Past Exhibitions Contemporary Drawing, Sculpture and Works on Paper
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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
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
& The Achromatic Flame Playing With FireSOS OKANAGAN RAMBLING- Group Show - June 20 - August 13, 2021
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
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
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.
This
exhibition of paintings and sculpture first came
to
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
While the situation in
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The works of five female artists,
Susan Austad, Heide
Hatry, Cynthia Karalla, Katia Santibanez
and
Robin Tewes,
who live and work in
Susan Austad’s
studio is in the heart of
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
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
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.
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.
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’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
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
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.
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
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) 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
Derek Besant is no stranger to
Mark Bovey
(
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
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.
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,
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
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 …
Hand-Picked Okanagan August 3 - October 20, 2017
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
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.
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
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
Shh! Good Art Up & Down The OK Valley (Group Show) July 22 - September 10, 2016
'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
During the creation of this body of work,
both artists divided their time between San Miguel de Allende,
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,
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.
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
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
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,
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
4-Way
is an exhibition from March 7-29, 2014 of works by
Kelsie Balehowsky, Lucas Glenn ( 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
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.
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, 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
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.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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
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 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.
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 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
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
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.
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, 2012Katie 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.
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.
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. Aleks Bartosik - A Requium for Passion September 1 - October 2, 2011 Come and watch Bartosik and Oakes in the drawing performance 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. 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 Drawer's Gallery - Robert Farmer Paper Gallery - Daniel Hanequand 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
Refresh - The Colour Experience February 10 - March 20, 2011 Headbones BC Gala December 10 - February 6, 2011 Robert Bigelow C-RBB 6x6 July 2 - August 1, 2010 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.
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. 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
Essays by
James D. Campbell and
Julie Oakes
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 21The 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. 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, 2007It 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 |
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