Georgia Dickie acquired by Celine and featured in Womens Wear Daily.

New Celine store spotlights women artists. The store on Rue Duphot, designed by Hedi Slimane, features works by four female contemporary artists from across the world.

Celine is putting the spotlight on women artists with its latest boutique in Paris, its fourth opening in the French capital in as many months.

The store on Rue Duphot, just off Rue Saint-Honoré, carries women’s and men’s ready-to-wear and accessories. In line with creative director Hedi Slimane’s new retail concept, inaugurated in New York City in February, the 3,770-square-foot space features a mix of his furniture designs, vintage pieces and original art works.

They include a ceramic sculpture by German artist Katinka Bock; a sculpture by Chinese artist Hu Xiaoyuan incorporating materials such as rosewood, ink, raw silk and nails; a wall-mounted sculpture by Canadian artist Georgia Dickie, who often works with found objects, and a work by fellow Canadian Rochelle Goldberg. Rounding out the selection is a man, Brazilian artist Deyson Gilbert.

Walls are covered in stone including Grand Antique marble, a deep black stone with graphic white veining from the South of France, and travertine from Iran, in an overall design that blends elements of Brutalism, Modernism, Bauhaus and Dutch art movement De Stijl.

Among the store’s most striking features is a staircase linking the ground floor to the first floor, framed with slats of glass and wood, curving around Bock’s sculpture.

In addition to the locations opened since late February in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, London, Milan, Madrid, Dubai, Macau and Bangkok to coincide with the delivery of Slimane’s debut ready-to-wear collections, Celine plans to open stores this year in Shanghai and Beijing.

The Rue Duphot boutique is located in one of the French capital’s hottest shopping districts, which in the last year has welcomed new or revamped flagships from Chanel, Giorgio Armani, Valentino, Balmain, Marni and Serge Lutens, among others. Saint Laurent will debut its new retail format nearby on Saturday.

To view the full article please visit WWD.

For more information about Georgia Dickie please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Our current exhibition A Complete Change Of Form Into A More Beautiful Or Spiritual State is featured on Journal FYI.

Qualeasha Wood, Test of Faith, 2019 Jacquard, sequins, durag, feathers 74 x 51 in (188 x 129.5 cm)

A Complete Change of Form Into A More Beautiful Or Spiritual State

Timothy Yanick Hunter,
 Eileen Isagon Skyers, Eve Tagny, Qualeasha Wood
, Curtia Wright

May 10 – June 8, 2019
@
COOPER COLE
1134 Dupont Street,
Toronto, ON M6H 2A2, Canada

COOPER COLE is pleased to present A Complete Change Of Form Into A More Beautiful Or Spiritual State, a group exhibition curated by Timothy Yanick Hunter. This exhibition continues the gallery’s commitment to offering a platform for emerging curatorial practices. Participating artists include Timothy Yanick Hunter, Eileen Isagon Skyers, Eve Tagny, Qualeasha Wood, and Curtia Wright.

This exhibition is symbolic of the intersection between the digital plane and spiritual practice, both can be characterized by their ephemeral abstractness. A Complete Change Of Form Into A More Beautiful Or Spiritual State investigates varying ideas surrounding identity, memory, and the transformation of self. Together these artists explore the phenomenon of technological convergence – in this case, a phenomenon where transcendental spaces and ritual meet digital space and practice. The term transfiguration is defined as a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state. The works in this exhibition navigate ideas within religion, spirituality, digital space, and the internet as technologies of self realization. How do concepts of memory & identity parallel each other? Each artist in A Complete Change Of Form Into A More Beautiful Or Spiritual State identifies a step in this process by questioning the states of being to which we aspire, asking how much control do we have over our states of being, what ways they can be manufactured and manipulated, and what ways do we gain control.

“Convergence is a deep integration of knowledge, tools, and all relevant activities of human activity for a common goal, to allow society to answer new questions to change the respective physical or social ecosystem. Such changes in the respective ecosystem open new trends, pathways, and opportunities in the following divergent phase of the process” – Roco, 2002 [1], Bainbridge and Roco, 2016 [2]

“…The Internet is a place that fosters identity formation and self-authorship in a population that has traditionally been viewed as deficient in Internet use…As discussions on the digital divide transform from focusing on technical access to more societal concerns, the no=on of culture and identity becomes more substantial. As the digital divide continues to close, the potential for reducing the “cultural divide” continues to increase” – Hales, 2008, The African Diaspora, Racial Identity, and The Evolving Discourse of the Digital Divide.

Timothy Yanick Hunter (b. 1990, Toronto, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. After graduating from the University of Toronto in 2015 with a degree in Art History and English, his practice explores varying concepts surrounding digital security, identity – both digital and lived, narratives of hierarchical power-structures and how these ideas intersect with notions of Blackness and the greater African Diaspora. His approach alternates between exploratory and didactic. At times Hunter defines his process as experiments in visual language, where the mediums represent a range of languages and individual works express different stories. His work ranges from painting, sculpture, video, performance and installation. August 2018 Hunter debuted his first curatorial project Terms And Conditions – a group exhibit exploring information technology and the culture of mass surveillance. Currently Hunter is exhibiting overseeing programming at the Whippersnapper Gallery for its 2018-19 season alongside fellow members of Black Artist Union Collective. Timothy Yanick Hunter lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Eileen Isagon Skyers (b. 1991, Manila, Philippines) holds a BFA from University of South Florida, and a MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art, USA. Her work has been shown at Williamson Knight, Litman Gallery, Surplus Space, Portland; and Quiad Gallery, William and Nancy Oliver Gallery, Tampa, USA. Skyers’ has curated exhibitions at American Medium, HOUSING, New York; Digital Gallery, Hap Gallery, Portland; and Unit 19, Tampa, USA. Eileen Isagon Skyers lives and works in Brooklyn, USA.

Eve Tagny (b. 1986, Montreal, Canada) holds a BFA in film production/documentary from Concordia University. Her work has been shown at Xpace Cultural Centre, Critical Distance, VTape, Toronto; Never Apart, FOFA Gallery, Montreal, Canada; nGbk, Kleiner Salon, Berlin, Germany; WISHLESS Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; and Two by Two Art Studio, Johannesburg, South Africa and has an upcoming exhibition at Gallery 44, Toronto, Canada. Eve Tangy lives and works in Montreal, Canada.

Qualeasha Wood (b. 1996, Long Branch, USA) holds a BFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA. Her work spans from printmaking, textile works, and digital media and suggests realities and narratives surrounding black female bodies as they existed, and currently exist, as well as proposing potential futures in which they may exist. Through creating new narratives of black potential, Wood’s work creates dialogues across time in different historical contexts and settings. It is not about imagining an alternate reality but proposing a new perspective on an existing narrative that is just as real as the standardized Eurocentric view. She has exhibited at Rhode Island School of Design, Woods Gerry Gallery, RISD Exposé Gallery, and Benson Hall Gallery, Providence; New Image Art, Los Angeles, USA. In fall 2019 Wood will commence a MFA in photography at Cranbrook Academy of Fine Art. Qualeasha Wood lives and works in Providence, USA.

Curtia Wright (b. 1991, Scarborough, Canada) is a multi-disciplinary artist and mural artist. She holds a BFA from OCAD University. Wright’s work concerns the way societies perceptions of bodies, specifically black bodies, have the ability to shape their narratives without consent. Her current works delve into the spiritual and mental wellness of African peoples and the link to mythology and disseminating what ‘fantasy’ is and who it belongs to. She has exhibited at Margin of Eras Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, 918 Bathurst, White House Gallery, Younger than Beyonce, Toronto; Art Gallery of Guelph, Guelph, Canada; and Arts Dimensions Gallery, St. Louis, USA. Curtia Wright lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Timothy Yanick Hunter, Something I’ve Been Meaning To Send You, 2019 Video, acrylic sheet 5:25 min, Edition of 3 + 2 AP

Eve Tagny, Alocasia stand, 2019, Clear Electrostatic vinyl, clay, stones, dried flowers 12.5 x 21 in (31.8 x 53.3 cm) Editions of 3, 2 AP

Eve Tagny, nurture nurture nurture, 2019, Clear Electrostatic vinyl, clay, 10 x 15 in (25.4 x 38.1 cm)Editions of 3, 2 AP

Curtia Wright, Held together by own gravity, 2019 Oil and acrylic on Organza fabric 72 x 48 in (182.9 x 121.9 cm)

Eileen Isagon Skyers, Songwriter, 2019, Video installation with opaque two white screens, translucent polarized lens filters and floating shelves, Dimensions variable

Qualeasha Wood, Cult Following, 2019 Jacquard woven with glass seed beads 51 x 74 in (129.5 x 188 cm)

Timothy Yanick Hunter, Basic Instructions, 2019 Video, acrylic sheet 5:15 min Edition of 3 + 2 AP

Qualeasha Wood, Test of Faith, 2019 Jacquard, sequins, durag, feathers 74 x 51 in (188 x 129.5 cm)

Our current exhibition A Complete Change Of Form Into A More Beautiful Or Spiritual State is featured on Art Viewer.

Sara Cwynar’s solo exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is featured in Photograph Magazine.

Sara Cwynar: Sara Cwynar

June 9 – November 10

The Aldrich will present the first East Coast exhibition of artist Sara Cwynar (b. 1985), whose practice spans photography, video, installation and bookmaking and surveys the transitory object-life of visual matter in our time of image infatuation. The exhibition will feature new and recent work by the artist. Using an accumulative archive of images and objects, culled from libraries, public archives, dollar stores, and eBay, Cwynar combines archival imagery and out-of-date objects with new digital technologies and archaic analogue processes to expose how images are produced, trafficked and mimed over time. Cwynar’s first museum publication, with an essay by Amy Smith-Stewart, the exhibition’s curator, will accompany the show.

To view the full article please visit Photograph Mag.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, included in group exhibition at the Burnaby Art Gallery, is featured in Burnaby Now.

Six years ago, the Burnaby Art Gallery launched a new mission: to significantly enhance its collection of works created by women.

You’ll get to see the results of that effort in a new show at the gallery. Women’s Work: New Acquisitions opens Thursday, June 20 and runs from Friday, June 21 to Sunday, Aug. 25.

Back in 2013, was discovered that within the gallery’s collection of more than 5,000 works of art, only 22 per cent were created by women.

“Although a statistic such as this is common amongst collecting institutions, it was nevertheless identified as troubling,” says a write-up from the gallery.

To view the full article please visit Burnaby Now.

For more information about Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s San Antonio exhibition at Artpace is featured in The Texas Observer.

Living in a city can deaden our instinct for noticing environment. Caught up in our day-to-day lives, we walk — or, especially in Texas, drive — through our cities without giving much consideration to either the superstructures of urban design that define our paths or the secret world of living things that thrive in the recesses of our man-made spaces. One of the many things that visual art can do is help us notice again, to think more deeply about what our eyes normally race past.

Raul Gonzales and Daniel Rios Rodriguez, whose art is on display at San Antonio’s Artpace through August 18, both invite this sort of shift in the viewer. They begin from abstraction or a stripped-down image and follow their instincts toward compositions that steer clear of any obvious meaning or politics. At the same time, both have developed evocative visual languages that guide our eyes and thoughts toward a certain set of reflections about our physical surroundings.

Taken together, these two San Antonio artists unintentionally summon a dialogue reminiscent of the ancient board game “Snakes and Ladders.” From below, on Artpace’s ground floor, Gonzales’ angular, latticed designs in duct tape thrust the viewer’s imagination upward, evoking buildings, grids, pipework and power lines. Meanwhile, on the second floor, Rodriguez’s serpentine sculptures and dream-symbol canvases draw us back down into the grass, mud and murky waters of the River City’s collective unconscious.

Rodriguez was born in Killeen and grew up all over the world as an Army brat, though with strong family ties to San Antonio. He says his Artpace show, “Bruisers,” comes out of an obsession he developed with snakes on a stretch of the San Antonio River near his house. Since settling there five years ago, Rodriguez has made work revolving around found items and wildlife he encounters on daily walks by the river. He also has a longstanding interest in what he calls “essential forms” — the spiral, for instance, in one body of work, and the snake in this one. “Bruisers” combines his twin interests in the local and the universal, exploring the snake as an archetype while also making reference to the very literal snakes that he knows often surround him, hidden, on his river walks.

Rodriguez’s exhibition space at Artpace is dominated by a table teeming with coiled snake sculptures, featuring materials ranging from rope and wire to metal ducts and electrical conduits. The show title, “Bruisers,” refers to a slang term the artist and his friend use for people with a strong physical presence, who struggle to exist in the world but emerge victorious and tough. He hopes his works can have the same kind of existence — coming into the world on their own terms, thriving regardless of his intentions for them. He speaks of his show as an experiment in seeing if these creatures could survive an excursion outside his house. They do.

Rodriguez makes snake paintings, too. These feel more Jungian, rooted in anthropology and dream symbolism, though he says he’s not interested in psychological theory. (He does frequently dream of snakes, however.) In contrast to the industrial materials which make his sculptures feel like a repurposing of city trash, the paintings are cleaner, based around simple shapes, patterns and color fields, simultaneously more symbolic and less mysterious, more scaled and less poisonous than the sculptures. Each painting, Rodriguez says, is inspired by an individual relationship in his life. Though the meanings are illegible, there’s a sense of a pictorial, nearly hieroglyphic language, inspired by the art of traditional and indigenous societies.

Shawn Kuruneru acquired by Celine and featured in W Magazine.

Hedi Slimane prefers to play his cards close to his vest, so it’s hard to know exactly what he’s thinking. But the man likes his music, and he clearly let his song choice speak for him at the fall women’s-wear show for Celine, his second for the French brand: “J’ai un plan pour te garder.” Sung over and over in a playful woman’s voice, the message—“I have a plan to keep you”—seemed directed toward those who had criticized him for dropping the logo’s accent aigu and forgoing the 74-year-old house’s bourgeois history in favor of his own signature youthful rock ’n’ roll aesthetic.

Indeed, he does have a plan, and not just when it comes to the clothes, which were pure 1970s Parisian chic, and the highlight of Fashion Week. He also intends to win over naysayers with his store designs. Slimane has always been somewhat of a polymath, using fashion as a vehicle with which to explore other creative outlets. While at Dior Homme and Saint Laurent, he focused on photography and music, releasing books of his own portraits and using ad campaigns that he had lensed to promote the musicians, both new and old, that he was into. Now, at Celine, his attention has turned toward art and design.

Under his creative direction, Celine’s New York, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, and L.A. retail spaces have been reworked in “a refined 21st-century brutalist context,” as the company puts it. Which is to say, each striking space is uniquely outfitted with natural stone and wood surfaces, reflective fixtures, and site-specific works from a notable roster of contemporary artists, including Theaster Gates, Oscar Tuazon, and Virginia Overton. They, alone, are worth a trip to the stores.

At the New York flagship, on Madison Avenue, which was the first to undergo his redesign, swaths of Roman lava stone and bianco Raffaello marble grandly showcase not just the clothes but also sculptures by James Balmforth and Jose Dávila. Also on display is furniture of Slimane’s own design—he had released a line of ebonized steel pieces in 2007, and he now seems to be taking the pursuit more seriously. His latest creations—minimalist-looking boxy chairs designed in the spirit of Donald Judd—play a crucial role in the stores’ interiors.

As does the artwork on display, which includes Elaine Cameron-Weir’s slinky cascade of copper scales at the Tokyo flagship and Davina Semo’s steel-chain wall hangings at the Paris Montaigne space. There are also striking works by Lukas Geronimas, Charles Harlan, Rindon Johnson, Shawn Kuruneru, Artur Lescher, Marie Lund, Luca Monterastelli, David Nash, and David Adamo, who appears to be one of Slimane’s favorite new artists. The Berlin-based sculptor’s totemlike cedarwood creations are spread across several boutiques, including Celine’s men’s-wear flagship in Paris, on rue François 1er. “Fashion isn’t really my world,” Adamo says. “But once I saw the context, it made sense. There’s a roughness to my pieces that works well against the high-design slickness of the space.”

To view the full article please visit W Magazine.

For more information about Shawn Kuruneru please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s group exhibition at Burnaby Art Gallery is included in the Vancouver Sun‘s summer exhibition picks.

Since 2013, the Burnaby Art Gallery has sought to significantly enhance its collection of works by women artists. Through targeted practices, the gallery has increased its holdings, so that 25 per cent of the collection now comprises works created by women. Women’s Work highlights the results of that effort, including recently acquired works by Diyan Achjadi, Shuvinai Ashoona, Mary Cassatt, Kate Craig, Leonor Fini, Carole Itter, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Agnes Martin, Tania Willard, and many others.

Women’s Work: New Acquisitions 2019, June 21 to August 25

6344 Deer Lake Avenue, Burnaby, 604-297-4422

To view the full article please visit the Vancouver Sun.

For more information about Gabe Hill please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Shawn Kuruneru acquired by Celine and featured in Wallpaper Magazine.

Hedi Slimane has lost no time in making Celine his own, after taking over as creative director at the luxury brand given cult status by the departing Phoebe Philo. Since his arrival last year, Slimane has removed the accent on the ‘e’, introduced menswear, put his stamp firmly on womenswear, and is now rolling out his new retail concept worldwide.

Of the latest move, Celine’s CEO Séverine Merle explains: ‘Celine has a great distribution network and high-quality visibility but no large stores. We need to open flagships in major cities, larger stores that can accommodate menswear and newly expanded women’s collections.’ Which is why in March, less than a month after inaugurating its 5,000 sq ft New York flagship at 650 Madison Avenue, Celine unveiled two addresses in Paris: a remodelled two-storey space for menswear and womenswear on rue de Grenelle, and the brand’s first menswear flagship on rue François 1er. By mid-April, the French maison had also opened new boutiques in Tokyo, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Madrid, Milan and London, while a store in Beijing is due to follow before the end of the year.

Slimane designed all of the spaces in collaboration with Celine’s in-house team. Though each store is unique, they share common traits, such as an emphasis on natural stone and other bold materials. Massive, richly veined slabs of marble, granite and travertine appear on walls, shelves and blocky columns, while the floors are lined with Basaltina lava stone. Their contrasting patterns are a feast for the eyes, reflected in floor-to-ceiling mirrors and steel surfaces. Reclaimed oak along with wood and leather furniture bring warm accents of brown to the sleek black-and-white palette.

Many of these materials beg to be touched. As you climb the imposing open-thread concrete staircase at rue François 1er, for example, try to resist caressing the creamy Bianco Raffaello marble wall to your right, or the ginger-veined black granite to your left – both deployed like couture fabric and offering a silky texture, with none of the usual coldness of stone. But if the materials can be smooth, Slimane’s architectural lines are unrelentingly rigorous – intersecting seams in concrete floors, parallel shelving, rectangular metal displays hanging above under-lit mirrored platforms. At the same time, there is a certain weightlessness to the design. Display cases and shelves seem to hover just off the ground. Any time two materials meet – such as brushed steel next to Grande Antique marble – they never touch directly, but float in close contact to one another.

Slimane has experimented in furniture design over the years, and has created a new collection for the Celine stores, which is set alongside vintage 1960s and 1970s pieces that showcase French woodworking expertise. Slimane’s furniture, most of it made of light or dark plywood, is elegantly minimalist, with an element of children’s building blocks or primitive thrones. (There are plans to produce it for sale at some point.) Contemporary artworks by established and emerging talents, either acquired or commissioned, are another major feature of the spaces, an initiative dubbed the Celine Art Project. Many of these are also tempting to touch – such as a yellowed rawhide cube wrapped in rope by American artist Rindon Johnson at the rue de Grenelle store. Some play off the decor, like Shawn Kuruneru’s ink-and-acrylic painting inspired by traditional Chinese landscape art, its abstract pattern echoing the marble of nearby display tables. The centrepiece of the rue de Grenelle store is a site-specific work by Oscar Tuazon. ‘Hedi is a strategic thinker, and he thinks about a brand on a global level,’ Tuazon says. ‘What’s amazing is that he combines this with a genuine passion for working with young talent. Musicians, artists, creative young people – they are the basis of his universe.’

To view the full article please visit Wallpaper.

For more information about Shawn Kuruneru please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Sara Cwynar’s solo exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is featured in Cultured Magazine’s “10 Summer Exhibitions Worth the Trip”.

N. Dash and Sara Cwynar at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
The Aldrich in Ridgefield, Connecticut has no permanent collection and is the only museum in the state dedicated solely to the exhibition of contemporary art. Currently on view through September 15th is an entirely new set of work by Miami-born artist N. Dash, whose multidisciplinary work employs both natural and manmade materials, including pigments, adobe, fabric, and found objects. June 9th marks a second opening—Sara Cwynar: Gilded Age, the artist’s first East Coast museum exhibition and a survey of new and recent work.

To view the full article please visit Cultured Mag.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

ektor garcia’s exhibition cadena perpetua at the Sculpture Centre is included in ArtNet’s Editor’s Picks: 19 things not to miss in New York’s art world this week. 

“ektor garcia: cadena perpetua” at SculptureCenter

In his first New York solo show, ektor garcia presents a series of mixed-media sculptures made of interlocking parts—leather loops, clay fired into chain links, copper wire crocheted into lace, and bits of steel welded together. His practice draws on the traditional handcraft of rural Tabasco in Zacatecas, Mexico.

Location: SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, Queens
Price: $10 suggested donation during regular hours, opening reception is free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Thursday–Monday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

To view the full article please visit ArtNet.

For more information about ektor garcia please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

9 Art Events to Attend in New York This Week: ‘Artistic License,’ ektor garcia, Migration and Art, and More

Opening: ektor garcia at SculptureCenter
The artist ektor garcia uses a range of materials—from clay to metal to leather—to create sculptures whose elements are connected by a series of fasteners, loops, and knots. The end result tends toward modular works whose contents and dimensions have the ability to change as they move. Garcia’s SculptureCenter exhibition continues a practice that serves as an investigation into labor and the craft traditions of the artist’s family, which hails from Tabasco in the Mexican state of Zacatecas.
SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Queens, 6–8 p.m.

To view the full article please visit ArtNews.

For more information about ektor garcia please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

SculptureCenter presents a solo exhibition by ektor garcia.

ektor garica: cadena perpetua

May 23 – July 29

garcia’s work implicitly asks where in chains of production, tradition, and command one might locate oneself, and how this is knowable. His work, for example, faithfully continues certain rural handcraft and gendered family traditions, while his own itinerant lifestyle necessarily drags the detritus of many places into his practice. Social and cultural associations of these techniques, materials, and objects are reimagined through garcia’s trajectory.

SculptureCenter is located in Long Island City (44-19 Purves Street), and is open Thursday-Monday, 11am-6pm.

About SculptureCenter
SculptureCenter leads the conversation on contemporary art by supporting artistic innovation and independent thought highlighting sculpture’s specific potential to change the way we engage with the world. Positioning artists’ work in larger cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts, SculptureCenter discerns and interprets emerging ideas. Founded by artists in 1928, SculptureCenter provides an international forum that connects artists and audiences by presenting exhibitions, commissioning new work, and generating scholarship.

To view the full article please visit Hyperallergic.

For more information about ektor garcia please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Tau Lewis is included in Yorkshire Sculpture International, a new festival of international sculpture across Leeds and Wakefield.

The inaugural edition of Yorkshire Sculpture International (YSI), the UK’s largest sculpture festival, will take place across Leeds and Wakefield this summer from June 22 until September 29, 2019. The free, 100-day festival will feature new commissions and sculpture outdoors in spaces across Leeds and Wakefield, and major exhibitions at each of the four partner venues—Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Art Gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Featuring 18 international artists from 13 different countries, the programme will bring together artists who share an interest in harnessing the cultural histories and physical properties of the materials they use. New commissions and exhibitions will respond to a provocation made by artist Phyllida Barlow in 2018—that “sculpture is the most anthropological of the artforms.”

Highlights of the programme will include a new commission by Rashid Johnson at the Henry Moore Institute, and rarely-seen sculptures by preeminent Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The Hepworth Wakefield will present a series of large-scale installations including new work by Wolfgang Laib and Tau Lewis’ first exhibition in the UK. Leeds Art Gallery will present a series of solo presentations and new commissions by artists including Nobuko Tsuchiya, and ambitious new collection displays will be presented at Leeds Art Gallery and The Hepworth Wakefield.

Yorkshire Sculpture International commissions include Huma Bhabha’s first public realm commission in the UK in Wakefield city centre, a site-specific sculpture by Ayşe Erkmen for Leeds Art Gallery’s central court, and new work by Tarek Atoui which will be presented in gallery spaces and through performances in public spaces in Leeds and Wakefield. Working almost entirely with figurative sculpture, Bhabha’s sculptures have a timeless quality, making connections between histories, languages and civilisations. Erkmen’s sculptural practice transforms environments as she responds to a particular place through eye catching interventions, often incorporating the architectural features of the location as part of the work. Atoui will create a series of performances exploring instrument-making, the material properties of sound and its connection to the body of the performer and those of the audience.

Yorkshire Sculpture International builds on Yorkshire’s rich history as the birthplace and home to pioneering sculptors including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Damien Hirst, and YSI’s partner galleries’ celebrated sculpture collections. Major sculptures by Damien Hirst will be shown outdoors in Leeds city centre and at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and inside Leeds Art Gallery. Hirst grew up in Leeds and went on to study at Leeds College of Art in the early 1980s, as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore had done 60 years earlier.

Artists whose works will be exhibited during YSI include Tamar Harpaz, Rashid Johnson, Maria Loboda, Sean Lynch and Cauleen Smith at the Henry Moore Institute; Tarek Atoui, Ayşe Erkmen, Rachel Harrison, Damien Hirst, Joanna Piotrowska, and Nobuko Tsuchiya at Leeds Art Gallery; Tarek Atoui, Nairy Baghramian, Jimmie Durham, Wolfgang Laib and Tau Lewis at The Hepworth Wakefield; Damien Hirst, Kimsooja and David Smith at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

For more information about the individual artists click here.

Yorkshire Sculpture International has also developed an extensive public engagement programme, which supports artistic talent development in the region and introduces new audiences to sculpture. Working with schools, universities, artists and community partners to inspire and connect people with materials and making, exploring what it means to create sculpture today.

YSI has raised more than 1.5 million GBP, including a National Lottery funded Ambition for Excellence grant from Arts Council England and regional investment from Leeds 2023, Wakefield Council, Leeds Beckett University and the University of Leeds.

To view the full article please visit e-flux.

For more information about Tau Lewis please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Jenine Marsh is featured in Hoodline as part of the program for Liz Magor’s solo exhibition, BLOWOUT at the Renaissance Society.

From stuffed toys to knitted sweaters, peculiar shoes to plastic wrap, common objects become “agents” or activators in Liz Magor’s sculptures, bringing with them elusive narratives or up-swells of feeling.

For this program, presented in conjunction with Magor’s solo exhibition, BLOWOUT at the Renaissance Society, artists Alex Chitty and Jenine Marsh each respond to Magor’s practice, followed by a conversation together. Reflecting on her work and their own, they consider how sculptures can tune in to the lives and afterlives of objects, or how they might offer their share of surprises through the use of familiar-seeming materials.

To view the full article please visit Hoodline.

For more information about Jenine Marsh please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s solo exhibition Loose Spells is featured on Art Viewer.

Artist: Gabrielle Hill

Exhibition title: Loose Spells

Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada

Date: March 28 – May 4, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and COOPER COLE, Toronto

COOPER COLE is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Gabrielle Hill. This marks the first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Gabrielle Hill’s Loose Spells drawings were made through a labor -intensive process over the fall and winter of 2018-2019 that included coating paper repeatedly in a homemade tobacco-infused Crisco oil, then applying pigments and allowing the paper to dry for several months at a time. While the works were drying, Hill collected ephemera from the neighbourhood: dandelions and other assorted wildflowers, beer can tabs, magazines and dollar-store charms. Once the oil had fully dried, she was able to carefully sew and glue these small tokens to the paper. The resulting drawings are both delicate and tough, translucent in areas, odorous, and materially connected to Hill’s daily life. The images, which the artist calls “spells,” recall trash-strewn sunsets and billowing clothes on a backyard line. The idea of these works as “spells” points to Hill’s ongoing interest in the connection between the ephemeral and the real, and can be connected to earlier works such as her sculpture series Four Effigies for the End of Property, which she describes as “images of ideas that intend to have a kind of power over those ideas.”

(quoted in The Capilano Review 3.35/ Spring 2018, p. 26).

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (b. 1979, Comox, BC, Canada) is a Cree and Metis artist and writer. Hill’s sculptural practice explores the history of found materials to enquire into concepts of land, property, and economy. Most recently, her work has shown extensively in Canada at Unit 17, Polygon Gallery, the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver; the Alberta Art Gallery, Edmonton; SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Montreal; and STRIDE gallery, Calgary. Hill is a member of BUSH gallery, an Indigenous artist collective seeking to decentre Eurocentric models of making and thinking about art, prioritizing instead land -based teachings and Indigenous epistemologies. Hill’s writing has been published in many places, most recently in Beginning With the Seventies (Helen Belkin, 2019). She is also the co-editor of The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (ARP 2009) and Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island (Wildred Laurier 2017). Hill lives and works on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh people.

To view the full article please visit Art Viewer.

For more information about Gabe Hill please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Sara Cwynar’s solo exhibition Image Model Muse at the Milwaukee Art Museum is featured on Urban Milwaukee.

What makes objects desirable, and who assigns value to them? How do colors impact buy decisions? How does the idea of feminine beauty fit into all this?

Brooklyn-based artist Sara Cwynar tackles these questions and examines the often-sexist nature of the advertising world, along with the fleeting nature of materialism, in her exhibit Image Model Muse at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibit, organized with the Minneapolis Institute of Art, will be displayed in the museum’s Herzfeld Center for Photography through August 4.

“Image Model Muse” showcases three of Cwynar’s short films and photographs from the artist’s “Tracy” series, a collection of photographs of her longtime friend and muse.

The 34-year-old Cwynar, who was born in Vancouver, Canada, has a background in graphic design. She earned a bachelor’s degree in design from York University in Toronto in 2010 and an MFA From Yale University in 2016. Cywnar has long been fascinated by kitsch — art considered in bad taste or too sentimental, but often embraced in an ironic way. In 2014, her book Kitsch Encyclopedia: A Survey of Universal Knowledge was published. The book combines the philosophies of writers Milan Kundera, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard with Cwynar’s photographs.

Several “Image Model Muse” photographs, like “Tracy (Gold Circle)” (2017, dye sublimation print on aluminum), depict Tracy, unsmiling and looking straight into the camera. She is surrounded by mementos, knickknacks, and other forgotten items–pre-digital color photographs, mid-century advertisements clipped from magazines, credit cards, plastic grapes and cups, credit cards, and small velvet jewelry boxes—all set against crimson and apple-green backgrounds.

In other photos, Tracy is pictured against what appears to be grid-like wallpaper in many primary colors, a sort of flat Rubik’s cube. She wears plain, unornamented clothes—a pale pink, long-sleeved dress; sheer, white socks; simple high-heeled shoes. The grid may be symbolic of rigid beauty standards, or how women in their 20s and 30s are expected to conform to neat little boxes of societal norms.

Cwynar’s three films, “Soft Film,” 2016, “Rose Gold,” 2017, and “Cover Girl,” 2018, narrated in part by the artist and in part by a male voice, feature quick shots of vintage makeup compacts, velvet-toned jewelry boxes, dusty perfume bottles and knickknacks, a bubblegum pink plastic tea set, iPhones and modern electronics, and makeup factory assembly lines. Shot with 16-millimeter film and then digitized, Cywnar’s films have a bright, almost unnatural Technicolor quality to them, like commercials of the 1960s.

In a video of an artist talk she gave at the Art Institute of Chicago, Cwynar refers to the numerous jewelry boxes pictured in “Soft Film” as a metaphor for the subtle misogyny women face, particularly in the corporate world.

“Rose Gold” was named after a color of the Apple iPhone 6S, released in 2015. The color name suggests exquisiteness and wealth, and traditional societal notions of femininity. The film juxtaposes modern electronic communications, like swiping on dating apps and text messaging, with a now antiquated method of communication—a corded telephone.

In “Image, Model Muse,” Cwynar explores the more sinister side of quirky, bright and sometimes odd objects which people might hang on to in an attempt to romanticize the past, while ignoring sometimes dangerous realities of the present.

“I’m trying to dismantle this often-idealized kitsch, or often very nostalgic Western context of photography, which tells us who we think we are, and often with great bias,” Cywnar is quoted as saying in a press release. “I’m trying to think of all the different ways that that is a false history.”

To view the full article please visit Urban Milwaukee.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s exhibition at Artpace is featured in the San Antonio Current.

With a powerful trio of exhibitions already on view, Artpace gives us two more reasons to visit this spring with the unveiling of new projects by San Antonio-based artists Daniel Rios Rodriguez and Raul Gonzalez. Although Rodriguez and Gonzalez explore wildly different topics and themes, their bright and bold bodies of work find common ground in playful energy, DIY aesthetics and transformations of commonplace materials.

A Houston transplant who earned an MFA from UTSA along with grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Surdna Foundation and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC), Gonzalez has long been fixated on the concept of work in many forms — construction, manual labor and his dual roles as a “werking artist” and undeniably cool stay-at-home dad. He’s captured the everyday joys of fatherhood in figurative drawings, celebrated his love for Whataburger and the Houston Astros in paintings and installations, enhanced his exhibitions with energetic, movement-based performances and even danced for 4.3 miles — continuously from downtown to the McNay. With a title lifted from a song by bygone Texas hip-hop duo UGK, his “Front and Back, and Side to Side” promises to transform Artpace’s Main Space windows with a “multi-dimensional mural” rendered in cardboard and colored duct tape. (Cue the selfies.)

A native of Killeen who earned his MFA from Yale and has exhibited in New York, Chicago, Marfa, Ireland and beyond, Rodriguez takes a tactile approach to small-scale “semi-figurative” paintings inspired by personal experiences and the natural world. Frequently using oddly shaped, homemade panels, he paints scenes and patterns in thick, textural layers, adding organic-looking embellishments such as stones, shells and feathers, and finishing the pieces with earthy frames rendered in found bits of wood, rope, wire and hardware accents. Bringing to mind everything from cave drawings and tribal symbology to folk and outsider art, Rodriguez’s work comes to light in “Bruisers,” his first ever solo show in Texas. Nodding to battle scars we collect as we navigate life on Earth, the exhibition title also speaks to the surfaces of his paintings, many of which he says “undergo a lot of heavy hitting and burning and throwing across the floor.”

During the opening reception on May 16, both artists will give short talks about their work and Artpace will be rolling out a new Third Thursdays series that kicks off with a rooftop screening of shorts curated by the San Antonio Film Festival ($5-$10, 8pm Thu, May 16).

To view the full article please visit San Antonio Current.

For more information about Daniel Rios Rodriguez please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Sara Cwynar included in upcoming SFMOMA exhibition SOFT POWER. 

Timely and provocative, SOFT POWER is an exhibition about the ways in which artists deploy art to explore their roles as citizens and social actors. Appropriated from the Reagan-era term used to describe how a country’s “soft” assets such as culture, political values and foreign policies can be more influential than violence or coercion, the title SOFT POWER suggests a contemplation on the potential of art and offers a provocation to the public to exert their own influence on the world. The exhibition opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) on October 26, 2019 and remains on view through February 17, 2020.

Organized by Eungie Joo, curator of contemporary art, and presented exclusively at SFMOMA on two floors of the museum, the exhibition features new and recent work by 20 international artists working in 12 countries. More than three quarters of the works in SOFT POWER are commissions and new works never before presented in the United States. Taken together, the works demonstrate what cultural theorist, filmmaker and catalogue contributor Manthia Diawara has called a solidarity between intuitions — a concept that acknowledges the complexity, darkness and opacity from which our reality emerges — the poetry and imagination of our differences. According to Joo, “Professor Diawara’s solidarity between intuitions expresses how specific works can enhance our understanding of others by association and relation, while maintaining their distinct contexts and content. I trust the public can relate to many of the concerns of the artists in SOFT POWER, and hope that this exhibition will unleash an untapped energy among us.”

“SOFT POWER reflects SFMOMA’s commitment to living artists and the world we share, as outlined in our new Strategic Plan,” said Neal Benezra, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “The diverse practices and perspectives represented in this exhibition embody the goals of this museum: to embrace new ideas, push boundaries and share new ways of looking at our world through the lens of contemporary art.”

About the Exhibition

The majority of works in SOFT POWER have never been presented in the U.S., including the four-channel video installation The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019) by Tuan Nguyen, co-founder of The Propeller Group. Co-produced by SFMOMA and commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, the work explores the creation of memory and the agency that affords. Nguyen’s remarkable collaboration with descendants of French colonial soldiers once stationed in Vietnam — tirailleurs Sénégalais — features stories written by three members of the Vietnamese community in Senegal. Enacting fictionalized vignettes that reveal their own imaginings and experiences, his collaborators call forward the unresolved ghosts of history, receiving them with compassion and grace.

The 15 artists’ commissions for SOFT POWER also include five new sculptures by Haig Aivazian that explore the relationship between mythology and nation-building; the installation Who’s Afraid of Ideology, Part 2 by Marwa Arsanios; a site-responsive installation by Dineo Seshee Bopape; a new mural by Minerva Cuevas inspired by the history of Smokey the Bear and the environmental impact of fire; a sound sculpture enveloping the fourth floor by Cevdet Erek; a series of sculpture by Hassan Khan that echoes his concurrent solo exhibition at the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid; a performance and video by Tanya Lukin Linklater on encounter as a form of repatriation in collaboration with the Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley; an installation and photographic diptych by Cinthia Marcelle based on the traces of economic instability; a performance by Jason Moran in early 2020, along with a published conversation between Moran, IONE and Jessie Baird about the revolutionary power of the dream state; the first chapter of Carlos Motta’s new project on LGBTQI Dreamers; four large-scale abstract paintings by San Francisco Art Institute alumnus Eamon Ore-Giron; ongoing research into the market potential of gas hydrate by Pratchaya Phinthong; Xaviera Simmons’ enormous painting installation inspired by and responding to Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series (1940–41); and a series of “flat” sculptures based on teepee covers by Duane Linklater. Highlighting the technology of mobile architecture, Linklater’s new canvases patch together distant elements that comprise indigenous reality. Incorporating the ancient geometric patterns of the Omaskêko Cree, a large format inkjet printer and natural pigments that he harvests locally, Linklater produces objects masking their own purpose through their form: nonfunctioning teepee covers, now devoid of architectural purpose, but imbued with new cultural purpose.

SOFT POWER is also enlivened by several existing works, including a changing installation of five massive landscape drawings and tent from the durational performance Drawing a Line through Landscape by Nikhil Chopra at documenta 14; the premier of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s, Flint is Family, Part 2, in which Shea Cobb and her daughter Zion escape the ongoing Flint water crisis and “return” to their inheritance in Mississippi; Hassan Khan’s remarkable video installation Jewel (2010); a series of 15 banners and small abstract sculptures by Dave McKenzie; Pratchaya Phinthong’s “documentation” of migrant bilberry pickers in Finnish Lapland, Give More Than You Take (2010); and a wall installation and sculptures by Tavares Strachan from his Invisibles series. The exhibition features two works by Nairy Baghramian, including Retainer (2013), produced for her first major exhibition in the U.S. and extending her examination of systems of power, context, architecture and the materiality of sculpture. In this work, chromed steel supports large translucent slabs of cast resin and silicon reminiscent of a dental or gynecological intervention in process, but at a scale that confronts the full body. Within the context of the exhibition, Baghramian’s work suggests the temporal precision of physical states of matter, conjuring vast possibilities of adaptation, suffering and survival.

To view the full article please visit Modern Diplomacy.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

ektor garcia’s solo exhibition sangre y barro is featured on Contemporary Art Daily.

Press Release:

COOPER COLE is pleased to present a solo exhibition by ektor garcia. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

sangre y barro
dolor y amor
suave y duro
dulce y sabor a metal
puro y sucio
inocente y malvado
moribundo y viviendo
feo y bello

blood and clay
pain and love
soft and hard
sweet and taste of metal
pure and filthy
innocent and wicked
dying and living
ugly and beautiful

ektor garcia’s art is grounded in the body, in touch and tactility. Every element of sangre y barro is made, crafted, formed, manipulated, and arranged by the artist’s hands. Hand shaped and glazed terra cotta, stoneware, and porcelain. Intertwined ceramic rope and chain. Hand made copper wire lace, crocheted ropes, twined threads. Hand sewn leather hides. Imprints, mark making, fingerprints, gestures: the trace of the artist’s hands are everywhere. Every material, every found object — bike tires, goat horns, horse shoes, rusted horse bits, chains, cords, doilies, decorative domestic textiles — holds the tactile memory of garcia’s hands. They call out to us to be touched in return, tempting us, even daring us — to touch. But we can’t touch them back. The gallery is at once a space of sensory overload, and sensory deprivation. So how can we make up for the inability to touch?

The work demands that we engage beyond looking, that we engage our other senses, like smell, and that we activate our more visceral sensibilities, like desire, fear, sadness, anger, disgust. The work also insists that we rely on different modes of perception altogether, like our subjectivities, identities, lived experiences, memories, fantasies. On empathy, compassion, longing, vulnerability, interpersonal connection. The work implores us feel, to sense the works’ less immediately perceptible traces:

Hands crocheting doilies placing them under plastic protecting covering the couch next to a cabinet with a wedding dress with a photo of a quinceañera perched on top next to a cowboy hat in front of a side-table with plastic flowers and family photographs
Hands picking strawberries in the blaring sun in the endless sprawling growing fields in California Hands on rusted metal in abuelo’s rancho garage
Bleeding hands
An American passport passed back and forth between traveler and border agent Hands wrapped around bicycle handlebars.
Hands on lovers’ bodies.

Queer Mexican American hands. Not to be confused or conflated with “the hand” of Western art history, a hand that is Euro-American and masculine and cis-male. garcia travels regularly, across all five continents, always collecting and working on things as an integral part of his practice. His queer brown hands mark the trajectories of objects and materials sourced and collected in places like his grandparents’ land in Tabasco in the state of Zacatecas, Mexico; on bike rides across New York City where he currently lives and works; and in Toronto on days spent installing the works. His queer brown hands carried these works across national borders between Mexico, the United States, and Canada — countries bound together by militarized border systems, neoliberal trade agreements, and settler colonial and colonizing regimes.

And so the works are imbued with cultural, geographical and sexual histories, histories of violence and resistance, subversion and survival, family and community. They embody personal, familial, territorial, and cross-cultural histories of struggle and resistance. And they are invested with garcia’s experiences growing up between borders, classes, identities, cultures, and languages.

Other significant influences also include radical queerness, anarcho-punk sensibilities and community, and Mexican and Chicanx domestic aesthetics. While often described in terms of craft and the domestic, garcia’s works challenge dominant art historical understandings of both. The artist draws on thousands of years’ worth of local, indigenous, campesino, Mexican craft — on hand skills, materials, processes and expertise that persist despite Euro-American attempts at erasure, appropriation, exploitation, and monetization — on modes of hand production deployed long before white male historians “invented” definitions of what we now call “craft”.

The artist’s embrace of specifically Mexican, Chicanx, and queer domesticities also refutes art historical notions of “the domestic”, an exclusionary and largely unattainable, white, heteronormative space of classed and raced privilege. Instead garcia valorizes specifically brown, decidedly queer and migrant strategies like mess and domesticana (the crafting of Chicanx working class domestic space), characterized by abundance, accumulation, reuse, impermanence, and site specificity — strategies of necessity and survival, movement and migration(1).

garcia is intrigued by the idea of craft as the possibility of crafting or creating a new world, new futures that extend beyond the reach of dominant systems like capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism, and homonormative queer politics like gay marriage. The need to create new futures resonates in the work of the Cuban American queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, who notes that the present is not enough, and that queerness is a horizon or possibility through which we can reclaim freedom and remake oppressive systems. Writing about transgender identity and community, scholar and curator Jeanne Vaccaro observes that creating community is a type of handmade: it is collective, made with and across bodies, objects, and forces of power. Creating and sustaining community is very much a type of craft: it requires skill, dialogue, risk taking, compromise, patience, compassion, and generosity — much like working with craft materials like textiles, clay, metal, and wood.

There are also parallels between garcia’s strategies of assemblage and installation — bringing discreet objects together to create new spatial, formal, and aesthetic relations — and the creation of community. Each and every discreet object or material in sangre y barro depends on a constellation of other objects and materials. Each can stand alone, but is much more powerful within larger systems of mutual solidarity and support. These works are a metaphor for coming together, for garcia’s community of radical queers, punks, anarchists, anti-capitalists, and artists.

Violent systems of social, political, and economic oppression seek to destroy collectivity, cooperation, and community. And so garcia’s work reminds us that we need community to break the forms of isolation and subjugation unleashed by colonialism, capitalism, xenophobia, and white supremacy. We need community to help us craft a different reality, a more sustainable present and a more promising future.

— Lisa Vinebaum

Lisa Vinebaum is a scholar, artist and educator

(1) On domesticana, see Mesa-Bains; on mess, see Manalansan.

ektor garcia (b. 1985, Red Bluff, California, USA) received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, and his MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2016. Solo exhibitions include Mary Mary, Glasgow, Scotland; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; kurimanzutto, Salon ACME, Mexico City, Mexico. Group exhibitions include LAXART, Los Angeles; New Museum, Salon 94, Sargent’s Daughters, New York; Chicken Coop Contemporary, Portland, USA; Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico; ACCA, Melbourne, Australia. garcia lives and works in between Mexico City, New York, and wherever he loses himself.

To view the full article please visit Contemporary Art Daily.

For more information about ektor garcia please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Exhibited artists Curtis Santiago, Laurie Kang, and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill among the 25 artists shortlisted for the 2019 Sobey Art Award.  Featured on NewsWire. 

OTTAWA, April 16, 2019 /CNW/ – The Sobey Art Foundation and the National Gallery of Canada announced today the longlist of nominees for the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s preeminent contemporary art award. The 25 most promising young Canadian visual artists, nominated by leaders in arts communities from coast to coast to coast, have been selected to contend for the $100,000 CAD grand prize.

Established in 2002, the Sobey Art Award represents unprecedented opportunities for today’s Canadian artists, while raising the visibility of Canadian contemporary art here and abroad. The top prize of $100,000 CAD is awarded to the winner, $25,000 CAD is given to each of the four shortlisted artists, and $2,000 CAD is presented to each of the twenty longlisted artists.

In addition to monetary awards, three among the 25 artists will be selected by the Sobey Art Award jury to participate in the Sobey Art Award Residencies Program (SAARP), an international residency program ranging from three to six months.  Finally, one shortlisted artist will be selected by Fogo Island Arts to attend an annual residency.

Rob Sobey, Chair of the Sobey Art Foundation, notes: “I am thrilled by the caliber of the artists selected by the jury for this year’s longlist. The diversity of backgrounds gets more exciting every year. We are delighted to see several never-before nominated artists and are excited to learn who from Canada will participate this year in the SAARP in Berlin, London and New York.  We are grateful that their work will help Canadians, as well as people around the world, to become better aware of the richness and vibrancy of contemporary Canadian art.”

The 2019 jury panel has selected the following 25 artists:

ATLANTIC 
Philippa Jones
Eleanor King
Logan MacDonald
Ericka Walker
D’Arcy Wilson

QUÉBEC
Marie-Michelle Deschamps
Nicolas Grenier
Caroline Monnet
Celia Perrin Sidarous
Sabrina Ratté

ONTARIO
Stephanie Comilang
Patrick Cruz
Brendan Fernandes
Laurie Kang
Erdem Taşdelen

PRAIRIES & NORTH
Alana Bartol
Catherine Blackburn
Kablusiak
Curtis Talwst Santiago
The Ephemerals

WEST COAST & YUKON
Andrew Dadson
Rochelle Goldberg
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill
Anne Low
Carmen Papalia

The artists gain valuable exposure to leading art professionals in Canada and abroad, as their portfolios are reviewed and judged by the jury, chaired by National Gallery of Canada’s Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Josée Drouin-Brisebois. The 2019 jury is composed of  Peter Dykhuis, Director/Curator, Dalhousie Art Gallery, for the Atlantic Provinces; Jo-Ann Kane, Curator, National Bank Collection, for the Quebec region; Swapnaa Tamhane, Independent Curator, Artist, and Writer, for the Ontario region; Lindsey Sharman, Curator, Art Gallery of Alberta, for the Prairies and the North region; Nigel Prince, Executive Director, Contemporary Art Gallery, for the West Coast and Yukon; and international juror, Henriette Bretton-Meyer, Curator, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark.

“I am so proud of the 2019 Sobey Art Award jury for its work on a compelling and provocative longlist of Canadian artists,” said Drouin-Brisebois. “This year’s list is certain to stimulate curiosity and debate. Through its international residency program, exhibition of the finalists, and its cash prizes, the SAA has an invigorating impact on the artists recognized by the jury for their innovation and creativity. The National Gallery is looking forward to partnering with the Art Gallery of Alberta to bring an inspiring exhibition for our first time to this part of the country.”

The five shortlisted artists will be announced June 12 and the international residencies recipients will be revealed on September 18. The Sobey Art Award finalists’ exhibition will be on view from October 5, 2019 to January 5, 2020 at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. The grand prize winner of the 2019 Sobey Art Award will be announced at a gala hosted by the Art Gallery of Alberta on November 15, 2019. The Fogo Island Arts residency winner will be announced in the weeks following the gala.

To view the full article please visit NewsWire.

For more information about Curtis Santiago, Laurie Kang, and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

ektor garcia’s solo exhibition sangre y barro is featured on Art Viewer.

To view the full article please visit Art Viewer.

For more information about ektor garcia please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Dallas Art Museum Adds Eight Works to Collection with Dallas Art Fair Acquisition Fund including Brie Ruais

As part of a $150,000 acquisition program coinciding with this week’s Dallas Art Fair, the Dallas Art Museum added eight artworks to its collection by artists showing at the fair. The selected works are by Sheila Hicks, Don Dudley, Arcmanoro Niles, Samuel Levi Jones, Nobutaka Aozaki, Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Maja Ruznic, and Dike Blair.

Dallas Museum director Agustín Arteaga said in a release, “We are delighted to continue our long-standing partnership with the Dallas Art Fair, whose generous fund has allowed the DMA to support promising, dynamic contemporary artists at the forefront of the field.”

The Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program has provided the museum with $450,000 in funds over the past four years. Last year, works by Sanford Biggers, Brie Ruais, Tony Lewis, and Geraldo de Barros were added to the DMA’s collection.

To view the full article please visit Artnews.

For more information about Brie Ruais please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

ektor garcia’s solo exhibition sangre y barro featured on Blouinartinfo.

Cooper Cole Gallery is currently presenting a solo exhibition by Ektor Garcia, “sangre y barro,” on view through May 4, 2019.

The exhibition presents a collection of the artist’s latest works.

“Ektor Garcia’s art is grounded in the body, in touch, and tactility. Every element of ‘sangre y barro’ is made, crafted, formed, manipulated, and arranged by the artist’s hands. Hand-shaped and glazed terra cotta, stoneware, and porcelain. Intertwined ceramic rope and chain. Hand-made copper wire lace, crocheted ropes, twined threads. Hand-sewn leather hides. Imprints, mark making, fingerprints, gestures. The trace of the artist’s hands are everywhere. Every material, every found object — bike tires, goat horns, horse shoes, rusted horse bits, chains, cords, doilies, decorative domestic textiles — holds the tactile memory of Garcia’s hands. They call out to us to be touched in return, tempting us, even daring us — to touch. But we can’t touch them back. The gallery is at once a space of sensory overload, and sensory deprivation… The works are imbued with cultural, geographical and sexual histories, histories of violence and resistance, subversion and survival, family and community. They embody personal, familial, territorial, and cross-cultural histories of struggle and resistance. And they are invested with Garcia’s experiences growing up between borders, classes, identities, cultures, and languages,” as per Lisa Vinebaum.

Garcia received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, and his MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2016. Solo exhibitions include Mary Mary, Glasgow, Scotland; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; kurimanzutto, Salon ACME, Mexico City, Mexico. Group exhibitions include LAXART, Los Angeles; New Museum, Salon 94, Sargent’s Daughters, New York; Chicken Coop Contemporary, Portland, USA; Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico; ACCA, Melbourne, Australia. Garcia lives and works between Mexico City, New York, and other cities.

Since it’s conception Cooper Cole has always had a focus on existing as part of the global art dialog. The gallery not only focuses on inviting international artists to exhibit in Toronto but also aims at promoting Canadian artists abroad through art fairs and partnerships with other galleries across the globe.

The exhibition will be on view through May 4, 2019, at Cooper Cole, 1134 Dupont St, Toronto, ON M6H 2A2, Canada.

To view the full article please visit Blouinartinfo.

For more information about ektor garcia please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

ektor garcia’s solo exhibition sangre y barro is featured on ARTnews.

To view the full article please visit ARTnews.

For more information about ektor garcia please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000