Visual arts graduate and undergraduate students showcase their best work in a series of graduation exhibits on campus and downtown Toronto throughout April and into May.
For the fourth consecutive year, Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts hosts a juried group exhibition by undergraduate students from York. The show, titled Moutling, runs April 13 to 24. Coordinated by visual arts Professors Michael Davey and Richard Hill, it draws from the hugely successful visual arts open house of the same title which took place on campus in March (see YFile, March 31).
Ranging from sculpture, installation, painting and drawing to photography, time-based art and print media, the works in the show were selected by juries for each studio area that each included studio faculty and an art historian.
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| Ten of the artists selected for Moulting exhibition at Propellor posed together that the Visual Arts Open House. Pictured from left, Ilona Peel, Couzyn Van Heuvelen, Tasha Turner, Chloe Norman, Joshua Vettivelu, Alex Clarke, Allen Coulson, Michelle MacKinnon, Krista Heidrich and Sarah Pintaric. |
Participating artists are Alex Clarke, Allen Coulson, Krista Heidrich, Michelle MacKinnon, Chloe Norman, Ilona Peel, Sarah Pintaric, Eshan Rafi, James Sumner, Tasha Turner, Couzyn Van Heuvelen and Joshua Vettivelu, who will each contribute a work to the exhibition.
Propeller is located at 984 Queen St. W. Gallery hours are Wednesday to Saturday from 12 to 6pm and Sunday from 12 to 5pm. There will be a reception for Moulting Saturday, April 16 from 2 to 5pm.
Six artists from York’s Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts Program are presenting their thesis shows at a variety of uptown and downtown Toronto venues.
Maria Flawia Litwin presents a collection of work by her alter-ego Róza Selawiska, which is on display until April 10, at Ten Eighty Gallery. It will then move to the Loop Gallery April 13 to 24. 
Consisting primarily of obsessive self-portraiture, Selawiska explores issues of identity and representation through repetitive Slavic symbolic language. Accompanying the photographs are critical essays by another two of Litwin’s alter-egos, Maria Jolanta Rozwora and Nicholas Stock.
Left: Maria Flawia Litwin’s I Have Been Pecked to Death by Ravens and Crows (2011, 21 by 13 inches, photo)
Ten Eighty Gallery is located at 1080 Queen St. W., and is open daily from noon to 6pm. Loop Gallery is located at 1273 Dundas St. W. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday 12 to 5pm, and Sunday from 1 to 4 pm or by appointment. The opening reception is April 14, from 6:30-9:30 pm.
Ian August’s Quarter Past Eleven is a collection of paintings influenced by the utopian thought and the sometimes troubled practical implementation of modernist architecture and planning. On display at Artscape Triangle Gallery from April 5 to 16, August explores how modernist ideas and their real-life manifestations have weathered with time.
Artscape Triangle Gallery is located at 38 Abell Street on the ground floor of the new Artscape Triangle Lofts. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. The opening reception takes place tomorrow night from 7 to 11pm.
Disappearing Contours: Landscapes is Alexandra Gelis‘ three channel video installation. It runs April 11 to 15 in the Gales Gallery in Accolade West Building on York’s Keele campus. Gelis seeks to unveil the relationships between landscape, history, and displacement through her videos, which highlight how landscapes can become dynamic archives and important repertoires of colonial and post-colonial histories and they help us to understand definitions of territory, nationalism and sovereignty. The Gales Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 10am to 4:30pm.
Right: Alexandra Gelis’ Corredor (Corridor or Passageway) (2011, three channel video installation)
Loop Gallery also hosts Margarita Macdonald’s Border Memory: Crossing Borders, from April 12 to 24. This series of prints includes various layers of photolithography drawing and silkscreen that focus on reconstructing memory. Macdonald is drawn to the landscape between the United States and Mexico and the particular narratives that are created there. She investigates issues of identity, displacement and landscape as a place of memory as they are relevant to the border.
Right: Margarita Macdonald’s contribution from the series Undetected “Boundaries” (2011, 32.5 by 44 inches, photo litho, silkscreen, chine colle on conservation gampi, BFK)
Grace Channer’s installation project Black Woman Floating in a Sea of Glass bears witness to the power of resistance and will be on display in the Gales Gallery from April 18 to 22. In her exhibit, Channers positions resistance as a fundamental key to understanding the trajectories of contemporary Black Diaspora culture. It also reveals unacknowledged possibilities that this stance poses in the creative expression of Diaspora artists.
Left: Alex Kisilevich’s Untitled from the series “Kallima”, (2010, 40 by 40 inches, digital chromogenic print)
Kallima is a photography exhibition by Alex Kisilevich on display at the Angell Gallery from May 5 to Jun 11. The show is named after a butterfly that bears an uncanny resemblance to a dried up leaf while its wings are together.
The show explores notions of camouflage within a contemporary and social context by investigating the function of mimicry in the natural world and the ways in which it can be mirrored in human behaviour. The images, full of pathos and absurdity, touch on ideas of masking and disguise, assimilation and adaptation as well as the way we construct connections between ourselves and others.
Angell Gallery is located at 12 Ossington Avenue and is open Wednesday to Saturday, from 12pm to 5pm or by appointment. Kalima’s opening reception is May 5, from 6 to 9pm.