IMAGINARY: Erin Finley, Linda Martinello, Gwen Ramsay, Hui-Yun Tsai, Niwah Visser
January 22 – February 27, 2005
Work by five Ontario artists who have all graduated
from the Art and Art history program at Sheridan
College and the University of Toronto at Mississauga.
This show of young emerging artists casts a light
on the issues and preoccupations that concern this
new generation of artists.
The large black and white photographs of Niwah
Visser probe the tentative intimacy between a young
girl and her father, alluding to a posture of touch
and gesture as a darker, more discomforting reading
of the implied relationship.
The paintings of Gwen
Ramsay address her infatuation with the overloaded
presentation of
hanging light fixtures displayed in a typical lighting
store. The monochromatic painted
surface and slight use of tonal
contrast create a light ephemeral veil
of obsessive intent.
Erin Finley's paintings explore
the legend of Nadia Nefariously, a
punk rock star who died in 1982. The artist
introduces the viewer into a world of blacks, reds
and pinks, themselves a somewhat punk gesture of
visually jarring theatricality, provocatively playing
with the parameters of jovial sexuality and good taste.
Linda Martinello assembles her
canvases from the detritus of her everyday life,
not unlike Dylan
Thomas’s “the fag ends of one man’s
year”. The rich,
shimmering surface is opulent and yet contains factual
discards, such as of streetcar tickets, that are layered
as archeology within the canvas. Fruit is also a trailing
motif that imbues the canvas with the hierarchy of
its own particular palette, dictating the whole colour
code from ripe to rotten as a limitation of possibility.
Hui-Yun Tsai paints from the romantic memory
of place and time, layering exotic architectural forms
as a stage set, enacting her own particular drama.
A
tree entwined within a windowed wall that defies
spatial logic approaches the mythic, climbing into
the sun of its own mythology.
