Halfway Between the Imaginary and the Real
Curated by Atticus Gordon
July 25th - August 12th - Vernissage Thursday July 28th, 2022 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Halfway Between the Imaginary and the Real is an exhibition of six contemporary Canadian artists concerned with the potential of imagination as a tool for understanding and working through our time. The artists build environments poised between reality and imagination, using this confluence to construct meaning. Rooted in the history of painting and image-making, the artists recycle surrealist methods to examine contemporary ideas and issues tied to histories, culture, and place. The exhibition proposes a re-enchantment, a remodeling of understanding orbiting imagination that looks to the past and speaks to the future.
Amanda Boulos's paintings are definitively uncertain, existing just beyond the eye in which fragments of cultural references synthesize. Boulos's practice engages with national narratives from Palestine, Lebanon and Canada, combining oral history, visual sources, and symbols. The open-ended hybrid works speak to the vitality of history and oral traditions, asking what else these stories have to say.
Gillian King's works are concerned with the codependency of all living things. Gathering organic matter as pigment for her paintings, she connects ancient art practices with current methods to examine ideas of fragility and mortality. King's abstract paintings contain traces of her surroundings to position herself within local ecosystems.
Paul Nadeau’s paintings are landscapes of socio-economic transition in rural Canada. Billboards, parking lots, and rural scenes painted from field research and online images examine the colonial extractive methods within Canadian industries and tourism. His practice highlights the colonial history of Canadian painting, seeking accountability in what is painted.
Emma White also explores the relationship of people to environment. Working with ideas of landscape and space, she creates visions of landscapes that bear human and painterly intervention. Her luscious paintings contain a longing and unfold a way of thinking through seeing.
Andrews Beck's paintings are moments of frozen action like a story picked up in the middle with an uncertain past and future. Beck is keenly interested in storytelling and the vehicle of painting; how paint handling, with its subtle shifts of tone, colour and energy, communicates atmosphere and narrative.
Mac Lenters is also a storyteller and world builder. His practice across painting and digital animation demonstrate a fascination with the complexity of reality. Logic, transformation, and the sublime are conjured and communicated through his work. The divide between the organic and the artificial is overcome as his works take up their own reality.