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Stanzie Tooth
- Surfacing
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Stanzie
Tooth lives and works in Toronto where she paints sheltered
glades that are more akin to Manet’s garden than the gritty
cement-scape where they are created. When it is copasetic to
interrupt the fecundity, she peoples these bucolic settings
with vague figures, coming, going or sinking into the fronds
with relaxed simpatico. Tooth uses teal, magenta, perse and
the rare thalos - colours that veer to the more refined
supernal shades of the primaries - as if conjuring the
better side of life.
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Surfacing,
an exhibition of paintings and paper works as lush as a
blousy spring,
will be showing in Headbones Gallery adding bloom to the
season. Stanzie Tooth will be in attendance for the opening.
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Ruth Waldman
- Mellifluous
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Hailing from New York, Ruth
Waldman charms with biological imagery as she tells tales
with a visual vocabulary set in a surrealist space.
Biomorphic creatures cavort with animated vegetation,
wisping and wending their way across the virgin expanse of
pure white paper. The coloured pencil fantasy describes
mutations between the floral and sinuous. It is the fronds
and ferns of woodlands translated into a more designed order
than the divine had devised. In bright pastels, wriggly
things play within a dreamy perspective as Seuss-like
illustrated botanicals, futuristic aliens and beings of
otherness are distilled through tubes to burst into bloom.
e Feught
We
look towards the far distant for a sense of something other than
the hum-drum existence that often takes over our routine lives.
Vacations, videos, reading, music – all become the escape routes
to enrichment. Afar Per se
fulfills the wanderlust and slakes the thirst for exoticism,
transferring a National Geographic mind frame into the refined
halls of high culture.
Amar
from Afar is actually residing and working quite close for his
studio is in Lumby, BC – yet that fact could translate into a
rather exotic imagining for a New Yorker. Headbones Gallery
visited the artist’s studio in the fall and were rewarded with a
revelation as expanding as that of visiting another country.
Amar’s work is not static. It reaches backwards in time as it
projects forward and seldom is there only a surface meaning. But
this is not a plea for nostalgia or even a reinforcement of
exotic otherness for Amar doesn’t let the image rest. He pokes
at it, jabs at it with the dissonance of virtual life and in
doing so pulls his visual story line into the theatrical realms.
There is a taste of intrigue, plot, climax and even the
potential for a narrative resolution. He gives us sufficient
clues but doesn’t reveal the ending.
Diane
Feught’s actual past, present and future have rarefied
beginnings. Feught grew up in an Anglican home. As an adult, she
lived in a Buddhist priory in Edmonton for seven years where she
experienced the lush overlap of philosophical, spiritual and
cultural diversity while still living in the heart of a
‘typical’ Canadian milieu. Her oil paintings and gouaches leave
room for study as well as speculation as to their narrative
source. Often with a strong composition that supports the drama
of the imagery, her technique – impeccable and practiced –
supports the strangeness of her subjects by granting an
immediate viability to the juxtaposition of elements. The
overwhelming perfection and balance take over any doubt at the
unusual imagery. Feught also backs her innuendos with
information, detailing with a precision to provoke applause.
Afar
Per se
- what does it mean? Per se does not only mean “intrinsically”
but also, “by, of, for or in itself”. It seems a fitting
description of the works of Amar from Afar and Diane Feught with
all of the allusions to otherness that they inspire.
The
opening reception for Afar
Per se is Friday, November 11, which is
Remembrance Day and
11/11/11. Even the date is fittingly evocative yet cryptic.
Trance
and Nilt to cosmic Eastern sounds and melodies during the
opening reception with Daniel
Stark on sarode,
Bill Boyd on cello and
Gaz on guitar.
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