BON ECHO
Curated by Monica Tap
G Gallery
234 Queen Street East
Toronto
Bon Echo brings together the work of two artists for whom landscape is less a genre than a space to be performed, constructed, or navigated.
Cecelia Nygren’s video, Tom, plays with the myth of a painter who disappears in the very landscape he paints. Nygren situates her androgyne character in compositions marked by strong horizontals and verticals but alternate between painterly and stark. We see Tom drift in a canoe across a twilit wilderness lake, and then suddenly perform a staccato jig in the abstract landscape of a squash court. The misty, watery landscapes are interrupted by the austere room; silence giving way to reverberating echoes. Nygren’s painterly video transfixes in its impressionist narrative an ambiguous hero(ine), unmoored in time and unfixed in gender.
In his newest paintings, Daniel Hutchinson extends his investigation of performance architecture to include natural amphitheatres, such as rock formations and mountain valleys. Sara Hartland-Rowe, a Halifax-based painter and writer, wrote of his work: “With the simplest of means – paint striations in essentially monochrome painting – Daniel Hutchinson engages the viewer in a complex, spatial navigation…, highlighting the body’s relationship to gravity, horizontality and verticality and virtual space.”
Hutchinson’s paintings are elaborate constructions that begin in Sketch-up, a computer program used to quickly diagram rectilinear space but is ill-suited for rendering organic forms. Consequently, Hutchinson’s depictions of coniferous trees assume a sharpness that echo the stylized forms of Lawren Harris’s canonical paintings of the north, or even Malevich’s angular compositions. Born in the zero dimensions of digital space and assembled like a puzzle of precise brush marks, each painting’s illusionism is revealed by the viewer’s own movements. Hutchinson’s black paintings offer the viewer a machined nature that is polished and sharp and impossible to see without moving.
Monica Tap, Curator
Cecilia Nygren is a Stockholm-based artist. Her work was recently included in Almost Romantic, I-20 Gallery, New York, and Girls! Girls! Girls – Through the lens of the female gaze, La Centrale, Montreal. In the fall of 2010 she finished a one year long residency program at The Banff Centre, and is currently completing her MFA at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. In her practice personal experiences and grand narratives are revisited and blurred. Her videos reflect upon the roles of images and the relationship between the picture and the depicted.
Daniel Hutchinson lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. He received his BFA from Emily Carr Institute, and his MFA from NSCAD University. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, including group exhibitions at the Sydney College of Art, Australia; the Power Plant, Toronto; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax. Hutchinson was a finalist for the 2009 RBC Canadian Painting Competition.
REVIEWS OF THIS SHOW:
* Leah Sandals, The Finer Details, The National Post, April 22nd 2011
G Gallery
234 Queen Street East
Toronto
Bon Echo brings together the work of two artists for whom landscape is less a genre than a space to be performed, constructed, or navigated.
Cecelia Nygren’s video, Tom, plays with the myth of a painter who disappears in the very landscape he paints. Nygren situates her androgyne character in compositions marked by strong horizontals and verticals but alternate between painterly and stark. We see Tom drift in a canoe across a twilit wilderness lake, and then suddenly perform a staccato jig in the abstract landscape of a squash court. The misty, watery landscapes are interrupted by the austere room; silence giving way to reverberating echoes. Nygren’s painterly video transfixes in its impressionist narrative an ambiguous hero(ine), unmoored in time and unfixed in gender.
In his newest paintings, Daniel Hutchinson extends his investigation of performance architecture to include natural amphitheatres, such as rock formations and mountain valleys. Sara Hartland-Rowe, a Halifax-based painter and writer, wrote of his work: “With the simplest of means – paint striations in essentially monochrome painting – Daniel Hutchinson engages the viewer in a complex, spatial navigation…, highlighting the body’s relationship to gravity, horizontality and verticality and virtual space.”
Hutchinson’s paintings are elaborate constructions that begin in Sketch-up, a computer program used to quickly diagram rectilinear space but is ill-suited for rendering organic forms. Consequently, Hutchinson’s depictions of coniferous trees assume a sharpness that echo the stylized forms of Lawren Harris’s canonical paintings of the north, or even Malevich’s angular compositions. Born in the zero dimensions of digital space and assembled like a puzzle of precise brush marks, each painting’s illusionism is revealed by the viewer’s own movements. Hutchinson’s black paintings offer the viewer a machined nature that is polished and sharp and impossible to see without moving.
Monica Tap, Curator
Cecilia Nygren is a Stockholm-based artist. Her work was recently included in Almost Romantic, I-20 Gallery, New York, and Girls! Girls! Girls – Through the lens of the female gaze, La Centrale, Montreal. In the fall of 2010 she finished a one year long residency program at The Banff Centre, and is currently completing her MFA at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. In her practice personal experiences and grand narratives are revisited and blurred. Her videos reflect upon the roles of images and the relationship between the picture and the depicted.
Daniel Hutchinson lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. He received his BFA from Emily Carr Institute, and his MFA from NSCAD University. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, including group exhibitions at the Sydney College of Art, Australia; the Power Plant, Toronto; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax. Hutchinson was a finalist for the 2009 RBC Canadian Painting Competition.
REVIEWS OF THIS SHOW:
* Leah Sandals, The Finer Details, The National Post, April 22nd 2011
