|
Indepth Arts News:
"no(w)here: Marcy Adzich, Amanda Wojick, Laura Vandenburgh and Donovan Barrow"
2006-06-18 until 2006-08-05
Susan Hobbs Gallery
Toronto, ON,
CA Canada
Opening on Saturday June 17th and continuing until August 5, 2006, the Susan Hobbs is pleased to present an exhibition which brings together the sculptures of Marcy Adzich and Amanda Wojick, the drawings of Laura Vandenburgh and the paintings of Donovan Barrow, organized by gallery artist Kevin Yates. This will be the first exhibition for all of these artists in Toronto. These artists share a unique, sculptural approach to landscape, presenting their subject more as object than image. Their works embody a sense of mysterious isolation, disconnecting them from our realm of experience and challenging our understanding of their surfaces and forms.
Marcy Adzich creates sculptures of dreamlike landscapes using common model railroad materials. She builds forms which are familiar yet unexpected, awkward yet intentional, and populates them with fabricated, sterling silver objects that litter across both the internal and external surfaces.
Donovan Barrow creates architectural still life paintings with glittering automobile paints. Using Modernist-inspired, cardboard architectural models as his subjects, he creates images in which proportions are skewed, and painted objects confer a material duality. The model’s material---corrugated cardboard---reads as both cardboard and corrugated steel sheeting, while a glass of spilt water also stands in as a creek trickling through a landscape.
Laura Vandenburgh produces intimate, coloured pencil drawings of distant mountains, lakes, and islands. They reference computer blueprints, topographical maps and surveyed landscapes. In vibrant colours, her subjects float on the paper becoming illusionistic objects.
Amanda Wojick’s sculptures echo natural forms, depicting simple topographies of cliffs, rocks, and puddles. The intensely-worked surfaces appear as colourful pixilated textures that waver somewhere between sculpture and illustration.
Dislodging aspects of landscape painting, these artists question the importance of illusionistic space, picture plane, and perspective in the true experience of our environment. They are more readily engaged by the language of sculpture, dealing with form, scale and materials. This raises its own set of challenges and limitations in depicting landscapes. While it is understood that the picture plane represents a segment of a larger panorama, there exists no such distinction in sculptural depictions. Instead, these works function as fragments, offered without an identifying context.
These ‘landscapes’ do not seem to fix a single viewpoint, resulting in a dislocating experience of isolation, loss or abandonment. The no[W]here exhibition uncovers an identity crisis between viewer and object: without knowing where we are, we cannot locate these places or ourselves in relation to them. Meaning is created through this feeling of disconnection, wherein ambiguous landscapes seem to deny human presence yet invoke an unmistakable sense of the familiar.
Related Links:
| | 
|
