The Art Dealers Association of Canada Inc. (ADAC) is a national not-for-profit
organization founded in 1966. ADAC is the only National Association of art dealers representing artists throughout Canada. ADAC maintains
a high standard of connoisseurship and adherence to ethical practice within the profession. Dealers are selected for their knowledge and
scholarship in their respective fields of expertise.
The ADAC mandate includes stimulating the art market in Canada, and encouraging the awareness of the visual arts both nationally and
abroad.
Bev Rodin is an internationally collected Canadian artist known for her accomplished, contemporary and distinctive paintings of light and atmosphere interpreted on large-scale canvases. Her acrylic paintings on canvas explore unusual lighting, transparency, abstraction, universality, movement, colour and connections between them. She is also interested in the universal human responses and relationships to natural landscapes, water and the beauty of natural geometries.
Artist reception Saturday, May 3, 2014, 1- 3 pm
Exhibition continues until May 14
It was while observing one of my professors 30 years ago that the idea came to me: instead of trying to figure out what he was trying to say, I started to watch how he said it. Since then, I started to travel through all life's layers of signs and meanings, drawing pleasure from the discovery of the incongruous in the familiar and the similarities between new or unusual contexts. rnrnThis game of tripping between the levels of reality magnified both my love of traveling and the pleasure I took from just standing still before an ordinary and familiar window. Gradually, my perception shifted from the object toward the context, from isolation toward immersion, from the portrait to the landscape, from the framing to the entire horizon beyond. rnrnIn Voyage dans les Alpes, Horace Benedict De Saussure described the importance of wholistic views, as opposed to the excessive details that mask them. Inspired by the vista from the peak of the Buet Glacier, the instructions De Saussure left for the illustrator Théodore Bourrit embodied Saussure's all-encompassing view. Saussure's observations, penned 237 ago, helped clarify the usefulness of this process for me. rnrnToday, this sense of the whole takes shape through a fresh reading of ordinary textures and the spaces that emerge. The true subject of this exhibition is the virtual and conceptual space that envelops the gallery then unfurls through several windows placed within the space. Physical objects are sign posts, clues, keys that unlock this space and lend it coherence. Thus, the artefacts, some 30 years old, provide a measure of the transformations that, over time, forge an artistic process.
"Saudade" - New Work From Iceland, China and Brazil 2007-2014
Saudade is the organizing theme for this work. It’s a unique Portuguese word that has no immediate translation in English. A taxi driver introduced me to this concept as I made the 4-hour journey between Jericoacoara and São Luís in northeast Brazil. Roughly stated, it refers to a longing, a melancholy, a desire for what was or what could be – a desire to be someplace anywhere but the present.
In this instance, I’m photographing the landscape as a sort of dream state where we float above and wander through with no prescribed destination. The figures and landscapes in these images are neither of this world or the other, but in between. Collected over a 6-year period in Iceland, China and Brazil the images chronicle a landscape that shifts from primitive and raw to one of escape and beauty.
“The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness. ~ In Portugal of 1912, A. F. G. Bel”
Opening Night: May 22nd with Artist in attendance
On Saturday, April 5th, Mira Godard Gallery is pleased to open an exhibition of new paintings by TAKAO TANABE.
TAKAO TANABE has been an important figure in Canadian painting and printmaking for over 60 years. Born in British Columbia in 1926, TAKAO TANABE studied in Europe, the United States and Japan. Following a decade as head of the art program and artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre, he returned to British Columbia in 1980, where he currently lives and works.
TAKAO TANABE's work is in numerous public, corporate and private collections including: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; Art Gallery of Ontario; Canada Council Art Bank; Glenbow Museum, Calgary; National Gallery of Canada; Tate Museum, U.K.; Vancouver Art Gallery; Borden, Ladner, Gervais; Four Seasons Hotels; Jarislowsky, Fraser and Co.; Scotiabank; UBS Canada Inc.
Tanabe is the recipient of several honorary degrees and awards including Order of Canada (Member) and the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. In 2005, the retrospective Takao Tanabe was organized by Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Vancouver Art Gallery and toured nationally.
TAKAO TANABE has been represented by Mira Godard Gallery for over 50 years. This exhibition will be Tanabe's first solo show of new work since 2007.
To arrange an interview with the artist, or for more information, please contact the gallery at (416)-964-8197, via email: godard@godardgallery.com, or visit: www.godardgallery.com.
For the month of April in our main gallery we will be showing late monochromatic works by London artist Margot Ariss (1929-2013) and St. Thomas artist Clark McDougall (1921-1980). Though both artists worked in very different mediums (Margot with clay and Clark with paint), they both understood innately the importance of composition, light, shadow and texture. By not using any colour, both artists created an incredible sense of atmosphere, movement and energy in their work.
Margot Ariss's sculpted clay panels from the early 1980s combine clay letters with complex molded and shaped forms. The clay is combined with plaster, canvas, cloth, acrylic and cellulose to build up the smooth rolling designs that hint at snow falls, storms and empty landscapes. She appeals to our emotions through the combined use of light, texture and shadow and the poignant clay lettered poems. Using only the colour of the white gesso, and the shadows created from the forms, Ariss relies on the raw materials and sculpted forms to create the atmosphere.
Clark McDougall is best known for his "black enamel" style of painting. In the early 1960s, McDougall's style style changed significantly where the outline became very important to the structure and design of the painting. He quickly embraced the quick drying black enamel car paint which distinguished his style from other regional artists. These newly discovered late 1970s black enamel paintings in our exhibition reveal McDougall's incredible mastery of composition and rhythm. McDougall paints the farms and roads that he is familiar with: Charlie Rowe's House, Stevenson's side yard and Kettle Creek Valley, however, this time, he chooses to remove emotive colour and instead paints playful patterns that delight our eye.
OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, MAY 3, 2014
ARTIST PRESENT
CATALOGUE AVAILABLE
On Saturday, May 3rd, Mira Godard Gallery is pleased to open an exhibition of new paintings by COLIN FRASER.
“There is an excitement about trying to paint something that is continually changing, and the knowledge that you can never keep up in your pursuit of it. I want to show everything I can. All the detail, all the tone, every hue, every colour. The mood or feeling it generates is the thing; it’s there, obvious for a moment but disappearing like a face seen momentarily in a crowd. The remembering of it somehow enhances the mystery, forcing you to reach within yourself for the unobtainable answers.” COLIN FRASER, 2014
COLIN FRASER was born in Glasgow in 1956, studied art in Brighton, and currently lives and works in Sweden. He has worked in the technically demanding medium of egg tempera for over thirty years, evolving a distinctive and recognizable style. He has exhibited internationally in London, New York, and Glasgow. His work is found in numerous private and corporate collections throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Mira Godard Gallery represents COLIN FRASER exclusively in Canada.
To arrange an interview with the artist, or for more information, please contact the gallery at (416)-964-8197, via email: godard@godardgallery.com or visit: www.godardgallery.com.
Opening Saturday, April 12, 12-4 PM
Rumi Galleries is pleased to present our annual exhibition of historical and contemporary Canadian art. This year we are paying homage to artists who exhibited at the Isaacs Gallery. The exhibition will include, but is not limited to, works by Michael Snow, Greg Curnoe, Robert Markle, Dennis Burton, William Ronald, Gordon Rayner, William Kurelek, Richard Gorman and Joyce Wieland.
Newzones is pleased to present, "Dark Nights and Quiet Rooms", a solo exhibition of new photographs by Joshua Jensen-Nagle.
A process-oriented artist, Joshua Jensen-Nagle has explored the use of photography as a medium to create, rather than to document a reality. The artist's photographs create strong feelings of nostalgia and reflection. Upon viewing the images, a memory is triggered. One is reminded of a particular time in life and the emotions and memories resurface. Often, small details of a photograph are lost through the processes, creating a dream state offering fantasy and illusion to viewers, yet still allowing one to recognize the places which are being depicted.
Joshua Jensen-Nagle received a BFA at Ryerson University 2004 and has since participated in over 70 solo and group exhibitions across North America, including "Through the Looking Glass" at the Glenbow Museum in 2008. He has been featured in numerous periodicals such as Harper's Magazine, Toronto Life, Photolife Magazine, National Post, Globe and Mail, Calgary Herald, Swerve, Canadian Art, Galleries West, FFWD, and Canadian House and Home. His artwork can be found in private and corporate collections world-wide, including those of Cirque de Soleil, Ryerson University, First Energy Petroleum Ltd, and MasterCard, to name a few.
In this exhibition, five artists depict the various stages of flowers - from growing, blooming plants to cut bouquets to the later but still beautiful fading bloom. Each artist explores the essence of flowers in his or her own unique way. The beauty, the delicacy, the fragility, the transience, are all captured and immortalised in paint, reminding us of the fluidity of life in all its manifestations. Featured artists: Colin Hugh Smith, Anna Cameron, Monica Lacey, Daniel Porter, Amber Lounder.
The gallery is pleased to present “China,” our third solo exhibition of work by Canadian photographer Scott Conarroe.
Conarroe (b. Edmonton, AB, 1974) first visited Beijing in the wake of the 2008 Summer Olympics. He returned to China briefly the following year and in 2012 he began photographing that nation against the backdrop of a railway expansion that rivals America's Interstates in both scope and intent. With imagery from this ongoing study, some earlier impressions, and a surprising new strain of street work, “China” describes a vast historical moment shot through with human-scale dramas.
Conarroe has ranged some twenty provinces by rail. He is 6' tall, blue-eyed and in no danger of blending in. Over thousands of shoulder-to-shoulder and knee-to-knee kilometres he has learned to make primitive small talk and to recede from focus. His view is certainly an outsider's, but even the landscapes in this exhibition contain instances of unguardedness; village men idling at billiards, people bent in picturesque labour and someone's small garden arranged around a drip-filled bucket. Closer in, his tableaux of proletariat ennui, a prosperous couple fighting and women laughing like girls read as stills from a well-produced cinematic feature. The West has been exposed to many iterations of China in recent years: grandiose, tragic, inspiring, infuriating, backwards and futuristic. Each reflects degrees of truth and each leaves something to be desired. Conarroe's China considers the casual yenning of people who live between those extremes.
Conarroe has a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He has been an artist-in-residence at Light Work (US), Villa Sträuli (CH), the FLACC (BE) and a Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artist in the arctic. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the 2011 Duke and Duchess of York Prize for Photography, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Conarroe’s work was included in Canada's pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo and in “Landmark: The Fields of Photography” at Somerset House, London. Last year he was featured at the inaugural Reflexiva Muestra Fotografía de Vila-Real and “Scott Conarroe: By Rail” concluded its five year tour at the University of Western Ontario's McIntosh Gallery. Conarroe’s upcoming monograph, By Rail and By Sea, will be published by Black Dog Publishing. He currently teaches at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and he lives between Vancouver and Zurich.
Scott Conarroe is grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council, Sony Canada, and TIME for supporting his work in China.
Originally from Montreal, Fiona Ackerman is a painter living and working in Vancouver, BC. Since completing her BFA through Concordia and ECIAD, Fiona has exhibited across Canada and in Europe (Germany & France). She received an honorable mention for the Kingston Prize for Canadian Portraiture in 2009, and was included in Carte Blanche 2: Painting, a survey and showcase painting in Canada (published by The Magenta Foundation, fall 2008). In 2012, Ackerman spent 6 months working from a studio in Berlin. The Berlin paintings, and the work produced for the exhibition titled 'Heterotopia' were published in a full colour Catalogue.
While Fiona’s work is diverse in style, it is deeply rooted in the practice of painting. Whether working on a wild abstract piece or a delicately rendered portrait, her approach is at once playful and meticulous. Through her painting, Fiona is continually reinventing the way she represents her world, her environment and the places of her imagination.
Critic, R.M. Vaughan wrote in the Globe and Mail about Fiona’s work, “When you describe the individual parts of a given Ackerman painting, then add said parts together, the math ought not to hold. But her paintings do cohere, and cohere wonderfully, largely because they remain true to their own interior, wholly idiosyncratic, systems of logic. Ackerman is a brave painter – always walking the dental-floss-thin tightrope between expertly composed and total train wreck.”
