Many Voices: talk by visiting Alumni Artist Aaron Li-Hill

Abstract geometric artwork
Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 12:00pm

Many Voices

Drawing and Painting is presenting four upcoming talks by visiting Alumni Artists. Each year graduates are invited to give an artist talk and meet with our fourth year students throughout the year.

Please bring your classes to Central Hall, room 230 on Tuesday November 7 Aaron Li-Hill will speak from 12-12:45. All are welcome!

 

LI-HILL                                                                                                                             

Aaron Li-Hill is a Canadian visual artist currently based out of Brooklyn, who employs painting, illustration, stenciling, and sculptural elements within his works.  With a background in graffiti and mural painting and a degree in Fine Arts, his works range from smaller multiples to enormous murals that explore industrialization, scientific breakthrough, people versus nature and information saturation.  He incorporates found objects and unconventional materials to structure complex multi-layered pieces that are as aesthetic as they are thought provoking. Li-Hill possesses a BFA from OCAD and has travelled and shown in countries such as Australia, Thailand, Myanmar, Mexico and China.  He has had works shown in such national institutions as the National Gallery of Victoria, The Art Gallery of Ontario and the Portsmouth Museum of Art in New Hampshire. 

 

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University 100 McCaul St., Central Hall, room 230 Toronto, ON
Cost: 
All are welcome!

Many Voices: talks by Chen Cao and Dionne Simpson

Tuesday, October 24, 2017 - 12:00pm to 12:45pm

Many Voices

Drawing and Painting is presenting four upcoming talks by visiting Alumni Artists. Each year graduates are invited to give an artist talk and meet with our fourth year students throughout the year.

Please bring your classes to Central Hall, room 230 from 12 to 12:30 on Tuesday October 24 for talks by Chen Cao and Dionne Simpson.  Many Voices continues in November.  All are welcome!

Chen Cao: 

Growing up with physical impediments I tend to contemplate on the limits of human potential. My work explores the idea of control and discipline relative to dualistic nature and cause and effect. Using painting as a medium, I try to understand myself as a subject and attempt to convey universal truth and beauty. Chen grew up in Toronto Ontario and pursued fine arts at Ontario College of Art and Design graduate of 2013. He draws inspiration from both eastern and western philosophies while pursuing an aesthetic of his own.  He is motivated to rediscover the thinking of the Old Masters.

Dionne Simpson:  

Dionne Simpson's current body of work combines tradition with contemporary content.  She pulls threads from large canvases using a traditional African technique.  New materials are intricately interwoven into the spaces where the threads have been removed.  She adds "found pigments" and further destroys and embellishes the fabric.  By subtraction and addition the work develops into a contemporary piece embedded with tradition.  Employing the canvas as a metaphor for the underlying fabric of Canadian society Simpson embeds fragments of our culture inside the windows formed within the canvas.  The square is a reoccurring element in her work and is used as a symbol of growth, order and stability that has become the backdrop for Western living from her perspective as an African Canadian artist.

Venue & Address: 
OCAD U 100 McCaul St Central Hall, room 230 Toronto, ON
Cost: 
All are welcome!
painting of man in front of painting of man
textile work, image of a face

Meet artist Alex McLeod

What are the key responsibilities you maintain for your practice?

My main responsibilities include making sure everyone has what they need. Firstly I have to make sure I am making good work, and that the printer gets it in time to deliver to the framer.  If I'm doing an interview or commission I have to make sure that party is getting my full attention and that emails are answered promptly.  There are certainly obvious tools like software and hardware that I need, but anything that I'm unfamiliar with I can usually learn about through the internet.  Networking is essential to build relationships with other artists, curators and collectors. It's one of my favorite parts of the job ;D 

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Department: 
Admissions Segment: 

Working Title: Monique Mouton, Mina Totino & Sally Spath

Working Title
Saturday, July 12, 2008 - 4:00am to Saturday, August 2, 2008 - 4:00am

Working Title explores the ways in which these artists deal with the matter of painting. The elements with which the paintings are composed - including the size and direction of the brush marks, the visible layers of colour, the viscosity of the paint, the negotiation of the edges and the idiosyncrasies of format – are the subject of the work.

Spath’s paintings are a temporary and intuitive response to the site: the site being the space where they are exhibited. She uses standard sized vellum to create a composition in the space.

Venue & Address: 
Diaz Contemporary 100 Niagara Street, Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

Phantasm

Phantasm
Friday, April 4, 2008 - 4:00am to Saturday, April 26, 2008 - 4:00am

Angell Gallery in Toronto presents “Phantasm”, the fifth solo show by OCAD Instructor and alumnus Luke Painter. For years now, Painter has employed his immense technical skill to create fanciful works that delight the imagination and arouse wonder. The seven works in this exhibition continue in the same vein, featuring the fantastical and quasi-historical subject matter that have become the artist’s trademarks.

From a distance, one could easily mistake Painter’s latest works for large-scale prints. The stark black-and-white aesthetic and fine line-work suggest the effects of wood-block engravings, or possibly metal etching prints. Not only this, but the incredible amount of detail leads one to believe that these works resulted from a process of serial reproduction, since it’s reasonable to assume that the artist wished to yield multiple copies from the hours of handiwork that went into them. Upon closer inspection however one realizes this is not the case. A sustained viewing reveals the works to be unique and original brush and ink paintings, comprised of thousand of accumulated marks that mimick traditional printing methods. The effect is one of obssesive ornamentation and preciousness. If nothing else, these paintings are labours of love created by a steady and patient hand.

Venue & Address: 
Angell Gallery 890 Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

Labyrinth of the heART

Labyrinth of the heART by Maria Gabankova
Saturday, January 12, 2008 - 5:00am to Sunday, February 3, 2008 - 5:00am

Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by OCAD Professor Maria Gabankova, entitled Labyrinth of the heART.
Labyrinth of the heART is a selection of drawings and paintings featured in a recently published book body broken body redeemed on Maria Gabankova's art. Published by Piquant Editions in Great Britain, this second volume in the VISIBILIA series of 'visual biographies' features over 50 full-colour reproductions of paintings and installations by Czech-born Canadian artist Maria Gabankova. Introduction by John Franklin.
The exhibition presents a large copy (94" x 108") of the Crucifixion panel of the Issenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Gr'newald, a work which Gabankova travelled to Colmar, Alsace, France to study at the Unterlinden Museum in 2003. She was commissioned by the Biblical Museum of Canada in Vancouver, B.C. to paint a copy of the Crucifixion panel, which she completed in the summer of 2007. The painting has had a profound influence on Gabankova's work and its spiritual content and expressive power relates to the themes of her previous work.
The exhibition's title pays homage to a literary allegory Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart by the 17th century Czech philosopher, educator and theologian Jan Amos Comenius.

Venue & Address: 
Loop Gallery 1174 Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

"Tussle" published article about Rae Johnson's recent solo exhibition titled "Interiors"

graphite image of humans in corridor
Tuesday, February 9, 2016 - 9:00pm

"Tussle", published article about Rae Johnson's recent solo exhibition titled "Interiors" Nov 28 - Dec 31-  at Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto.  Article below:

http://www.tusslemagazine.com/#!rae-johnson/brg0f

She paints it personal, she’s Rae Johnson

by Miklos Legrady, February 6th, 2016

I'm looking at an anonymous daguerreotype from 1858 of a carefully composed picture of the city of Paris - except for that horse's head intruding from frame left.  In classical painting the use of composition normally eliminates such distractions by directing our gaze and how we read the image, without our knowing we're being led.  That is the “art” in visual art. Photography was different from the start, photographs at first being a rare magic. As with all novelty the unexpected was often awesome rather than quizzical, like this horse photobombing your landscape. Encroaching means the personal made public, which is what Rae Johnson does in her work by injecting what appears to be our personal remembrances into her paintings, her work hinting at secrets and hushed memories. The personal is unexpected and the impersonal is political.

 

At first glance these paintings don't seem unexpected, more like sophisticated drawing writ large. You wonder if Rae Johnson is just whipping that dead horse. Isn't beauty passé, so five minutes ago?  Duchamp did say good taste is the enemy of art so logically bad taste should be our friend.  Duchamp also said he wanted to kill art, discard the ocular, make it intellectual.  Art is senseless if lacking sensation, tasteless for lack of taste. But in the 1970s Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake analyzed links between beauty, information processing, and information theory. (1)  Physicist Paul Dirac is quoted saying “if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress”.(2)  Denis Dutton was a philosophy professor and the editor of Arts & Letters Daily. In his book The Art Instinct, he suggested that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty. “There is evidence that perceptions of beauty are evolutionarily determined, that things, aspects of people and landscapes considered beautiful are typically found in situations likely to give enhanced survival of the perceiving human's genes.” (3)

 

In Against Interpretation, a collection of essays by Susan Sontag published in 1961, we’re informed that sensations and perceptions retain their primacy.  Sontag writes that we live "in a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability…” (4)  that she called the revenge of the intellectual on the creative artist.  Thirty years later Robert Storr, then curator of MOMA, spoke of how, during the 1960s, art moved from the Cedar Tavern to the seminar room. Storr said it was a transformation that created a class of critics and artists, a class that lost all sight of the viewer and created a cult of difficulty based on jargon -– the words used like pieces in an erector set to reference their own theories to other theories, - with art works to illustrate those theories alongside.(5) Art shifted to the intellectual sphere because we find it so much more satisfying to struggle with something real, something we already understand, rather than face the unknown and create new understanding.  To stick with an intellectual approach is but procrastination, it is uninspired and therefore Johnson  plunges in, she paints.

 

In an interview discussing her work Johnson said, "we better get used to the fact that painting occupies a position all by itself, you can't get rid of it or deprecate it, it's unique." For 130 years we’ve heard of painting’s demise but currently we’re witnessing such a profusion of figurative painting including this exhibition as to put a “death of painting” argument back in the grave. Johnson has always turned the world into a narrative. She paints it like she’s drawing, in a handful of brush strokes. This current body of work includes powerful large paintings in colour but I'm fascinated with the monochromes. These are square black- and -white graphite on canvas, like large charcoal drawings, youthful sketches by a sophisticated painter.  Scenes of local bars, nightlife, dancing, with an itch of haunting memories.  The work promotes self-identification by mirroring our lives and the people we know, presented as chess pieces on a stage of memories.  Johnson tells us she smudges people’s features.  “I blurred when faces appeared, made them generic. So they will be more real to the viewer. If I gave them features it would detract”.  The impersonality of locale and the blurred figures are occasions for projection, for reading our own stories in the general pattern.  The impersonal is political.

 

Johnson’s recent paintings are like notations in a journal.… A memory of how going for a drink, waiting for a friend, at the Cameron or the Gladstone or your local oasis. Even as we think these are familiar clubs and bars Johnson said the sources are autonomous, pictures found on Google. Yet these images look both familiar and documentary, which tells us something about painting as a medium and Rae Johnson as artist. They always said Johnson had a Munchian vibe.  Rae’s paintings are not blatantly political.  They will not feed hungry Syrians nor do they berate Monsanto and capitalism, her images are neither didactic nor subscribe to overt social change. Yet these images are beautiful and haunting and certainly needed.  Long after conceptual works lose their train of thought the paintings will grow on you.  Rae Johnson’s canvasses are full of visual gestures and they are lovely, the brushstrokes embed a body language directed by the subconscious mind into a set of compressed codes. These brushstrokes aesthetics can be compared to algorithms that are decoded deep within the viewer while consciously we feel a sense of fascination. In the fine art aesthetic elements may be seen as compressed information we decode subliminally or on a semiconscious level. Aesthetics contain shades of meaning experienced as feelings and sensations, which have as much content as any intellectual statement.  Beauty is then a depth of complexity harmonized to simplicity… surely not something to ignore.

 

Endnotes.

1- A. Moles: Théorie de l'information et perception esthétique, Paris, Denoël, 1973

Nake (1974). Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung. (Aesthetics as information

processing). Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informatik im Bereich ästhetischer

Produktion und Kritik. Springer, 1974, ISBN 3-211-81216-4, ISBN 978-3-211-81216-7

2- Paul Dirac, The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature (May 1963), Scientific

American.  http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-evolution-of-the-

physicists-picture-of-nature/

3- Dennis Dutton, The Art Instinct, A Darwinian theory of Beauty, TED Talk 2010

http://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutton_a_darwinian_theory_of_beauty

4- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, (New York: Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, 1961).

5- Stuart Servetar, The Inspeak of the Overlords, New York Press, May 29-June 4, 1996

http://www.studiocleo.com/cauldron/volume3/confluence/miklos_legrady/tex...

Get lost inside these drawings

Matthew Chapman is a fourth-year drawing and painting student at OCAD University.

Among Matthew’s creations is a murder mystery game inspired by the popular board game Clue.

“The Black Manor is a plan for an ultimate dollhouse murder mystery game. It’s based on the board game Clue, which I've been an immense fan of since childhood. This game, as you can see, is intended to have a multi-roomed mansion.”

Ink Drawing of the Interior of stacked houses

 

There was a deleted chapter from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that was first published last year, and Matthew has illustrated a scene.

“There were extra children in the deleted chapter, including Miranda Mary Piker, a bratty teacher’s pet with a school headmaster as a father. I decided to illustrate in pen and Photoshop the cut chapter detailing Miranda and her father falling into the Spotty Powder Mixer; a machine that grinds powder to make children sick to evade exams. The Oompa Loompas' sing: 

Oh Miranda Mary Piker,

who could ever, ever like her,

such a nasty, disobedient kid. 

So we said, we shall fix her, 

inside the Spotty Powder Mixer

and we'll like her even more than we did. 

 

 

Family looking down spooky stair well with giant spider at the bottom

 

Matthew doesn’t just focus on ink drawings — check out the incredible detail in this Titanic image.

“This is an accurate cross section is of the RMS Titanic back when I did a theme exhibition on the ship in 2012. Made this entirely on SnagIt 8.0.” 

 

Drawing of the Titanic

Alumnus Alex McLeod featured on CBC TV’s new arts program

By the Sea, by Alex McLeod
Tuesday, October 20, 2015 - 4:00am

CBC’s new weekly series Exhibitionists launched this fall, examining creative and cultural events across the country. In the third episode, themed “Landscapes,” the work of OCAD U alumnus Alex McLeod (BFA, Drawing & Painting, 2007) is featured. Artists Kent Monkman and JR are also profiled in the 30-minute episode. An interview with McLeod alongside some of his images of fantastical landscapes can be found on the new CBC.ca/Arts website.

 

Bent Lines and Folded Space Colette Laliberte and Nicholas Wade

black and white geometric shapes
Saturday, March 7, 2015 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm

Painting upon the surfaces of everyday construction materials as well as directly upon the walls of the gallery itself, these two prominent visual artists and art educators explore the materiality of paint through an abstraction that takes as its starting point the built environment. Interests in light as contained and spilling forth; as material and immaterial within a space inform both artist's work. Investigations into the temporal and spatial characteristics we encounter within an architectural environment manifest in works that are at once complex and minimal. Come to the Latcham Gallery and experience these works that contain multiple perspectives simultaneously yet at the same time remain super flat.

Colette Laliberte is an artist and Associate Professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto (OCADU) where she teaches drawing, painting, installation and site-specific art interventions. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include Galeria de Arte Universal, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba (2007); Triangle Artists' Workshop 2004, Brooklyn, New York (2004); Durham Art Gallery, Durham, Ontario (2003); Musee des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec (2003); ARCO Madrid, Spain (1996) among others. She is the recipient of visual grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Art Council and, Toronto Arts Council. Her work can be found in private collection in Canada, France and, Spain as well as in the public collection of Le Musee national des beaux-arts du Quebec, le Musee des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke and, the Canada Council for the Arts, Art Bank.

Nicholas Wade has taught at, Queen's University, Kingston, David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, Brock University in St. Catharines, Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and The Nova Scotia College of Art in Halifax before moving to Lethbridge in 1994 where he taught from 1994 to 2011. In 2005 Wade installed his first permanent public art work entitled "the illumination" in the Millennium Library in the heart of Winnipeg. In that year he also was one of a number of Alberta Artists representing the province at Alberta Scene in Ottawa during Alberta's Centennial Year. In 2014 his work was represented in the Art Gallery of Alberta's 90th anniversary exhibition. Nicholas Wade has exhibited in most major Canadian Cities and has work in the Canada Council Art Bank, Nova Scotia Art Bank and in the collection of The Alberta Foundation for the Arts. He now splits his time
between Lethbridge AB and The Bruce Peninsula on Georgian Bay.

Nicholas Wade will present an Artist Talk on Thursday March 5th at 7pm $5 suggested donation

Please join Colette on Saturday March 7, between 1:00-3:00 pm at The Latchman Gallery, for a last chance to view the wall paintings she produced for the exhibition.

Everyone is welcome.

Venue & Address: 
The Latchman Gallery, 6240 Main Street Stouffville
Email: 
claliberte@faculty.ocadu.ca

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