Gallery Neubacher announces the opening of a radical new exhibition exploring expressions of solitude and geographic isolation. The broad grouping of nine artists involved in the show present a diverse collection of works featuring eccentric personas to hybrid creatures engaged in ‘out-of-context’ narratives. Starting at the core of an artist’s practice, INMYSOLITUDE focuses its attention on drawing and mark-making. Themes of isolation and marginalization inform, inspire and produce moments of wisdom as well as fright throughout the collection on display.
The works are presented in collaboration of the following individuals or institutions: Shauna McCabe and Confederation Centre Art Gallery (PEI), The Power Plant (Toronto), and MRI Foundation (Milan).
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Alison Norlen, the Grand Dame of the Royal Art Lodge, showcases her current drawings inspired by carnival processions in Rio de Janeiro and Port of Spain. The drawings seem to be produced in another country and time, a place given over to collective brooding and the ghosts of 20th-century fantasy parks. Their richness as well as their blankness construe a nothingness in the midst of an assumed sea of possibilities.
Vincent Trasov is best known for his alter ego persona, Mr. Peanut, a performance art character spawned almost 30 years ago. On the political stage Trasov’s Mr. Peanut ran for Vancouver’s mayor in 1974, receiving 4% of the popular vote. INMYSOLITUDE presents a selection of intimate portraits of the presumably mute pop star Mr. Peanut in various situations where he is always the center of attention, utterly alone, but the center of attention.
Martha Colburn (born in Pennsylvania 1971, living in Amsterdam) started producing super 8 and 16 mm films in the early nineties. Her experimental films are comprised of found film materials, newspaper clippings, and her own drawings that she then colours by hand. Animated collages result whereby reoccurring themes like violence, sex, fetishism, and death render a peculiar contradictory ironic conglomerate.
Brad Phillips often captures the threat of nature and the potential for violence and tension in things viewed as tranquil. Many of his interests are based on teenage culture and the exaggeration of negativity – Goths, love, death, depression, melancholy, and isolation. Three dark portraits for INMYSOLITUDE capture a high school friend, Julie Ann Stanton, who was abducted and murdered by her best friend‘s father.
Tim Gardner is interested in depicting the process of fraternizing that is often fueled by alcohol and drugs, and then stirred with lewd behaviour. His works visit arenas of male bonding such as beer parlours, anonymous motel rooms and bathrooms.
Les Newman’s wild computer generated work creates a distinct “low-fi-high-tech image” focusing on themes of alienation, abandonment, and loss. He combines and diffuses these misanthropic sentiments with humor through brightly coloured charts and science models/graphs/charts and pat explanations.
Judith Scherer is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Prince Edward Island. With every gesture—personal or cultural—“the human being is always disturbing space,” says Scherer. Her drawings presented in INMYSOLITUDE represent a highly articulated breakdown of the movement of the body as it passed through time, space and/or various gradations of light.
Brian Burke is a painter based in Prince Edward Island. His current work reflects on solitude in the most profound manner, as an implied and obvious symptom of depression. In this new series of paintings, Burke repeatedly depicts a lone man in bed, an often solitary place for reflection on one’s life. For Burke, the stark bedroom and the solitary man represent the “end-zone.”
Yi Tong Lok’s paintings act as quick sketches of the landscape rendered in a familiar, impressionistic style. One can easily imagine the artist on an isolated rural hillside.
ABOUT GALLERY NEUBACHER:
Gallery Neubacher promises to introduce and contribute to the development of emerging artists as well as showcase the talents of more established contemporary artists working in all media. Gallery Neubacher is located within a stone's throw of Toronto's celebrated Yorkville gallery district.
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