeley
Jodi Panas
Heidi Thompson
Gord Smith
Kerry Stevens
.
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto              May 25, 2006
Situation, Positioning, Location
 
Situation, Positioning, Location
As summer approaches and the nomad movements of urbanites seek their country respites, Headbones, The Drawers traces the imagery that comes from our personal situations, which affected through positioning, results in location. Primarily landscape based, this exhibition extrapolates on an essentially vague theme and links the works of ten diverse oeuvres.
 
The Gykan Project Room
Iran , Iran and I ran with Bogos
There is another interpretation for 'situation' that pertains to ethnic and cultural origin. By focusing on four Canadians with sympathetic backgrounds and a combination of cultures and generations, the gaze of assimilation confronts the present challenge - the making of art. Mahmoud Meraji and Mehrad Meraji are father and son. Mehrad is in his second year at OCAD. Mohammad Mofrad graduated from OCAD this year. All three were born in Iran. The generational and experiential differences are intriguing as are the similarities and trends between their bodies of work. Bogos Kalemkiar is Mahmoud's friend, of Armenian descent and married to an Iranian woman. Armenia was occupied by Iran at one time.

Their styles are diverse, even their mediums - Mohammad is a photographer - but the subject remains the same. They all address 'their people’. The Meraji's focus on family, Mohammad on stereotypical translations of ethnicity and Bogos presents the masses.
May 25 - June 24
Daniel Anhorn
Susan Austad
Daphne Gerou
Margie Kelk
Peter Reginato
Robin Tewes
John Torreano
Lorne Wagman
Charles Yuen
Ben Woolfitt
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto              April 22, 2006
Results of the headhunt
 
A Selection of Heads
There are artists who are known for their heads - Chuck Close, Alex Katz, Angus Bungay, Cynthia Karalla or Ann Kipling where a primary source of their research and practice has been the human physiognomy. They are hanging on our walls, a result of the headhunt. This generation of heads came after the tradition of portraiture where egoism and historical record-keeping motivated the use of heads as subject.

Headbones, The Drawers presents a portrait attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds and documents the search for it's authenticity, but this is not a portrait show. The Results of the Headhunt brings forward a selection from artists who have succumbed to the irresistible urge to headhunt, to have a head to hang up, 'a head of one's own' to examine with all of the ramifications of expression, execution, subject, and association that they embody.

Daniel Anhorn, Michaele Jordana Berman, Daniel David, Andy Graffiti, Cherry Hood, Gertrude Kearns, Kris Knight, Daniel Lee, Tom MacKenzie, Jennifer MacKlemm, Mehrad Meraji, Maurizio Pellegrin, Srdjan Segan, Julie Oakes, Malcom Poynter, Fred Tomaselli, Alphonse Van Woerkom, Charles Yuen and others address the head from their particular perspectives.
April 22-May 23
Sergio Finamore
Rae Johnson
Harold Klunder
Judith Page
Lorraine Pritchard
Gord Smith
Jenny Wing Yee Tong
Selection of Heads
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto              March 18, 2006
Narrative?
 
On Saturday, March 18, Headbones, The Drawers introduces ten additional Canadian and international artists to its drawers. Exhibition dates are March 18 – April 21. The opening reception is March 18, from 4-8 PM.

Interrogating narrative has been the concern of art historians ever since the end of the Renaissance when the meaning of the religious iconography was understood by everyone laymen and the initiated alike. Now, as we attempt to grab a handle of commonality in the many diverse narratives that run through our multi-ethnic/racial/gender/political/ fantastical contemporary story telling, Headbones, The Drawers assembles a selection of works on paper and questions the narrative intent, the couching of the tale and the interpretation.
March 18-April 20
Daniel David
Jen Dyck
Eric Jerezano
Judith Jurica
Wanda Lock
Jesus Mora
Shauna Oddleifson
Srdjan Segan
Ruth Waldman
Scott Waters
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto              February 4, 2006
Drawers' Selection
 
On Saturday, February 4th Headbones, The Drawers introduces ten new Canadian and International Artist’s to its drawers. Exhibition dates are February 4th – March 11th.
 
A hybrid gallery, something between Pierogi, Brooklyn and The Drawing Center in New York, Headbones Gallery, The Drawers is inspired by the recent interest in drawings and works on paper in the contemporary art market.

Managing Director of Headbones, The Drawers, Richard Fogarty translated his interest in collecting artwork into Rich Fog Micro Publishing, printing and publishing art catalogues and art books. He is producing catalogues for each of the artists represented in the Drawers.

Assistant director, previous owner of Headbones Gallery, visual artist and art writer Julie Oakes brings her established career and expertise to guide selection and programming. For the past six years, Oakes has been living in New York City where she acquired a Masters in Art and Art Professions from NYU, a Masters in Social and Political Science (Cultural Theory and Criticism) from The New School for Social Research and maintained a studio.
February 4-March 16
Ellen Butler
Phyllis Godwin
Jim Kalnin
Attila Richard Lukacs*
Malcolm Poynter
Tina Poplawski
Birgit Ruff
Bryan Ryley
Alphonse van Woerkom
Tom Wren
Press Release & Artist Profile -Visual Art, Toronto           December 14, 2005
Inaugural Drawers' Selection
 
On December 14, 2005, Headbones, The Drawers introduces the first ten Canadian and International Artist’s to its drawers in Toronto. Exhibition dates are December 14 – February 2.

In existence in British Columbia since 1995, now, “Headbones, The Drawers” will be focusing on contemporary drawing and works on paper.

“The Drawers” will exhibit ten Canadian and International artists every month. Following the exhibition month, the works will be placed in the drawers for on-going viewing. This will make space for up to ten new artists to be exhibited in the gallery space.

The mandate of the gallery is to encourage collecting at an entry level by offering works for sale that are both affordable and of a high caliber. 
 
Director, Richard Fogarty
Dec. 14/05 - Feb. 02/06
Robert Bigelow
Billy Copley
Ed Giordano
Catherine Hahn
Cynthia Karalla
Donna Kriekle
Zachari Logan
Jesse McCloskey
Julie Oakes
Katia Santibanez