p|m Gallery

2011-02-11

Get the Robert Waters catalogue by Praxis at Issuu.com

THE ARTIST ROBERT WATERS USES EARTH FROM THE MASS GRAVES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR TO CULTIVATE MEDICINAL HERBS – INCLUDING SOME THAT HELP IMPROVE MEMORY – AND CREATE A HEALING ATMOSPHERE.

Gregory Burke, director of Toronto’s The Power Plant, today announced that he will leave his position at the end of this May, after close to six years in the role. On joining The Power Plant in 2005, Burke immediately set in place the development of a five-year strategic plan, adopted in 2006. Under that plan, Burke led a range of initiatives to develop The Power Plant and increase awareness of its programs. In 2006, Burke launched All Summer, All Free, a program providing free admission to tens of thousands of visitors to The Power Plant. This program, combined with other new public programs, has led to The Power Plant increasing visitation by more than 250 percent during Burke’s tenure. The Power Plant annual commissioning program was also launched by Burke in 2006, with the aim of realizing major new projects. Since then projects have been commissioned from Simon Starling, Lawrence Weiner, Scott Lyall, Candice Breitz, Ian Wallace, and Pae White.

2011-01-21

Robert Waters’ project uncover RECOVER is now on exhibition at Artium, a museum in the Basque region of Spain. In his newest installation Waters uses soil taken from the mass graves of the Spanish civil war to cultivate medicinal plants, including plants that increase memory, to create and promote a healing environment.

2011-01-20

Akimblog’s Terrence Dick on Nava Lubelski

Nava Lubelski at P/M Gallery has assembled a visually stunning collection of false freedom with her randomly stained and torn canvases that she then meticulously builds on with thread. The seemingly spontaneous abstractions are on close examination intricate webs and weavings that suggest an underlying architecture to all disorder. As a reflection on the nature of painting, they merit further attention.

2011-01-15

Nava Lubleski’s exhibition reviewed in today’s Globe & Mail

Nava Lubelski at p|m Gallery
Until Jan. 29, 1518 Dundas St. W., Toronto; www.pmgallery.ca

Everywhere I go, textile works tempt me to touch them. Nava Lubelski’s multimedia painting-embroidery hybrids at P/M Gallery are especially difficult to resist. Lubelski stains and rips open her canvases with abandon, then winds elaborate webs inside and around the peepholes. Pluck me, the works beg.

She further augments her vibrating concoctions with minute patches of intense needlework, in brilliant tones. The resulting tapestries remind me of tidal pools, of cool, grey-green seaweed gardens where spindly urchins and jellyfish lurk, of murky pits twitching with primordial intelligence.

Yes, I considered running my fat fingers along the taut threads, and yes, I wondered if I could get away with covertly adding a toy fish or three to Lubelski’s watery seascapes – but, you break it, you buy it.

By R.M. Vaughan, The Exhibitionist

2010-12-18

See Amanda Clyne in the new issue of Flare!

2010-12-08

Nava Lubelski interviewed by Michael Hansen on ArtSyncTV.

2010-11-17

Let the bidding begin! OCAD Whodunnit Gala Live Auction. Thanks to Amanda Clyne, Meghan McKnight, and Amanda Reeves for their generous contribution.

2010-11-13

Amanda Reeves review in Globe & Mail.

R.M. Vaughan: The Exhibitionist

On first inspection, painters Amanda Reeves and Mike Bayne have little in common. Reeves paints thin, delicate streams of feather and leaf-like shapes exploding outward onto monochromatic canvases. Her darting forms remind me of traditional Islamic calligraphic art, and, pardon the stretch, mid-sixties modernist decorative motifs.

Bayne is a photo-realist painter. His paintings of modest suburban homes and stretches of unimpressive urban sprawl are so crazily close to photographic replications they create the feeling one is seeing the world through a new, stronger pair of glasses. Bayne’s subjects are banally real, and then, as his technique creeps up on you, suddenly more than real, hyper real. The paintings make definite and solid what our eyes and brains are accustomed to overlooking.

What, then, is the connection? Both Reeves and Bayne are actively attempting to erase the presence of the painter.

Reeves’s works are so finely crafted, I defy anyone to find evidence of a brush at play (and, her gallerist tells me, Reeves never uses stencils or outlines her shapes with tape – it’s all deathly still hand work). There are areas in Reeves’s paintings where shape and background almost completely blend, reaching near invisibility.

Bayne similarly negates his painterly authority. Bayne’s previous works gave the careful viewer gentle hints, little nodding drips and swipes, that the paintings were something more than photographs. Well, all bets are off now – Bayne has embraced the photo half of photo realism with a vengeance, to the point of possibly questioning the very use of painting itself.

Cao Fei and Joan Kaufman revivify, with new technologies, the primordial human dreams of shape shifting and flight – two forms of ultimate personal autonomy. Meanwhile, Amanda Reeves and Mike Bayne, using ancient technologies, go to great lengths to cloak the “artist’s voice,” another sacred autonomy.

How does that old curse/blessing go: May you live in interesting times?

2010-10-20

Last week to see Clyne’s exhibition!

“Clyne’s multilayered process – culled image to ink print to photograph to final painting – gives her already well-informed paintings an unexpected hall-of-mirrors jubilance. Disorientation never looked so good.”

R.M. Vaughan for the Globe and Mail, Saturday, October 9, 2010