Stanzie Tooth - Surfacing

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.  

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.

Ruth Waldman - Mellifluous

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.