News

Rachel Eulena Williams and Scott Treleaven’s show Hey Mars is reviewed in The Star.

Rachel Eulena Williams’ art suggest that Earth — like us — is in a tender state

As summer days unfold into warm humid nights, we’ve made our way outside and turned our eyes upward. We’ve looked to the northwest and picked out the Big Dipper, using it to point our way to a rare glimpse of the comet Neowise. To the southeast, Saturn and Jupiter have been together in the sky — an event that occurs only every 20 years, when their orbits align. A collaboration, of sorts; a light show we witness together with others across the continent.

It’s an apt metaphor for this week’s work of art, “Sunburn of the abundant earth,” by Rachel Eulena Williams. It is showing at the Cooper Cole Gallery in Toronto as part of the exhibition “Hey Mars,” which features Williams, a New York artist, and Scott Treleaven, a Toronto artist. While “Hey Mars” evokes the idea of looking up to the stars, familiarly, the individual work suggests that our Earth is in a tender state.

Much of Williams’ work is multimedia, a combination of paintings, or paintings deconstructed with the use of wire and fabric. According to the gallery, Williams “works at the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Her reconfigured canvases unbind painting from the stretcher, avoiding conventional support systems and imagining a myriad of spatial contortions.”

Treleaven’s paintings are bold canvases that “resemble microcosms of richly coloured minerals or galaxies. No one gem-hued shape/organism is a focal point; their interconnectedness is the object of study.” There’s a search for spiritual connection in Treleaven’s work, a mysticism.

We are all searching for meaning right now. We look to the stars, we look to art, to understand the world around us. We see potential and the possibility of creating something new, together.

You can see this exhibition in person at the Cooper Cole gallery with, of course, appropriate safety and social distancing measures. You can also check it out online at coopercolegallery.com.

-Deborah Dundas

To view the full article, please visit The Star.

For more information about Rachel Eulena Williams and Scott Treleaven please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Artist Talk

Rachel Eulena Williams and Scott Treleaven

Thursday August 6, 2020

12-1pm

COOPER COLE is hosting a Zoom conversation with artists Rachel Eulena Williams and Scott Treleaven in conjunction with their current exhibition HEY MARS.

Williams and Treleaven share an interest in questioning the formal boundaries of painting. Through their own distinctive approaches to the medium and its history, both artists search for that which is not easily defined, fixed, or part of the visible, earthly world. Instead, they delve into the imagery of the ulterior.

Join us Thursday August 6th at noon to hear the artists discuss and explore their respective practices.

Zoom details below:

To join the Zoom event please click here.

Meeting ID: 818 4994 1844

Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991, Miami, Florida, USA) earned her B.F.A. from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York in 2013. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (2019), Ceysson & Bénétière, Sainte Etienne (2018), Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2018), Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2018), Cooper Cole, Toronto (2018), The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2017), Mass Gallery, Austin (2017), SomeTime Salon, San Francisco (2017), and Center Street, New York (2017). Williams has held the SIP Fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York (2019), 68 Projects, Berlin (2018), and NY Studio Factory, Brooklyn (2014). Rachel Eulena Williams currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA.

Scott Treleaven (b. 1972, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design in 1996. A noted figure in 90s queer independent film and zine circles, his publications have been included in historical overviews such as ‘In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955’ (JRP|Ringier 2009), ‘The Magazine – Documents of Contemporary Art Series’ (MIT Press 2015), and ‘Showboat: Punk, Sex, Bodies’ (Dashwood 2016). Treleaven was included in the FRONT International Triennial in 2018 and La Biennale de Montréal in 2007. Solo and group exhibitions include: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2018); XYZ Collective, Tokyo (2018); MOCA Tucson, Arizona (2018); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2018; 2017); Invisible-Exports, New York (2018; 2015; 2013; 2011); The Suburban, Milwaukee (2017); 80WSE, New York (2016); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2014); ICA, Philadelphia (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); and ICA London, UK (2012), amongst others. Treleaven currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

For more about the exhibition HEY MARS click here.

For more information about Rachel Eulena Williams and Scott Treleaven please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Sara Cwynar’s participation in Art on the Grid is featured on NYCgo.

(b. 1985, Vancouver, Canada; lives and works in New York, New York)

Scaffold Statue of Liberty, 2020. Digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Foxy Production, New York

Artist Statement

My photographs often take the form of sculptural constructions that are photographed, printed, tiled and rephotographed as new images. This image is a reworked 1980s photograph of the Statue of Liberty covered in scaffolding. I have collaged into the image with objects from New York City stores, art from MoMA and my own iPhone photographs of the recent protests in the city among other things. I wanted to reanimate this old New York icon and update it for the current time.

Sara Cwynar is a participant in Art on the Grid, a citywide, open-air exhibition presented by Public Art Fund. Conceived in the spring of 2020, the exhibition features 50 artists’ reflections on the converging crises of the coronavirus pandemic and systemic racism in our country.

To view the full post visit NYCgo

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Our current show Hey Mars featuring the work of Scott Treleaven and Rachel Eulena Williams is featured on Art Viewer.

Artists: Rachel Eulena Williams and Scott Treleaven

Exhibition title: Hey Mars

Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada

Date: July 9 – August 15, 2020

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

COOPER COLE is pleased to present Hey Mars, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of New York-based artist Rachel Eulena Williams and Toronto-based artist Scott Treleaven.

Rachel Eulena Williams works at the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Her reconfigured canvases unbind painting from the stretcher, avoiding conventional support systems and imagining a myriad of spatial contortions. Some works in this exhibition take this to the extreme: sprawling across the walls resembling assemblages more than canvases. In others, Williams pulls these shapes back into the frame, creating sculptural works that push out of the two-dimensional plane. Williams’ vibrant use of colour represents a critique of, and liberation from, Western art history’s ‘othering’ of colour, and its categorization as unruly, foreign, and vulgar. The artist embraces those colours marginalized by the chromophobia of the West, which defined them as both dangerous and superficial.1 Williams’ distinctive works question these restrictions placed on colour and shape, as well as how virtuosity is defined.

Scott Treleaven’s work is engaged with themes of perception, embodied mysticism, and queer alterity, aiming to re-locate abstraction as part of a transcendental, rather than purely formal, tradition. Using established aesthetic prompts, from pop psychedelic gestures to the arrangement of Neolithic stone sites, Treleaven’s paintings act as portals into ecologies of visual language and symbology, conveying ideas of sublimity and the ecstatic. The works begin with a representational image, which is responded to as a field of markings rather than a picture – unpremeditated strokes and gestures are added, allowing the elemental exuberance of the paint to perform, letting the original conception come apart. The paintings in this exhibition resemble microcosms of richly coloured minerals or galaxies. No one gem-hued shape/organism is a focal point; their interconnectedness is the object of study. Treleaven—who has worked in film, collage, photography, and sculpture— brings distinct tensions to the painting field: unlike a photographic image, the linearity of film, a line of text, or the circumambulation required to activate a sculpture, painting unfolds in its own unique temporal and psychological space; not as a transcendent object in itself but as a point of departure.

Williams and Treleaven share an interest in questioning the formal boundaries of painting. Through their own distinctive approaches to the medium and its history, both artists search for that which is not easily defined, fixed, or part of the visible, earthly world. Instead, they delve into the imagery of the ulterior.

To view the full article please visit Art Viewer.

For more information about Scott Treleaven and Rachel Eulena Williams please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Group show There are more than four is featured on Art Viewer.

Artists: Andy Fabo, Robert Flack, Tim Jocelyn, Chrysanne Stathacos

Exhibition title: There are more than four

Curated by: Jacob Korczynski

Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada

Date: April 11 – May 30, 2020

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

COOPER COLE is pleased to present There are more than four, a group exhibition curated by Jacob Korczynski featuring the works of  Andy Fabo,  Robert Flack, Tim Jocelyn, and Chrysanne Stathacos.

For me, life in this city begins and ends with artist-initiated networks, where energies and programmes are constantly opening and ending, keeping pace with the rate at which artist’s studios are closed and relocated. These networks establish where work is developed, shown, or both, and they affirm what is missing as much as what is made. The affective affinities that enable these associations also produced this exhibition. More specifically, it is anchored upon the long-term friendship and dialogue between Andy Fabo and Chrysanne Stathacos, and expanded to incorporate the work of their friends and lovers who are no longer with us due to the ongoing epidemic of AIDS: Tim Jocelyn (1952-1986) and Robert Flack (1957-1993). The result is a kind of doubled portrait, like catching your own gaze on a reflective surface in close proximity to another.

From the earliest stage of his interdisciplinary practice, Andy Fabo has asserted his queer subjectivity in his work. The Wild Ones (1975) performs as a painting, yet acts as an assemblage with acrylic, velvet, leather and metal studs framing the troika collaged at its centre. Made in the aftermath of his partner Tim’s death when Andy was facing an impasse with painting, Sisyphus on the Plains (1988) features the eponymous mythological figure exposed naked upon a landscape, turning upwards to face their burden. Silverado (2001), is a series produced with ink on silver card, and here the medium leads the image. Pooled or bubbled ink comes together to form moments of fluidity, at times contained, and at others nearly sliding off the surface.

In his practice, Tim Jocelyn developed a body of work for which textiles were the primary material. In doing so, his work was not so much medium-specific as it was subject specific: textiles always suggest bodies, either present or absent. He produced tapestries and garments alike and both are represented here through one of the many folding screens he produced in the early 1980s as well as two clothing pieces. The geometrical abstraction present on the three panels of the former foregrounds adored art historical references that Tim pointed to throughout his practice. With his Skyline jacket and Gordon’s shirt, two opposite milieus of artistic production are contrasted: a rising cityscape made manifest in the hot, bright colours of neon lights, and pastoral elements of nature rendered in earth tone hues.

Throughout her practice, Chrysanne has expanded the medium of painting via printing. Take for example her Broken Glass series, in which the cracked remnants of a pane are transferred to the soft surface of canvas or linen, forming a new object. Her experimentation with printing on different surfaces with various objects is further demonstrated by 1-900 Mirror Mirror (1993). An interactive installation that can be physically entered by the individual viewer, this work invited viewers to ask a question about the future, as a way to look ahead at the height of the AIDS crisis. The loss of so many at that historical moment connects to her aura photographs, a series which began in the late 1990s and traces the self outside of the corporeal.

In dialogue with these works, Robert Flack’s  Etheric Double (1990) contoured colours along a body, outlining an aura. In doing so, these works account for multiple energies rather than acknowledging a singular identity. A nude figure rendered in negative, in this photo work the body is recognized and yet we are required to invert it in our minds to see who may stand before us. The need to look, and then look again, is also intrinsic to the composite images of Love Mind (1992). Here, light projections cast upon portions of bodies are rephotographed, effectively capturing a double image. The two works from Love Mind included here replace the single model in favour of staging multiple bodies as a composite figure. Deep red light coils around a face in one. In another a spectrum of warm colours radiates outwards from the centre of the chest. Faced with fragility, Robert and Tim posed a question, one that Andy and Chrysanne continue to ask: where do we locate the body and what lies beyond?

– Jacob Korczynski

Toronto
March 12, 2020

To view the full article please visit Art Viewer.

For more information about Andy Fabo, Robert Flack, Tim Jocelyn, Chrysanne Stathacos, and Jacob Korczynski please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Sara Cwynar’s Red Film is featured on GARAGE.

Sara Cwynar’s Red Film (2018) whirrs into action, booting up like a machine coming to life: a single bottle of red perfume spins alluringly, drawing us in before a swift cut that cruelly withdraws this object of desire. Sneakers! Suits! Sports cars! All cast in luscious, deep, sensual crimson. Red Film’s procession of products catalyzes a tingle in my fingertips, flirting with the familiar visual language of marketing and promotion—the familiar sense of manufactured need held at bay only by the film’s voiceover track, which draws on theorists like Jonathan Crary and John Berger, tempering the base drive for more, more, more with the higher-order pleasure of thoughtful self-restraint.

I have revisited Red Film particularly often in the last month, trying to talk myself out of a string of cursed (but cute!) online purchases—feeble attempts at achieving some kind of high. I crave the embodied head-rush of sweating it out on the dance floor and kissing my friends on the mouth. In lousy stead, I make myself believe I can fill myself up by filling my shopping cart. The gradual, staggered accretion of objects makes me feel alive: cut off from the identity I had once comfortably assembled by, like, doing things and seeing people, I’m now compelled to believe I can architect a personality by commanding boxes to appear in three to five business days. What self am I producing, I wonder, by proxy of these products?

This question sits at the heart of Red Film, which probes the vacant promises that prop up our increasingly subsidized and saturated media landscape. Its intertwined tracks of coked-up voiceover narrate the futile and exhausting process of fashioning oneself as a desirable and desiring subject—describing how consumption has, itself, come to feel like a kind of work, the Barbie Dream House transmogrified into the Italian Marxist Social Factory. In my most despondent moments, Cwynar’s film helps me see the grid of identity and personal expression grafted onto the monstrous machinations of post-industrial capitalism in freakishly lucid terms: there is no choice but consumer choice. “You’ve got to take your pleasure where you can get it, Sara,” harp various voices early in the film. “Stop enabling me!!!” I groan as my cursor hovers over the dangerous threshold of Proceeding to Checkout.

Capitalism equals democracy equals freedom, or something. This equation isn’t holding up so well, lately: as the cataclysm of our current crisis is unequally distributed along pre-existing fault lines of race and class, it grows increasingly clear that the system was broken to begin with. A revelation so axiomatic as to ascend to meme status: what if capitalism is the real virus? I consider the prescience of this observation as I advance into the double-digit depths of my eBay search results. I can’t remember what I came here looking for, but I’m certain that once I find it—that once I have it—I will be perfect and complete despite the disarray around me. Now, of all times, I should know better, but the discomfort of sitting with this realization is conveniently placated by queuing up another purchase.

Cwynar herself appears onscreen in Red Film, her vacant gaze meeting my own. “You’ve got to take your pleasure where you can get it.” The miasma of competing voice-over tracks circles with suffocating intensity. Rapid cuts between people and products parallel the breathless futility of producing oneself as a subject by procuring the right stuff. Cwynar, too, is given over to the hunger of want: masterfully, she dissects these pangs of desire, revealing the underlying labor of self-styling that repeatedly promises delight and repeatedly fails to deliver. It’s deadening, its tax visible in her cadaverous face while rapid-fire product shots swirl around her. Her eye-line bounces dizzily across the screen as though she means to track the endless tug-of-war between wanting and knowing she should know better—the gnawing ambivalence of critiquing consumer culture without buying into the parallel delusion that one can fully, ascetically renounce its cyclic siren song.

The inevitable disillusionment of cutting open another (dutifully disinfected!) mailer, the contents of which fail to live up to the fantasy I had managed to manufacture between forking over my AmEx and greeting the package on my porch: there is almost a shred of virtue in this self-flagellation, as if, in my disappointment, I’m performing anticapitalist critique. One of Cwynar’s crucial virtues is that she never condescends to those who share her familiar ache for acquisition. This time, I tell myself, the thing will make me happy. This time, no, no, no, this one! You’ve got to take your pleasure where you can get it.

This crisis demonstrates such a transparent, painfully-obvious failure of the free market, yet confined to my home, market-based promises of pleasure compel me a hell of a lot more than they did when I could go outside. Red Film does not purport to solve the catastrophe of consumer capitalism—to its great credit, it doesn’t reward us with a false exodus from complicity, but it also stops short of the necessary and revolutionary work of moving beyond negation to imagine an alternative. Still, I find comfort in its clarity as it frames out the paradox, elegantly expressing the ambivalence of being torn: I’m not ascetic but neither am I anhedonic; the throb of want is a sort of sign of life.

To view the full post visit GARAGE.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Geoff McFetridge’s collaboration with Thalia Surf is featured on Surfer.

Thalia Surf has teamed up with the master of the mind bending line Geoff McFetridge on a new piece of surf inspired artwork. McFetridge’s simple line drawings are akin to a visual daydream; inviting us to loosen our grip on our perceived reality, and embrace something a little more fantastic. The Geoff McFetridge for Thalia Surf artwork is featured on both Thalia’s limited edition Vans “Foot The Bill” program shoes, and an exclusive Thalia Surf pocket tee.The Vans “Foot The Bill” program was created to help small businesses during this time of economic uncertainty. Vans opened this program up to a group of core surf and skate shops, giving them the ability to custom design a shoe through their Vans customizer feature, with the profits from each sale going to the shop that designed the shoe.

Link to Shirt: https://thaliasurf.com/collections/mens-tees/products/thalia-surf-x-geoff-mcfetridge-mens-tee

Cooper Cole is featured on Blog TO.

After a challenging few months, art galleries in Toronto are beginning to reopen but things may look different.

Cooper Cole, a favourite for contemporary art on Dupont, just opened and have a number of new visiting guidelines. They now require everyone entering the gallery to  wear masks and they’re limiting the number of visitors at a time to four people.

They’re also encouraging people to book an appointment and the gallery has ramped up cleaning protocols.

Cooper Cole isn’t the only gallery that’s opted for this route — both Nicholas Metivier Gallery and Stephen Bulger Gallery are doing something similar.

“We’re working by appointment only and only one group at a time, with no more than five people,” Stephen Bulger, the owner of his namesake gallery, told blogTO.

Nicholas Metivier Gallery has been open for a month now and staff is pleased to see visitors come out again.

“It’s been good but definitely not as many people walking through as before,” said Caroline Pearson, an associate at Nicholas Metivier Gallery.

And while it might be slow right now, many galleries have spent the last few months changing tracks on how they bring art to the public in order to stay afloat.

“The biggest tool is the gallery space and not having that made you be creative,” explained Pearson.

The first thing Nicholas Metivier Gallery did was move their exhibitions online.

“It took quite a bit of trial and error and we think artists we are pleased with the show,” said Pearson.

“We received a nice amount of engagement from our collectors too.”

They also did a series called “In The Windows” where they hung art in the large windows that face Richmond Street so people could “stroll by and see things from a safe distance.” They also utilized social media to its full potential.

“Nicholas came up with this series that you could do on Instagram. We focused on different artists and spoke with them and see what they’ve been working on during this period of isolation. The results were quite interesting,” she said.

“It was really great to be able to share that with our audience and people that follow the gallery. As Nicholas pointed out, for most people life was very much interrupted  but artists’ work is very solitary, so life kind of carried on for them.”

Bulger also took advantage of technology — especially for selling art.

“We put more listings online and noticed there’s been a lot more traffic,” he said. “To replicate some of the discussion as they walk through the door we’ve been doing little video tours of the gallery and short videos about individual work. We sold some work as a result of those.”

Both Stephen Bulger Gallery and Nicholas Metivier Gallery have teamed up with Heffel Fine Art Auction House, one of Canada’s largest auction houses, to host online auctions of their work.

“We wanted to see if that was a way to replicate our business online,” explained Bulger, who lost out on sales due to the fact they can’t travel to the various art shows this year or interact with their clients in the normal way.

“We were happy with how it went,” he said.

Nicholas Metivier Gallery is currently hosting an auction with Heffel to support Canadian food charities. It ends on June 23.

But even with all the changes, there’s a silver lining as now more people are able to appreciate the art.

“We definitely expanded our customer base,” said Bulger.

“We just have to keep moving forward and keep making plans.”

To view the full post visit Blog TO.

For more information about Cooper Cole please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Sara Cwynar is featured on The New York Times‘ “Five Artists to Follow on Instagram Now”.

Like most photographers of her generation, the 35-year-old Canadian Sara Cwynar is fluent in digital imagery. Her faux “behind the scenes” shots of portrait subjects on set, or elaborate collages of consumer products mixed with art-historical references, glitter with a seductive alternation of insight and self-consciousness. More to the point for Instagram, though, her feed — which includes a careful sprinkling of candids, selfies, and art works by other people as well as plenty of in-situ shots of her own print work — largely sticks to the distinctive, otherworldly palette she’s developed. It’s an unforgettable mix of rose, red, gold and electric green.

To view the full post visit The New York Times.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

COOPER COLE condemns systemic racism and police violence. We stand in solidarity with all the protesters worldwide.

Black Lives Matter.

In light of recent events we will be postponing our weekly Zoom events with Chrysanne Stathacos in conjunction with our current exhibition There are more than four, curated by Jacob Korczynski, featuring artists Andy Fabo, Robert Flack, Tim Jocelyn, and Chrysanne Stathacos.

We will announce a revised event schedule in the future.

To view the exhibition online click here.

Group show There are more than four featured on Contemporary Art Daily.

Artists: Chrysanne Stathacos, Tim Jocelyn, Robert Flack, Andy Fabo

Venue: Cooper Cole, Toronto

Exhibition Title: There are more than four

Date: April 11 – May 30, 2020

Curated by: Jacob Korczynski

Press Release:

COOPER COLE is pleased to present There are more than four, a group exhibition curated by Jacob Korczynski featuring the works of Andy Fabo, Robert Flack,Tim Jocelyn, and Chrysanne Stathacos.

For me, life in this city begins and ends with artist-initiated networks, where energies and programmes are constantly opening and ending, keeping pace with the rate at which artist’s studios are closed and relocated. These networks establish where work is developed, shown, or both, and they affirm what is missing as much as what is made. The affective affinities that enable these associations also produced this exhibition. More specifically, it is anchored upon the long-term friendship and dialogue between Andy Fabo and Chrysanne Stathacos, and expanded to incorporate the work of two artists who are no longer with us due to the ongoing epidemic of AIDS: Andy’s lover Tim Jocelyn (1952-1986) and Chrysanne’s close friend Robert Flack (1957-1993). The result is a kind of doubled portrait, like catching your own gaze on a reflective surface in close proximity to another.

From the earliest stage of his interdisciplinary practice, Andy Fabo has asserted his queer subjectivity in his work. The Wild Ones (1975) performs as a painting, yet acts as an assemblage with acrylic, velvet, leather and metal studs framing the troika collaged at its centre. Made in the aftermath of his partner Tim’s death when Andy was facing an impasse with painting, Sisyphus on the Plains (1988) features the eponymous mythological figure exposed naked upon a landscape, turning upwards to face their burden. Silverado (2001), is a series produced with ink on silver card, and here the medium leads the image. Pooled or bubbled ink comes together to form moments of fluidity, at times contained, and at others nearly sliding off the surface.

In his practice, Tim Jocelyn developed a body of work for which textiles were the primary material. In doing so, his work was not so much medium-specific as it was subject specific: textiles always suggest bodies, either present or absent. He produced tapestries and garments alike and both are represented here through one of the many folding screens he produced in the early 1980s as well as two clothing pieces. The geometrical abstraction present on the three panels of the former foregrounds adored art historical references that Tim pointed to throughout his practice. With his Skyline jacket and Gordon’s shirt, two opposite milieus of artistic production are contrasted: a rising cityscape made manifest in the hot, bright colours of neon lights, and pastoral elements of nature rendered in earth tone hues.

Throughout her practice, Chrysanne has expanded the medium of painting via printing. Take for example her Broken Glass series, in which the cracked remnants of a pane are transferred to the soft surface of canvas or linen, forming a new object. Her experimentation with printing on different surfaces with various objects is further demonstrated by 1-900-Mirror-Mirror (1993). An interactive installation that can be physically entered by the individual viewer, this work invited viewers to ask a question about the future, as a way to look ahead at the height of the AIDS crisis. Through her groundbreaking use of early video communication technology, Chrysanne’s engagement with the future also anticipated the current moment we find ourselves in, when we look towards the reflective surfaces of our screens not only to see one another, but also ourselves.

Where Chrysanne considered the way the bodies of the viewers were reflected onto the surrounding surfaces, in his photographic works presented here Robert Flack took the body itself as a site of projection. All three were produced after he was diagnosed with AIDS and are inextricable from the psychic and physical transition he was undertaking at that time. With his series Love Mind (1992), he photographed multiple subjects as saturated coloured light was cast upon their chakra centres. Produced prior to the advent of digital photography, the two selections from this expansive series requires the viewer to look, and then look again, expanding an image of the body outside of the corporeal. In his earlier work Etheric Double (1990), a male nude is rendered in negative, suggesting a spectre. With both the body and the background pulsing with radiant auras, the inversion of the image suspends the figure between legibility and ephemerality, between the radiance of life and the threat of death. Faced with fragility, Robert and Tim posed a question, one that Andy and Chrysanne continue to ask: where do we locate the body and what lies beyond?

– Jacob Korczynski

Toronto
March 12, 2020

Andy Fabo (b. 1953, Calgary) is an artist, art critic, independent curator, AIDS activist, and art educator. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Alberta and the Alberta College of Art before moving to Toronto in 1975. He received his MFA from OCAD University in 2013. Fabo’s paintings, drawings, and films have exhibited widely nationally and internationally. In 2005 he had a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art that featured over thirty years of work. The exhibition spanned the first mixed media paintings that he exhibited in his 1979 A Space show, Studs- a landmark for Queer art in Toronto- through the paintings from his time as a founding member of the influential ChromaZone collective (1981-85), through his activist and memorializing response to the AIDS epidemic of the late 80s and early 90s. In the former period Fabo began to make collaborative videos with his late partner, Michael Balser, and also expanded his practice into digital media. The video he made with Balser, Survival of the Delirious (1988), won numerous awards including ‘Best New Narrative’ at the Atlanta Film Festival and Kijkhuis Festival in Holland. It is also included in the Art Against AIDS anthology that V Tape in Toronto and Video Data Bank in Chicago co-produced. A retrospective of their collaborative work mounted at Oboro, Montréal in 2003.

Robert Flack (b. 1957 Guelph, Canada; d. 1993 Toronto, Canada) was an artist based in Toronto. He received his BFA from York University in 1980 and attended Sheridan College in 1984. Flack’s work was deeply concerned with internalized realms of psychic energy, the chakras, and the etheric body, which was influenced by the experience of his HIV seroconversion in 1988. In 1980, Flack began working at Art Metropole. Soon after, he began to exhibit at Toronto galleries and in 1982 was included in a two-person exhibition with Chrysanne Stathacos at Chromazone, a space co-founded by Andy Fabo. Flack was soon invited to exhibited nationally and internationally at spaces such as Das Institut Unzeit, West Berlin (1982); Artist Space, Sydney (1983); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (1989); the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford (1990); Rutgers University Museum, New Jersey (1991); and W139, Amsterdam (1993). Notably, his exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum was an iteration of Group Material’s iconic AIDS Timeline exhibitions. He also lived and worked in New York, showing regularly in solo and group exhibitions with Hudson at Feature, Inc. Flack’s work has also been posthumously included in noteworthy exhibitions including Time is Thirsty, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2019); Tributes and Tributaries 1971-1989, Art Gallery of Ontario (2016); Par Amour/Paramour, curated by Jonathan Shaughnessy, National Gallery of Canada at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (2014); Standing Ground (with Will Munro), Paul Petro Contemporary Art (2014); The Temptation of AA Bronson, Witte de With (2013); and The Cold City Years, The Power Plant (2005). Flack’s estate is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.

Tim Jocelyn (b. 1952, Ottawa, Canada; d. 1986, Toronto, Canada) was an artist and designer. Jocelyn’s primary medium was textile, in which he made clothing garments, tapestries and folding screens. Through his works’ references to the body he was able to explore his own queer subjectivity. Jocelyn was a central figure in the 1980s art and fashion scene in Toronto’s Queen Street West neighborhood. During his lifetime he exhibited internationally in both art and fashion contexts including Ontario Crafts Council, Toronto (1979); Julie Artisans Gallery, New York (1981); Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto (1983); and Galerie Walchetürm, Zurich (1985). He met Andy Fabo in 1980, and in 1983, they co-curated Chromaliving at Chromazone, Toronto. In 1985 he moved to New York City with Fabo and received the CIL commission for the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 86. Posthumously, his work has continued to be recognized through exhibitions at the Power Plant, the Textile Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Mercer Union in Toronto, as well as the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Mississauga; the McMichael Art Gallery, Kleinburg; and Visual Aids, New York. Jocelyn’s work, specifically that which was presented in Chromaliving, was foregrounded in the exhibition Chroma Lives in Toronto in 2016.

Chrysanne Stathacos (b. 1951, Buffalo, USA) is a multidisciplinary artist of Greek, American, and Canadian heritage. Her work is heavily influenced by feminism, Greek mythology, the natural environment, eastern spirituality, and Tibetan Buddhism. Stathacos is widely known for her public interactive artworks which include 1-900-Mirror-Mirror (1993) which was first presented at Andrea Rosen Gallery and traveled to Art Metropole, Toronto and Franklin Furnace, New York. The artist also creates performances—one of which was included in the public program The Parliament of Drawings in Documenta 14— as well as paintings and prints that have been featured in numerous exhibitions including Gold Rush at Cooper Cole, Toronto (2018). Stathacos has exhibited for over 40 years in museums, galleries and public spaces internationally, living and working in New York for much of that time. Stathacos will be included in the 13th Gwangju Biennale / Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning directed by Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala this fall. Most recently, she created a series of works from her Rose Mirror Mandala Series for exhibitions curated by AA Bronson at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2013); Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2015); Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2015); and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2018). A major Installation “Five Mirrors of The World” is currently on view at The Sculpture Park, Madhavendra Palace, Nahargarh Fort, Jaipur, India. Her work is included in numerous public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Albright-Knox Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and the Royal Bank of Canada. The Chrysanne Stathacos fonds is located in the Archives and Library at the National Gallery of Canada. Stathacos is represented by The Breeder in Athens, Greece and currently lives and works between Athens and Toronto, Canada.

Jacob Korczynski is an independent curator based in Toronto. He has curated projects for the Stedelijk Museum, Mercer Union, Western Front and the Badischer Kunstverein and his writing has been published by art-agenda, Flash Art, Frieze and Camera Austria. With curatorial projects taking the form of exhibitions, screenings and publications he is also the editor of I See/La Camera: I (If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution), Andrew James Paterson’s Collection/Correction (Kunstverein Toronto & Mousse Publishing), Jimmy Robert’s Revue (Leopold Hoesch Museum), and Nour Bishouty’s 1-130 (forthcoming).

To view the full article please visit Contemporary Art Daily.

For more information about Andy Fabo, Robert Flack, Tim Jocelyn, Chrysanne Stathacos, and Jacob Korczynski please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Tau Lewis reviewed in Border Crossings for her solo show “Tau Lewis: Sparkle’s Map Home” at Oakville Galleries.

Toronto-based but currently peripatetic artist Tau Lewis has recently been attracting international attention, notably at large American institutions such as MoMA PS1, the Hammer Museum, LA, and the New Museum in New York. Meanwhile, in the inverse relationship typical of Canadian artists garnering success elsewhere, larger Canadian institutions have so far overlooked her work. In contrast, public regional galleries—the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Kenderdine Galleries and now the Oakville Galleries—have granted her deserved acknowledgement.

Geoff McFetridge is featured for his positive work in The Star with an article by Deborah Dundas.

Geoff McFetridge’s painting shows how we can build a positive future together

Together we can create change. And, with incremental change, together we can build a positive future. It’s an idea as true when we’re looking for new ways to approach climate change, inequality, or living with each other during — and after — a pandemic.

In this painting, “A Positive Future Built of Incremental Change,” Canadian artist Geoff McFetridge has positioned the people depicted in such a way that we can’t help but think of it as a metaphor for what can be achieved through collective action and support. The image — representing that positive future — is only possible with all of us, as individuals, playing our parts, acting together.

The individuals are stylized — McFetridge is both an artist and a graphic designer. Many of his images, including this one, echo or incorporate graphic design elements and patterned formations. There’s a familiarity to them that’s attractive and instantly communicates to us. “It should feel like something, rather than look like something,” he says.

His work waxes poetic on the human condition. Figures are arranged against flat tonal surfaces, often forming simple shapes in their solidarity. They lean on one another or melt, become one; they leap through space using heads as stepping-stones.

McFetridge was born in Calgary in 1971 and studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design and the California Institute of the Arts. Although he now lives in California, he’s represented by the Cooper Cole gallery in Toronto and exhibits around the world, most recently with a solo presentation of his work in New York at Independent 2020.

His most recent work consists of a series of paintings and drawings directly responding to the pandemic. He’s posted some of them on Instagram (look him up: @mcfetridge). In one image, as people walk by each other at a good distance, their shadows still touch, giving the effect that they are holding hands. “The distance between us (6 feet!) Is also measured by our thoughts and love for each other,” McFetridge posted.

We’re all in this together.

Discover more about McFetridge, and other artists at the gallery at coopercole.com. The physical gallery is open for viewings by appointment only.

– Deborah Dundas

To view the full post visit The Star.

For more information about Geoff McFetridge please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Shawn Kuruneru and Walter Scott’s solo exhibitions at COOPER COLE are reviewed in Cornelia Magazine by Margaryta Golovchenko.

As I step into Cooper Cole, I feel an overwhelming sensation of lightness and openness that is partially conditioned by the physical space itself, with its white walls and bright lights. I’m reminded of the similarly white and bright simulation in The Matrix where Morpheus brings Neo to show him that reality is fluid, dictated by the mind rather than the body. This analogy, as well as the idea that the body is not as solid nor as “fixed” as we tend to believe, is apt for the two solo shows on display—Shawn Kuruneru’s Emanata and Walter Scott’s Extension of Doubt—which share an interest in exploring the process of constructing the self.

To view the full article, please visit Cornelia Mag.

For more information about Shawn Kuruneru and Walter Scott please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

The terraced streets of Glasgow: driving past, 2016
Mixed media on paper
26″ X 40″

COOPER COLE artist Jagdeep Raina has an interdisciplinary practice that spans drawing, textiles, writing, and, more recently, video animation, photography and ceramics. This year, he was one of the recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award for Ontario and was going to have a solo presentation at Frieze New York this May.

We recently spoke to Jagdeep about the new work he made for Frieze New York. These drawings explore the phenomenon of Bhangra club culture during the late 1980s in the UK, Canada, and the US. Bhangra– music that remixed traditional Punjabi folk with hip hop and reggae– also represented a cultural fracturing of younger generations away from their immigrant communities.

Completed while Jagdeep was living in England during Brexit vote, this work also speaks to the crisis of gentrification and nationalism altering the way these same communities grapple with day to day life. The artist uses the medium of drawing as a way of exploring themes of historical memory through archival material.

For more information about Jagdeep Raina, please visit our website.

To stand there and smile, 2016
Mixed media on paper
22″ X 30″

Attentions mates! Why is our paki nationality not an outdated concept?, 2017
Mixed media on paper
22″ X 30″

The guitar solemnly strung, and life on the Broadway went on, 2016
Mixed media on paper
22″ X 30″

Factory grind, 2016
Mixed media
26″ X 40″

A tangible expression (Part 2), 2017
Mixed media on paper
19″ X 25″

Could you tell us a bit about these new drawings you made for Frieze New York?

These works on paper investigate an ongoing relationship I have with house music, specifically Bhangra music from the late 1970s, early 1980s and early 1990s. Bhangra—a form of Punjabi folk mixed with hip hop and reggae— was created by working class South Asian Migrant labourers who worked in the industrial factories of Britain, specifically Birmingham and the outskirts of London. I was inspired by how this music left Britain, and has travelled all across the globe to Canada, the United States, and even back to the Global South. 

What made you become interested in Bhangra club culture in the 1980s?

I’ve always been interested in clubs as being a space where people can strip themselves of the external markers of identity: gender, race, age, class, sexuality as a way of collective desire and self-pride. Bhangra is a form of music that I was always influenced by, especially looking at the history of the music and the relationship I had with it growing up. As I began studying the origins of this music, I never knew that it had such a political, and radical history. I was coming across anti-colonial, anti-racist, and feminist song lyrics like Kala Preet, Nirmal and Mohinder Kaur Bhamra and discovering the work of queer film-makers and DJ’s like Pratibha Parmar and DJ Rekha who were documenting Bhangra in their work by juxtaposing the self-affirmation that came with dancing to Bhangra music against histories of colonial and imperial carnage. I was also having conversations with people who lived through these moments- telling me that Bhangra was also a way to rebel against rigid and constraining ways of upbringing that was dominated by fundamentalism and a violent holding onto tradition. It was using and utilizing the archive that made me come across these powerful histories. I’ve also always been inspired by this piece of writing I came across by the DJ Honey Dijon:

“The politics of today are defined by gentrification which is also the biggest single obstacle for nightlife. Cities can become places where people only consume and do not create. Artists are pushed out to make room for high-rise apartments built for people with corporate jobs. They don’t want noise, they don’t want difference. There is no space for those who do not fit a prescribed agenda. And yet it is always the disenfranchised who fuel culture five years later.”

Nightlife is not just a scene for entertainment. Clubs are intersectional spaces free from the repression and struggles of everyday life. Or at least should be. Venues, promoters, DJs, and the people who come to dance— they need to stand against gentrification. Clubs should not just be places of monetary transaction. Clubs can bring people together of diverse sexual orientations, ethnicities, and backgrounds in ways that government never can. Being a DJ is a privilege; we allow people to connect and escape. The continued existence of nightlife is vital for our culture: in these times of division, it creates safe places for people to convene without fear.

What is your process for determining the content of your drawings? Are some from life or are they all from memory?

A lot of these drawings use archival material as a reference point, and slowly morph into memory, mark making, textured washes, and experimental writing: text phrases that I always lay out on top of the drawings.

Which archives do you reference?

To study the historical development of Bhangra music, I looked at documentaries, photographs, oral history interviews, album covers, and things like that. Personal archives are also important. For this body of work, I drew inspiration from conversations I had with people from the South Asian diaspora who came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as photographers and film-makers who were documenting the Bhangra music scene in Britain during the 1980s.

Visually, I was looking at film stills from news documentaries from the 1980s and early 1990s, the filmic work of Gurinder Chadha and Pratibha Parmar, the photographs of David Corio, and photographs of family and friends. I also did a two-hour interview with a film director when I lived in London, and drew from the audio I recorded with the film director.

You made some of this work while living in England in 2016, around the time of the Brexit vote. Did this affect your work?

Brexit had a huge impact on my work. It was devastating and powerful being in England during the summer of 2016. It was the first time where I stopped romanticizing and homogenizing what a diasporic community looked like. I realize that every community is flawed, including the ones I come from. 

Dismantling utopian ideas of what we want a community to look like is really important to me. I always try to operate from a place of being self-critical as well. I’m inspired by the writings of Adrian Piper, Stuart Hall and the work of Felix Gonzalez Torres who have helped me realize the importance of detaching from the social and standing outside of a community in order to learn and see more deeply. When I dismantle and tease apart notions of a fixed diasporic communal identity, I realize that the word “community” is also a double-edged sword: it is something that is constructed and not innate, and the very definition is exclusionary. 

Your lines are so strong, yet suggest a lot of movement. How does your visual language relate to what you are drawing?

Drawing is always at the core of my practice as an artist. While I am finding myself immersed in textiles, and now slowly photography, video, and film, drawing will always be at the core of my work to help me translate and develop my ideas through a visual medium. Drawing has helped me create an experimental writing-based practice as well. What has made drawing so important for me is that it has always unified all the threads of my work, without hierarchy. The quiet surface of paper and now the quiet surface of thread, fabric, and 16 and 35mm film echoes the fragility of the documents I work from. I’ve also always seen how easy drawing can be to transport: they be rolled up, tied together with string or an elastic band, and tucked lightly underneath my arm to travel where they need to go. Drawing has also always been an anchoring point for me to push myself in collage and writing: whether it’s incorporating text onto my work or collaging photographic image and archival material onto my drawings.

There are a few drawings in this series that are cityscapes. They appear to depict the same place; can you say a bit about these?

I’m interested in slowing down and creating movements of pause and contemplation in my work… the building of terraced houses, industrial factories, run down clubs and venues are a type of mark, a ghost or a soft presence of bodies and communities that cater together once. I’m becoming really inspired by the thought of creating cityscapes through the medium of video and film as well. That is my next skill set I want to build as an artist. 

¹ Honey Dijon On nightlife. Art Forum, Summer 2017.

For more information about Jagdeep Raina please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Sara Cwynar’s exhibition at The Approach, London reviewed in Frieze by Sophie Ruigrock.

The Cognitive Dissonance of Sara Cwynar’s Media Haven

‘What do I need from you in order to complete myself?’ asks a man’s voice. He’s calm and cogent with the authority of a presenter on National Public Radio’s This American Life (1995–ongoing). A droning sound pulses beneath his words, sedating me. And, as the silver-tongued narrator delivers his script, dense with allusions to critical theory and cultural references – from the postimpressionist painter Paul Cézanne to philosophers René Descartes and Plato – delicious imagery unfurls: tight shots of red mouths, soft blonde whiskers on an upper lip, jewellery boxes, glossed cars, paint that ripples like chocolate in Lindt adverts.

Screened as part of ‘Marilyn’, Sara Cwynar’s first solo show at The Approach, Red Film (2018) was briefly installed in the gallery before being moved online, following the UK’s coronavirus lockdown. Shot in smudgy 16mm, with abundant footage of limbs and symmetrical faces, Red Film is beautiful. But its formal qualities are not pure aestheticism; rather, they serve to replicate the experience of existing on capitalism’s conveyor-belt, which holds us on an eternal loop of craving and consuming.

Having initially studied and worked as a graphic designer, Cwynar is well-versed in the tropes of advertising, which capitalizes on base desires and insecurities. In order to critique this language, Cwynar appropriates it, saturating Red Film’s imagery with marketing sleights of hand. Elegant fingers direct our gaze, imbuing the objects they touch with allure. This cognitive bias – the belief that an object is desirable because it is associated with something beautiful or good – is known as the halo effect. And, I’ll admit it, Cwynar’s trick works on me: I want that NARS blush compact on the screen. Its image brings back memories of the powdery smell of my mum’s makeup bag and Christmas gifts. Maybe, if I owned it, I would be like the woman holding it: complete. Maybe I would feel as safe and loved as I did in my nostalgic recollections. The narrator’s sermon, the thrum of the music, the revolving objects: this is the insidious trance of advanced capitalism.

In addition to Red Film, six, small silent videos line the gallery walls. They document a range of settings, including an Italian hosiery manufacturer (Pantyhose Factory, Italy, 2020) and a near-empty department store (Barneys New York, 2020). Less engaging than Red Film, these clips nonetheless make a point about the suffocating torrent of images many of us endure daily. In the gallery’s annex is a selection of Cwynar’s photographs. They’re as beautiful and tightly wound with theoretical references as her film, but fail to pack quite the same punch. Perhaps it’s because they’d look so good on a collector’s wall. I’m left thinking about their price point.

To view the full article, please visit Frieze.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Sara Cwynar’s exhibition at The Approach, London is reviewed in the Financial Times by Chris Allnutt.

“These reds are not real,” insists the monotone narrator of “Red Film”, a video installation in Sara Cwynar’s latest show Marilyn. And yet the colour pervades the Brooklyn-based artist’s exploration of glamour and identity in the Instagram era: the reds of a lipstick, of a convertible, of a rose that seems neither entirely real nor entirely imagined.

Her work was due to be exhibited at The Approach, a small gallery in east London, but now features instead in David Zwirner’s online showcase of 12 London gallerists disrupted by coronavirus lockdown. Through photography, film and collage, Cwynar offers up both visual ingenuity and a lively rejoinder to commercialised influencer culture.

To view the full article, please visit the Financial Times.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Geoff McFetridge created a visual diary about the Covid-19 pandemic for the New York Times.

To view the full article please visit the New York Times.

For more information about Geoff McFetridge please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

COOPER COLE will be presenting a new series of posts on our news feed in which we look at one artwork in-depth. For our first post, we chose Chrysanne Stathacos’ incredible 1-900-Mirror Mirror (1993-2020), which is part of our current exhibition There are more than four, curated by Jacob Korczynski.

1-900-Mirror Mirror is an interactive installation that was first presented by Stathacos at Andrea Rosen Gallery in 1993. After an extensive exhibition history that followed, it is now installed at Cooper Cole alongside work by Andy Fabo, Robert Flack, and Tim Jocelyn. Surrounded by mirrors hand-printed with some of the artist’s motifs including roses, hair and ivy, each individual encounters their infinite reflection. Provided with an opportunity to ask a question using tarot cards about the future through video-phone communication, it offered a means to look ahead at the height of the AIDS crisis. Through her groundbreaking use of early video-phone technology, Chrysanne’s engagement with the future also anticipated the contemporary context we find ourselves in, when we look towards the reflective surfaces of our screens not only to see one another, but also ourselves. For this presentation at Cooper Cole, Stathacos will adapt the work for the current conditions of the pandemic by engaging in a series of conversations online with various people connected to the exhibition and its four artists.

Thirty years later, and amidst a global pandemic, Stathacos was inspired to reflect back on the social history of this sculpture and remember her friend Robert Flack, who died from the AIDS virus and whose work is also included in There are more than four. She plans to use his favoured deck – The Tantric Dakini Oracle.

Photo Credit: Maxine Henryson

I  first presented the work in 1993 at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, at the height of the AIDS pandemic. I remember oceans of tears merged with snowstorms as I traveled between New York City and Toronto. Our friends and partners were dying. 1-900-Mirror Mirror confronted viewers with their own image in my infinity chamber, connecting me with the viewer by video phone as I sat in my Little Italy apartment with my tarot cards. What would they ask?  What would I answer as I picked a card? I hoped to create a transformative experience, hope and healing unfolding within the never-ending vision of one’s self, seen through my hand-printed roses, ivy, and hair. Now, during another pandemic, the work will again be interactive, but online.

Robert Flack and I used to read tarot together often back then, doing rituals with oils, candles, sage and secret objects on an Indian bed spread on the roof of my New York studio on Centre Street.  I have found a copy of the deck he used – The Tantric Dakini Oracle – which I will use now, thinking of him. 

 Robert Flack died in October, 1993, a few months before the opening of 1-900-Mirror Mirror.  Jorge Zontal of General Idea left us a few weeks after the project ended.    The sadness and tragedy of that time is still with me/us. Why were our governments and leaders not more proactive in the early 1980’s, when AIDS first appeared? So many could have been saved.  WHY remains the question.  Robert Flack, Tim Jocelyn, Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz, David Buchan and so so so many more should still be with us, that is the tragedy that will never die.

– Chrysanne Stathacos, 2020

To view more images of 1-900-Mirror Mirror click here.

For more information about Chrysanne Stathacos please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

SARA CWYNAR is contributing her print Cami to the Pictures for Elmhurst fundraiser in Queens, New York.

Elmhurst Hospital Center has been overwhelmed during the pandemic and has devoted 95% of the building to Covid-19 patients. It is a “safety-net” hospital that serves predominantly low-income patients. The hospital notes: 

“The hospital has been flooded with Covid-19 patients and is struggling to keep up with demand for both medical personnel and PPE. The Pictures For Elmhurst project adds desperately-needed supplies for those on the front lines fighting this virus. It is inspiring to know that such talented photographers and artists ‘have our back’ and are keeping our staff and community in mind during this terribly difficult time.”

Cwynar is participating in this fundraiser with 186 photographers. Cami is available for purchase for $150 USD with all the proceeds going to Elmhurst Hospital Center. It is an open edition, time-limited for the duration of the fundraiser. The photographs are all printed by the Brooklyn-based Griffin Editions and will be shipped once non-essential businesses reopen.

Cami reflects Cwynar’s interest in the re-presentation of visual materials and tropes. Balancing on one foot as she ‘poses’ deadpan for the photographer, the physical precarity of the woman depicted mirrors the makeshift chartreuse yellow backdrop. Referencing retail catalogues and old art history textbooks, Cwynar’s visual assemblages meditate on how vernacular images shape collective world views, and how those ideals can change through time and contextual manipulation.

SARA CWYNAR (b. 1985, Vancouver, Canada) works in photography and film to explore the way that images accumulate, endure, and change in value over time. Her works involve constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials, layering diverse imagery with references to art theory. Cwynar was one of the recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award. She received her Bachelor of Design from York University in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. She has exhibited at international museums including the Museum of Modern Art (2019); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2019); Milwaukee Art Museum (2019); Oakville Galleries (2018); Minneapolis Institute of Art (2018); Museum für Moderne Kunst (2017); the Fondazione Prada (2016); and MoMA PS1 (2015), and international galleries including The Approach, London (2020); Foxy Production, New York (2017); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2016); Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2015), M+B Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); and Fluxia Gallery, Milan (2014). In 2014, Cwynar was awarded the Printed Matter Emerging Artists Publication Series and published her first monograph, entitled Kitsch Encyclopedia, with Blonde Art Books. Her work is in the permanent collections of museums including the Guggenheim Museum (New York), SFMoMA (San Francisco), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas), Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York). Cwynar currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

To view the work and purchase prints, please visit Pictures for Elmhurst.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Represented artists Sara Cwynar, Georgia Dickie, and Jagdeep Raina are among 25 recipients of the Sobey Art Award 2020.  Featured on National Gallery of Canada.

Vanessa Maltese and Michelle Grabner two-person show at MICKEY is featured in Art Viewer.

Artists: Michelle Grabner, Vanessa Maltese

Exhibition title: A View Without A Room

Venue: MICKEY, Chicago, US

Date: March 13 – April 26, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and MICKEY, Chicago

COOPER COLE is pleased to collaborate with Chicago based gallery MICKEY to present a two person exhibition, A View Without A Room, featuring the work of Michelle Grabner and Vanessa Maltese, curated by Simon Cole.

Michelle Grabner’s sculptural work employs familiar objects, arrangements, and patterns to explore the power structures that underpin everyday life. Investigating the political resonance of the concept of ‘order’ that traverses the boundaries of governance and visual culture, the artist asserts that even the most domestic patterns on textiles reverberate with political connotations. In Grabner’s plaster reliefs, crocheted compositions are embedded in, and removed from, plaster molds set in baking pans, revealing that color has leached from the from the textile into the plaster, and speaking to the ways that our environments condition us. Her wood reliefs that display screen printed lids and abstract gingham paintings invert the previously mentioned material strategy by means of building layers, drawing attention to the visual ordering that exists in domestic environments. The works in this exhibition exemplify Grabner’s interest in undermining the social power of ordinary objects and images; Instead of developing new forms and patterns, she intentionally extracts common and mundane motifs, recontextualizing them in sculptural work that makes their social functions hyper-visible.

Vanessa Maltese’s new paintings and sculptures explore processes of pattern recognition and viewer perception. In her paintings Hypothesizing coincidence no.1-no.8 Maltese employs klecksography, a process of making images from inkblots. The artist begins by making blot prints on drawing pads, groups them together according to similarities and relationships between shapes, and from there transfers the drawings onto the panel surfaces. Maltese’s process of making these works speaks to associative thinking, recalling the historical use of klecksography in psychoanalysis as a way of tapping into the subconscious. In her sculptural series Hook, Maltese continues her inquiry into human perception by creating cast bronze works that depict coat hooks broken in various ways, with the intention of resembling faces. Emerging from Maltese’s research on pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon in which recognizable patterns are identified in unrelated contexts, the title of these works refers both to the literal objects as well as the sensation of a pareidolic instance.

A View Without A Room places Grabner and Maltese’s work into an incisive dialogue around objects and visuality. Both artists are influenced by imagery that is workaday and easily overlooked, but is also laden with social, political, and psychological implications. Together, Grabner and Maltese’s respective practices use familiar visual patterns to reveal the structures that condition the way we see.

Michelle Grabner (b. 1962, Oshkosh, USA) holds an MA in Art History and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. She joined the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996, and became Chair of Painting and Drawing department in 2009. She is also a senior critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Modern Painters, Frieze, Art Press, and Art-Agenda. Grabner also runs The Suburban and The Poor Farm with her husband, artist Brad Killam. She co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and served as the inaugural artistic director of FRONT International, a triennial exhibition in and around Cleveland, OH in 2018.

I Work From Home, Michelle Grabner’s first comprehensive solo museum exhibition opened in 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland organized by David Norr. She was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art curated by Tricia Paik in 2015. Solo exhibitions of her work have also been held at INOVA, The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Ulrich Museum, Wichita; and University Galleries, Illinois State University. She has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate St. Ives, UK; and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. Her work is included in the permanent collection of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MoCA, Chicago; MUDAM, Luxemburg; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Grabner currently lives and works in Milwaukee, USA.

Vanessa Maltese (b. 1988, Toronto, Canada) holds a BFA from OCAD University. She is the National Winner of the 2012 RBC Canadian Painting Competition and has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions across North America. Most recently, she has exhibited at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, New York, Halsey Mckay, East Hampton; ITP Space, Jackson; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, USA; The Power Plant, Cooper Cole, Erin Stump Projects, Toronto; Carl Louie, London; Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada.  In 2018 Vanessa completed the Glenfiddich Artist-in-Residence program in Dufftown, Scotland. Her monumental public artwork “subject to change” can be seen at RBC’s Waterpark Place in downtown Toronto. Maltese currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

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For more information about Vanessa Maltese or Michelle Grabner please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

For more information about Georgia Dickie please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000