Last Year's Winner
Solo work by Instructor and alumnus Gary Taxali
Cost
Free
Emailcontact@magic-pony.com
LocationMagic Pony 694 Queen St West, Toronto, Ontario
Gary Taxali's work mixes vintage advertising vernacular with contemporary jest, simultaneously poking fun and embracing the sheer absurdness of human nature.
Taxali's original long forgotten characters are unearthed and altered through silkscreening, drawing and painting. The end result is an oddly nostalgic presence that evokes a disconcerting wit amongst layers of memory. The show also includes original collaborative art with musician pals Jad Fair, Aimee Mann and Danko Jones.
"The work of Gary Taxali takes a basically juvenile bibliophilic impulse - doodling in the leaves of borrowed books - to a more artistically sophisticated level. The books he appropriates aren't the precious kind one sees fashioned into delicate, romantic assemblage works but the thick, hardy sort that fill high school libraries and suffer the consequent abuse. He arranges their covers and pages in grids of varying sizes and embellished these grids with an entertaining cast of cartoonish characters, random words and phrases, and icons of one sort and another. There (sic) is an appealing sense of play, drawn from childhood but supported by a mature iconographic sensibility."
-Holly Myers, Art Critic, The Los Angeles Times
Cost
Free
Emailcontact@magic-pony.com
Website LocationMagic Pony 694 Queen St West, Toronto, Ontario
Gary Taxali's work mixes vintage advertising vernacular with contemporary jest, simultaneously poking fun and embracing the sheer absurdness of human nature.
Taxali's original long forgotten characters are unearthed and altered through silkscreening, drawing and painting. The end result is an oddly nostalgic presence that evokes a disconcerting wit amongst layers of memory. The show also includes original collaborative art with musician pals Jad Fair, Aimee Mann and Danko Jones.
"The work of Gary Taxali takes a basically juvenile bibliophilic impulse - doodling in the leaves of borrowed books - to a more artistically sophisticated level. The books he appropriates aren't the precious kind one sees fashioned into delicate, romantic assemblage works but the thick, hardy sort that fill high school libraries and suffer the consequent abuse. He arranges their covers and pages in grids of varying sizes and embellished these grids with an entertaining cast of cartoonish characters, random words and phrases, and icons of one sort and another. There (sic) is an appealing sense of play, drawn from childhood but supported by a mature iconographic sensibility."
-Holly Myers, Art Critic, The Los Angeles Times
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