MICHAEL ANTKOWIAK, FACULTY OF ART, PRESENTS: WHAT RIGHT HAS MY HEAD TO CALL ITSELF ME

abstract figurative work, predominantly blue
Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 4:00am to Saturday, October 29, 2016 - 4:00am

WHAT RIGHT HAS MY HEAD TO CALL ITSELF ME

MICHAEL ANTKOWIAK

OCTOBER 7TH - 29TH, 2016

RECEPTION OCT 7TH 6-9PM

 

“At what precise moment...

...does an individual stop being who he thinks he is?

You know, I don't like complications.

Cut off my arm. I say, "Me and my arm."

You cut off my other arm. I say, "Me and my two arms."

You...take out...

...take out my stomach, my kidneys,

assuming that were possible...

And I say, "Me and my intestines."

Follow me?

And now, if you cut off my head...

...would I say, "Me and my head" or "Me and my body"?

What right has my head to call itself me?

What right?”

Excerpt from the film “The Tenant”, 1976, by Roman Polanski.

 

Michael Antkowiak (Warsaw, 1977) is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, and completed his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2003. He has since exhibited in public and commercial galleries in Canada and abroad, including the Queens Museum of Art, in New York City, and Carrie Secrist Gallery, in Chicago, Il. Michael is a recipient of several artist’s grants and residencies, including the Toronto Arts Council Grant, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. Michael lives and works in Toronto, and in addition to his studio practice, teaches as a drawing and painting instructor at OCAD University.

 

 

Blue, oil on canvas 12”x16” 2016

Venue & Address: 
WIL KUCEY GALLERY 1183 DUNDAS ST. W. TORONTO CANADA M6J 1X3
Website: 
http://www.wilkuceygallery.ca
Phone: 
416.532.8467

Buildings I feel like

Buidings I feel like
Saturday, March 3, 2018 - 10:00am to Friday, March 30, 2018 - 6:00pm

Investigating the correlation of sobriety and artistic output, Dawe's current practice illustrates parallels between recovery and the act of re-covering. What if we could step into ourself like we do our front door or favourite sweater? Or read oneself like we do a book? Buildings, dresses, and other vessels figuratively stand-in for the self, alluding to how slow transformations can be reflected in layers of mistinted paint, swatches of mended fabric, or patches of drywall. These manifestations of repair are poetic indicators of effort: the more layers, the further the journey. 

Buildings I Feel Like depicts something in-progress without the implication that it is somehow incomplete or undone. Some people are sturdy Victorian homes or cozy basement apartments. Others are new condos, perpetually under construction. The house presents various rich metaphors of; interior and exterior, covered and exposed, private and public. The weightless compositions of Dawe's 'dress portraits' - both intimate and surreal - offer a place for poetic speculation. Culled from her experiences, the drawings - revealing, bold and approached with an unresting vigour - stake an unashamed tone. Devoid of wearer, the clothing becomes animate, declaring itself a subject free for interpretation. 

Dawe's paintings, drawings, and installations celebrate the adaptive, sometimes messy, and meandering paths taken in search of self-actualization. By presenting a journey at its midpoint, her installations reveal that these finite markers - that of beginnings and ends - are fictitious when talking about self-betterment. Reminders that the pursuit of balance and happiness is inherently, and perpetually underway - valuing progression rather than perfection.

Venue & Address: 
Division Gallery, 45 Ernest Ave., Toronto

Remembering alumnus Rob Gonsalves

Rob Gonsalves autographing a book
Monday, November 27, 2017

The Globe and Mail published a touching tribute to artist Rob Gonsalves, written by his sister, Debbie Gonsalves. Gonsalves attended OCAD University and Ryerson University’s Architecture program, practicing architecture briefly before returning to painting. After exhibiting at Toronto’s Outdoor Art Exhibition in 1990, he decided to pursue his art full-time.  

He became known for his fantastical paintings that combined surrealism, illusion and elements of architecture. His work appears in the 2007 book Masters of Deception: Escher, Dalí & the Artists of Optical Illusion.

Gonsalves passed away in June, near Brockville.

A short documentary about him can be found online.

 

 

 

Open Call to Continuing Studies Students - Illustrators and Painters

Friday, September 15, 2017 - 5:00pm

Narrative Lines

Continuing Studies Gallery

285 Dundas Street West

September 28 – December 7, 2017

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 28, 5 – 7 pm

Submission deadline: Friday, September 15, 2017 at 5 pm

Email to: Lindsay Maynard, lmaynard@ocadu.ca

While submission fees are not required, regretfully artist fees can't be paid at this time. You must provide work(s) ready to be installed/hung. Work(s) do not require a frame, and there are no size requirements.

If you are interested in being part of this exhibition, please submit the following electronically in ONE EMAIL (text in one attached word document – no PDF’s please):

1. Image(s) – low-res of work(s)

2. Statement of work – max 300 words

3. Biography – max 100 words

4. Link to your website – optional

Please note: This call is open to all current and former OCAD U Continuing Studies students. Not all submissions will be chosen to participate, due to limited space and thematic coherence.

Venue & Address: 
Continuing Studies Gallery, 285 Dundas Street West
Website: 
https://continuingstudies.ocad.ca
Email: 
lmaynard@ocadu.ca
Image of exhibition

Shelley Niro Wins 2017 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts

Shelley Niro and Ryan Rice
Thursday, February 16, 2017

OCAD U congratulates Shelley Niro (AOCA 1990) on receiving a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Each year, the awards honour seven artists for their artistic achievements and one person for their outstanding contribution to contemporary visual and/or media arts.

A member of the Turtle Clan of the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) Nation, from the Six Nations of the Grand River territory, near Brantford, Ontario, she has demonstrated her dedication to producing art that contributes to Indigenous identity in Canada.

Niro creates complex visual experiences in a variety of media, including beadwork, painting, photography and film. Her work has been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and she has received considerable attention for her films.

Known for challenging conventional, colonial representations of Aboriginality with directness and humour, Niro crafts and retells Indigenous narratives by drawing on lived experienced, as well as themes of identity, self-determination and liberation.

Her short film, The Shirt, was presented at the 2003 Venice Biennale and the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. In 2009, her first feature film, Kissed by Lightning, premiered at Toronto’s imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and won the Santa Fe Film Festival’s 2009 Milagro Award for Best Indigenous Film. Niro’s work can be found in the collections of galleries and museums across Canada.

A graduate of OCAD University, Niro also studied at the Banff School of Fine Arts and received her MFA from the University of Western Ontario. To view some of Niro’s work, please visit her website.

 

 

Visit the Toronto studio of art star Elly Smallwood

OCAD University student Oscar Fletcher takes us on a visit to the Toronto studio of emerging art star Elly Smallwood to chat about her work and her over 220,000 Instagram followers. 

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Kristin Morthens: Busting out of tradition

Third-year OCAD U student, Kristin Morthens describes her work as “busting out of the conventional picture frame.” And literally she does just that, in many of her works. Perhaps it’s her life and love of travel that draws her to the unconventional. Born in Iceland, Morthens has travelled the world. From growing up in Iceland, to living as a teen in Kenya, where she was home-schooled, to painting walls in Brazil for five months, to studying at OCAD U in Toronto, Morthens believes that all of the places and cultures she has experienced have given her a broader perspective of the world. And now, as an exchange student at The Art Institute of Chicago, she further explores new territory.

“When I first started painting, I was doing graffiti as a teenager, and later  ̶  street art  ̶  so I didn’t start painting on canvasses until a couple of years ago,” says Morthens.  “I think in a sense, I was always very connected to site-specific pictures and painting on walls that were not a square or a rectangle.”

 

 

Morthens’ work is digitally inspired, contrasting between materials such as traditional paint and spray paint, exploring textures, mark making and colours. Lately, she has been fascinated by fabrication and the materiality of the canvas. “I’ve been dying canvasses and using bleach, painting a lot on raw canvas, and using unstretched canvas,” says Morthens.  “I feel like I want to go in an installation direction with creating a space that you enter… busting out of the rectangle. It’s not new, it has been done for many decades, but the idealization of the rectangle is something that an art student in 2016 should question.”

 

 

As an exchange student living in the United States during the recent election, Morthens encountered a different sort of cultural experience. “The country was paralyzed… people were crying and the energy here is very heavy,” says Morthens.  And how did this affect her work? “I couldn’t paint for a bit, after the election and I decided to do a portrait of a friend of mine from Chicago. I haven’t done a portrait on a canvas in two years, but it was an urge that I felt that I had to document something.”

 

 

Grateful for her time at OCAD U, Morthens, who was awarded the Curry's Art Store Prize this year, and the Helen Eisen Scholarship last year, asserts that she has been shaped and very influenced by her professors, fellow students and the aesthetics that are happening in Toronto. “The scene has pushed me into new directions. I feel like since I started OCAD, I haven’t stopped evolving.”

Check out more of Morthens’ work online.

Author: 
Natalie Pavlenko
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And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, new paintings by Nick Ostoff, Faculty of Art

painting_circular frame-like image on background
Friday, December 2, 2016 - 5:00am to Saturday, January 14, 2017 - 5:00am

Christie Contemporary is pleased to present And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Nick Ostoff, opening Friday, December 2 from 6-8pm. 

This body of work continues Ostoff’s exploration of objects and spaces within the interior domestic sphere—cast shadows, reflected light, random surface marks, and fragments of commonplace objects, the type of overlooked elements one might find half-concealed in the background of a generic family snapshot—with the aim of addressing both memory, and the unheimlich (Freud’s term for the ‘estranged familiar’). Despite the intimacy of this context, Ostoff is not interested in autobiography, self-portraiture, or sentimentalizing the familial. Rather, he is attracted to these objects and spaces for their very banality and ordinariness. Through his particular working process, they are agents ripe for perceptual reshaping, not unlike scenes viewed through a cinematic filter.

Looking to the way in which quotidian space is naturally transformed through a condition of absence into a reflexive index in memory, Nick Ostoff further amplifies this quality of the imperfect echo with the mechanics of representation and the painterly process. In re-framing overlooked but familiar visual phenomena, Ostoff seeks to heighten their perceptual ambiguity, to suggest suppressed elements of the uncanny, and in so doing, activate a kind of phenomenological intensity. There is a palpable sense of the ‘not seen,’ in part achieved with a working methodology that involves reduction and restraint, where seemingly straightforward imagery is all but ushered away from the conventions of representation, reconfigured as ostensible abstraction, to create an elliptical viewing experience in which fixed perspectives are destabilized. 

Working from anecdotal photographs, each painting is deliberately built up through multiple layers of translucent pigment, a crucial aspect to the recontextualization of these images, a process which effectively dissolves the spatial/temporal specificity of the photographic source, while retaining its pictorial trace. Thus, each painting is situated in an ambiguous realm that is proximate to, yet utterly removed from our quotidian experience. 

Venue & Address: 
Christie Contemporary 64 Miller Street Toronto, Ontario
Website: 
http://www.christiecontemporary.com/exhibitions/
Email: 
info@christiecontemporary.com
Phone: 
416 551-2005

Laura Millard, Faculty of Art, Showing in the Group Show: Strange Geometries

Image of circular snowmobile tracks in the snow
Thursday, November 24, 2016 - 5:00am to Sunday, February 19, 2017 - 5:00am

A labyrinth of trees, empty spaces, fractured architectural forms… we try to find our bearings in a vast terrain.

From above, the land provides a larger surface to inscribe our presence. Google earth and drone technology have turned the earth into a giant can- vas. Leaving traces of our presence we sketch strange geometries onto the land.

The three artists in Strange Geometries, Sylvie Bouchard, Laura Millard and Ross Racine, invoke these ideas through painting, photography and video. Compelling an investigation of the landscape from different vantage points the works in this exhibition conjure the myriad ways we attempt to tame our environment and reshape the land to reflect our reasoning.

Venue & Address: 
BOXOTEL GALERIE 175B 175 rue Ontario Est Montréal, Québec

Monstrum

Monday, December 5, 2016 - 5:00pm to Thursday, December 8, 2016 - 11:00pm

Monstrum is a performative painting exhibition that ‘demonstrates’ how one can artistically subvert all kinds of moral degradation associated with the demonization of other. The exhibition highlights a first-hand perspective of recent dramatic political events involving excessive cruelty. Oncu utilizes the monster as a metaphor to problematize the clashing of extremes by introducing it as a third party to antagonistic conflicts of various kinds. Her monsters resist any classification built on hierarchic dual oppositions, and thereby confront any categorization based on moral judgment.

OCAD U Student Gallery's is holding an artist talk with Yasemin Oncu on December 8th at 2:30pm.

yaseminoncu.com

Venue & Address: 
52 McCaul Street Student Gallery
Website: 
http://yaseminoncu.com
Email: 
studentgallery@ocadu.ca
Phone: 
(416)977-6000 ext263
Cost: 
Free
Monstrum

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