Public | Private
From the Permanent Collection
Featuring works by Anne Meredith Barry, Sheila Butler, Brian Kipping, Hugh Mackenzie, Waltraud Markgraf, and William Vazan
This exhibition considers site, human organization, and public vs. private space. Abstract works have been selected for their exploration of composition and space. Works are installed to consider the exhibition site and draw the viewer’s attention to their own physicality as contrasting scale draws the body in or pushes it back within the relatively narrow ramp space.
Sheila Butler’s work explores the human condition through the expression of the figure. Speaking to interviewer Sarah Swan for Galleries West Magazine in 2014, Butler said “I feel that my pictures refer to memory and imagination, and also refer to something that I actually stood and looked at yesterday, all simultaneously pictorial.”1 Her works describe the intricacy of humanity, conveying everything from intimacy to vitality to violence.
Brian Kipping painted streets, public gathering spaces, workplaces, storefronts, and quiet corners, framing them to capture the recognizable but often overlooked infrastructure of an everyday life.
Anne Meredith Barry’s works are like a love letter to the landscape of Newfoundland. Drawing and printing on found maps, Barry uses topography, line, colour, text, and composition to emit the play of sea against rock, the particularities of season, and community.
Waltraud Markgraf used art as a way to explore possibility. Gradually shifting through a range of tone, her works have been said to explore infinity and reject the linear. Her contribution to the Toronto 20 Portfolio (1965) uses colour, shape, negative space, and line to push the edges of composition while residing within the limitations of medium and dimension.
This exhibition is curated to support our concurrent exhibitions and the [in]Sites Festival.
- Sarah Swan. “Sheila Butler…on a continuous roll (part 1),” Galleries West, September 14, 2014. http://www.gallerieswest.ca/artists/previews/sheila-butler%3A–%22%E2%80%A6on-a-continuous-roll-%28part-one%29%22%2C-sept.-5-/