July 22 to August 21, 2010Angell Gallery is pleased to present three exciting new exhibitions opening Thursday July 22nd, 2010 from 6-9pm. Scroll down for additional information on each exhibition. The West Gallery – Summer Group Show: Bonnie Baxter, Jessica Eaton, Derek Evans, and Alex Kisilevich. The East Gallery – Allison Freeman: “Memorandum” The Project Room – Gertrude Kearns: “Architectural Digestions”
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Summer Group ShowBonnie Baxter, Jessica Eaton,
Derek Evans, & Alex Kisilevich The West Gallery July 22nd – August 21st, 2010
Opening reception Thursday July 22nd, 6–9 PM For Immediate Release ANGELL GALLERY is pleased to present its annual Summer Group Show featuring the photographic work of artists Bonnie Baxter, Jessica Eaton, Derek Evans, and Alex Kisilevich. The exhibition will be on display in the West Gallery from Thursday, July 22 to Saturday, August 21, 2010. An opening night reception will be held on Thursday, July 22 from 6 – 9pm. Summer group shows are the perfect time to try things out and test ideas, to draw links between variables we suspect will mesh perfectly. When the results are positive, the new combinations we find can provide momentum and food for thought for both the public, and artists alike. Summer is best most of all for giving us the chance to expose ourselves to possibilities – both experientially and imaginatively – that are just out of reach most of the time. From the suggestively haunting, semi-autobiographical fictions of Bonnie Baxter to the rich, quasi-abstract work of Derek Evans; and from the uninhabited science-fiction dreamscapes of Jessica Eaton to the ironic society pop of Alex Kisilevich, this summer’s show features a selection of photo-based artists whose highly developed styles merge in a sequence that is at once heterogeneous, and a textbook example of a classic summer group exhibition. These are artists who, although in widely different ways, all exploit traditional notions of beauty: their work complements each others’ because each is able to give us a powerful aesthetic experience, while making us doubt that beauty is all it’s cracked up to be, much less all there is to take pleasure in. At the heart of their practices is a conceptual kernel that combines the camera’s registration of reality with a tell-tale re-imagining of what that “reality” may be, or may involve. As such, they fit together like a four-part harmony that retains the individuality of its parts, but comes together with a flourish.
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 | | Allison Freeman, “Vestibule 2,” oil on canvas, 14” x 17”, 2010 |  | | Allison Freeman, “Document 4,” oil on canvas, 12” x 9”, 2010 |
Allison Freeman“Memorandum”
The East Gallery July 22nd – August 21st, 2010
Opening reception Thursday July 22nd, 6–9 PM For Immediate Release ANGELL GALLERY is pleased to present the upcoming show in the East Gallery, Memorandum by Allison Freeman. This will be Allison’s first showing at with Angell Gallery and will run from July 22 to August 21. An opening night reception will be held on Thursday, July 22 from 6 – 9pm. In the traditional view, paintings were conceptually likened to windows. The artist was said to record what was hypothetically real, and didactically could be taken to be literal. In Allison Freeman’s new body of work, done while finishing her graduate degree at Yale University, a next-generation twist has been added to that idea: in her series of elevators located in the hallways or garages of office buildings, we are slyly denied the ability to infer what is or is not, or could be going on. The images she works with are in fact of an actual place, but have been painted in a richly post-impressionist manner in such a way as to make identification unlikely. And in her “Document” series, in which she makes an oil painting by transcribing a bureaucratic form or a bill of sale, she adds a conceptual window to the idea of the surface of her paintings: we see the document once removed in the first-hand fact of the painting. This distancing tactic, in which the whole of her painters’ toolbox is engaged, brings clearly to mind the experiential gap between seeing and knowing; between presence and action, absence and mere awareness. Beyond the elevators’ transitional movement, action and non-action are seemingly deemed to be in essence indistinguishable. In such a way as to bring our attention to the self-referential fact of this “reality”, our gaze is directed not to a scene or any activity, but the possibility of a place which could be anywhere; or non-existent, effectively an abstraction, much like the document pieces in their use of the shallow space and gridded structure of much geometric abstraction. And while this interpretation may be strengthened by the artists’ rhetorical demonstration of technical prowess, we should also note the self-conscious nod in the direction of critical theory, in the subtle menace of the putative business offices or private bedrooms these elevators may bring us to; or in what seems like the innocuous content of the documents. The insight this ironic, tongue-in-cheek literalism programs into the work is that in rendering what she calls “a transitional space of entrances and exits, but never a destination”, alongside the paintings they inhabit, Freeman’s elevators and documents become ciphers standing for an interpretation of art; for the uncertainty of subjectivity, and the strange, hidden beauty of our quotidian lives. A recent MFA graduate at Yale University, Allison’s work has been exhibited in Toronto, Montreal, and at a recent MFA exhibition in New Haven, CT. Her work has been reviewed in the Concordia Journal, the Yale Daily News, and in the Globe and Mail by esteemed art critic Gary Michael Dault. |
 | | Gertrude Kearns, “Orange-Green Abstract,” mixed media on board, 60” x 40”, 2010. |  | | Gertrude Kearns, “Red Abstract,” mixed media on paper, 76” x 42”, 2009. |
Gertrude Kearns“Architectural Digestions”
The Project Room July 22nd – August 21st
Opening reception Thursday July 22nd, 6–9 PM For Immediate Release ANGELL GALLERY is pleased to present the upcoming show in the Project Room, Architectural Digestions, by Gertrude Kearns. This will be Gertrude’s first time showing at Angell Gallery and will run from July 22 to August 21. An opening night reception will be held on Thursday, July 22 from 6 – 9pm. Gertrude Kearns’ work is centered in a belief in the positive interaction between painting and architecture. For her this is representative of an idealist striving toward a better social future, one in which art can and would play an important role; when it would be self-evident that art - and the image of art - is central to life because of its unique power to remind us of our humanity, as both creators and creations. We are admonished to stay grounded but too, to maintain our sense of humour, with a light touch and in a graceful painterly tone of voice. These paintings remind us of things, first visually, and then subjectively, spiritually; they seek to edify without moralizing, and do so with both zest and self-awareness. All the formal elements of two-dimensional art, especially color and line, show themselves to be helpful agents for Kearns, in pursuing the logic of her aesthetics. Space unfolds in these mixed-media works along swooping architectonic lines, defying gravitational and positional logic within the purview of their vast mindscapes. Seeming to be located both “inside” and “outside”, to be both lyrical and geometric, and most importantly to be somehow keyed both in major and minor chords, the work swings between these poles effortlessly, engaging us because it is itself so engaged. And if it tacitly acknowledges, most especially in its sheer visual attractions, the distance between the functional role it plays in the world, and what by its nature it wishes to do, it is all the more at home, being and creating at once the thing it is and the thing it suggests. Gertrude’s work has been exhibited in Toronto, Ottawa, and Washington. Her work is included in such notable collections as: the Portrait Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, ON), the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax, NS), Art Collection Canada (Toronto, ON), the Department of National Defense (Ottawa, ON), and the Canadian War Museum (Ottawa, ON). Gertrude’s work has received critical review in Canadian Art magazine, as well as in the National Post, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. |
