Gallery Creatures Creating Presents
Friday, December 13, 2013
Participating Artists
Joy Wong
Joy Wong is an artist and writer, currently in her fifth year of pursuing a BFA at York University in Visual Arts and Creative Writing. While her practice has spanned multiple mediums, Joy’s focus is currently in painting and print media. Often described as “intense” and “earnest,” her work has dealt with the concepts of decay, deconstruction, and the abject in both the infrastructure of urban society, and of the post-modern material self. Currently Joy is working on a series of prints and paintings that explore the dualities of living and dying, beauty and disgust, through the imagery of the human body in relation to confectionery exteriors. Obsessed with process, the artist’s mark is vividly present in both her painting style and material layering of her prints.
Recently Joy was awarded the Willowdale Painting Group Prize (2013) and was nominated twice for the Hermitage Museum Young Artist Program during her studies at York.
Brandon Davis
I work in sculpture. Referencing organic materials and that which is commonly positioned as the
natural world. I am interested in using symbolic imagery as a way to question the authenticity of ideas of the real. I explore materiality and process, and contrasting themes of permanence and the ephemeral, recently working with the process of mold making, and photography, allowing the organic nature of my materials to record a sense of time.
Laura Huddart
Laura Huddart is a Toronto based artist focusing on content often described as domestic, playful, or even “kitsch”. Working with these images imbued with typically feminine connotations allows the artist to deal with her ideas of beauty, fantasy, playfulness, humor and nostalgia as a means of escapism from what is felt as uncomfortable, anxious or overwhelming. These fantasies however are almost always incomplete and decaying and the viewer is left to deal with the reality of these anxieties as they creep back into these fabricated worlds.
Laura’s work has been featured in Canadian Art Magazine and PhotoEd Magazine. She was nominated for both the State Hermitage Museum Foundation of Canada Young Artist Program and BMO 1st Art prize, as well as receiving the Nalini and Tim Stewart Photography award. She completed a BFA at York University with a concentration in Photography as well as Psychology.
Michael Gavin White
Michael White is a Toronto based visual artist born on December 29th 1988. He grew up in the Erin Mills area of Mississauga, and started his photographic journey in high school. After high school Michael then studied at York University and graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts with honours, focusing on photography and print making. Michaels work deals with concepts of sexuality, the subconscious mind, psychedelics, nature, religion and spirituality, as well as the juxtaposition between the analog and digital world. In his photographic work Michael uses in camera double exposure techniques, as well as digital techniques to create surreal and sometimes abstract imagery.
Chloe Norman
chloenorman.com
ABOUT CHLOE
Chloé is a Toronto-based artist who uses photography to record performances that uncover
themes of body, inadvertent sexuality and humour. In her most recent body of work, Liminal, a
subject is paired with an ambiguous prop and is encouraged to rediscover the new limits of their
body melded with this item. A strange interaction ensues and reaches the threshold between
assimilation and collapse. Chloé captures this momentary climax in a photograph.
Chloé finds importance in collaborating with local artists in the collective that she and a fellow
artist founded in 2011, called Thing. She completed her BFA from York University concentrating
in photography and performance studies. She has been recognized with such awards as the Nalini
and Tim Stewart Photography award and the John B. Aird Award for photography.
Miles Forrester
Email: milesimile@gmail.com
Miles Forrester is a conceptual artist and writer based in Toronto. His practice combines performance, video, sound, text, & installation. Since 2011, he has shown in group and solo exhibitions: the performance art showcase, New Performance Art: Subversive Technologies, at the White House Studio Project and recently mounted his solo installation show: Super Actuality #13: Parassemblance at Eleanor Winter's Art Gallery. A recent graduate of York University, Forrester's work ecstatically explores the latitudes of chaos with arbitrary systems, productive contradictions, and also assonance as to yield significant fiascos (wherein aesthetics rupture into the frenzied congealment of experience and intention). From one monumental failure to the next, Forrester is seeking the biggest fiasco, The Super Actuality, the 'x' at the end of all rhetoric and reality*.
Miles Forrester is a conceptual artist and writer based in Toronto. His practice combines performance, video, sound, text, & installation. Since 2011, he has shown in group and solo exhibitions: the performance art showcase, New Performance Art: Subversive Technologies, at the White House Studio Project and recently mounted his solo installation show: Super Actuality #13: Parassemblance at Eleanor Winter's Art Gallery. A recent graduate of York University, Forrester's work ecstatically explores the latitudes of chaos with arbitrary systems, productive contradictions, and also assonance as to yield significant fiascos (wherein aesthetics rupture into the frenzied congealment of experience and intention). From one monumental failure to the next, Forrester is seeking the biggest fiasco, The Super Actuality, the 'x' at the end of all rhetoric and reality*.
*reality should be considered the avatar of rhetoric in this context.
John Lowndes
Photographer & Mixed Media Artist
John Lowndes is a contemporary photo-based artist, in the final year of York University’s Bachelor of Fine Arts Studio Art program. Developing his practice through many mediums, his current work is focused in photography, and expanding that field through the use of mixed media. In 2013, John was nominated for the Hermitage Gallery’s Young Artist Program for his achievements in photography at York University. Developing the technique of ‘Elevated Plane’ photography, the artist uses processes of collage, wood sculpture, and mounting to render two-dimensional photographs with three-dimensional depth. Pursuing a range of themes in his work, his art captures the feelings of isolation and emotional dislocation in the city street, and also from his rural Canadian upbringing.
Jessica Butler
jebutleremail@gmail.com
Jessica is a recent graduate from the Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours: Visual Arts program at York University. Recent photographic works aim to illustrate the careful balance between the real and the ideal. The images strive to convey truth, by being honest about the lie, providing hints and actively avoiding creating a wholly convincing illusion.
Cristina Cornejo
cristina.cornejodiaz@gmail.com
Cristina is a recent York BFA graduate born in Central America, immigrated in her teens, and now currently based in Toronto. She was a painter for the Toronto street pianos ‘play me I’m yours’, and was also chosen by a jury with a group of York artists for ‘psychopomp’ that exhibited at the propeller gallery. Her work sets to explore the spaces in between through synaesthesia, in between the senses where sound becomes visual, where touch becomes sound, and the possibilities of all the senses. Goofiness and plain silliness make great ingredients for a delicious tasting of what is the in-between soup. Desperate to make silent conversations about the in-between soup she works to allow tensions of all kinds - material means, emotional, physical, etc- to stay as needed for a stirring in being.
Cristina is a recent York BFA graduate born in Central America, immigrated in her teens, and now currently based in Toronto. She was a painter for the Toronto street pianos ‘play me I’m yours’, and was also chosen by a jury with a group of York artists for ‘psychopomp’ that exhibited at the propeller gallery. Her work sets to explore the spaces in between through synaesthesia, in between the senses where sound becomes visual, where touch becomes sound, and the possibilities of all the senses. Goofiness and plain silliness make great ingredients for a delicious tasting of what is the in-between soup. Desperate to make silent conversations about the in-between soup she works to allow tensions of all kinds - material means, emotional, physical, etc- to stay as needed for a stirring in being.
Jose Angeles
Ihearplastic is a photo based project that deals with the artificiality and superficiality of western popular culture today.
Jennifer MacDonald
Reasons I’m a witch:
- speaks to animals and listens to their worries (mostly pigeons and mice)
- feels energy shifts like waves, ripples, drops, flooding
- surrounded by spiders as I fall each night
- drank Holy Water as a child and feels movement in my gut each time I enter a church
- levitated in my basement when I was 7
- brews love potions to convince strangers I am desirable
- casts spells to erase memories, grow body hair, and raise moles
- eats earth, rosary beads, toenails, dried leaves, flowers and expired milk products
Please call me if you know a witch or are a witch yourself. I have some questions and would like to talk to someone in person instead of on tumblr. (647)963-9056
Brigetta Piggott
Born and raised in Lambton County, Brigetta Piggott is now a third year visual arts student at York University. Her chosen media includes laborious sculpture techniques such as metalworking, stone and woodcarving and most recently, metal casting with investment and sand casting. All in which she explores the possibilities of presented mediums in particular spaces and strives towards a more interactive experience with sculpture. Twenty years young, she is excited about the possibilities in sculpture with inspiration from organic forms found in nature.
Amanda Boulos
iamboulos@gmail.com
Amanda Boulos received her BFA from York University (2013) working as a painter and new media artist. She received the Willowdale Group Senior Painting Award (2012), as well as a BMO1st Invitational Student Art Competition 2013 Nomination. Working with both student groups and community based art institutions, Boulos organized multiple curatorial art projects around Toronto. She has also exhibited her work throughout the city in shows including Vs. Separate at Graven Feather, Sign/Signify at Triangle Gallery and Show Off! at York University’s Gales Gallery sponsored by the Art Gallery of York University. Her work takes abstraction to an intimate level, compelling the viewer to imitate her pieces in order to experience them. Her instructional abstractions inculcate viewers with an understanding of their body’s limits and pleasures. Currently is working on a new series of paintings and rapping teddy bears at Creatures Creating Gallery & Studio.
Alex Curci
alexcurci.com
Alex Curci recently received his BFA from York University where he majored in Visual Arts. He currently lives within the GTA and continues to explore his studio practice through drawing, painting, and installation work. His curiosity and interest in technology has become an ongoing investigation into exploring the vast depths of computer systems and networks. His work examines the wired infrastructure needed to support our mobile devices and communications bringing recognition to the enormity of its physical presences. He attempts to uncover these networked systems while mapping and unveiling their hidden layers amongst the virtual and digital space.
Jennifer Laiwint
Website: http://www.jenniferlaiwint.com
Jennifer Laiwint is a Toronto based artist, currently completing her last year in the Visual Arts program at York University. Jennifer works primarily in photography, installation and sculpture . Her most recent work explores questions around inter-generational trauma. As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Jennifer struggles with the responsibility of responding to a call to remember and preserve the stories she grew up hearing while at the same time freeing herself from this duty. Jennifer’s point of access to these stories is through an interaction with found objects, textures, and materials. Through this interaction, Jennifer attempts to navigate through a complex history and explore the materiality of feelings and memories, those that are personal, inherited and imagined.
Michael Lindenas
Michael Lindenas is an emerging artist currently living in Pickering, ON. He graduated with a BFA in Visual Arts from York University in spring 2013. His work often focuses on contemporary issues in Canadian politics. Strongly subversive and sometimes humourous, his paintings and prints expose the political, economic, and social problems around us today. Currently he is creating many miniature oil paintings depicting classic moments from Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s illustrious carrier.
Alex Clarke
clarkexcore@gmail.com
Alex Clarke is a recent York University BFA Visual Arts graduate (2012). He thoroughly enjoys drawing, painting, and taking pictures of cats. His work has been shown in various galleries downtown Toronto (Triangle Gallery, Propeller Gallery, and Gallery 1313) and is currently on show at Community Innovation Lab in Oshawa. Alex’s work likes to be tongue-in-cheek by questioning its own purpose as art and himself as an artist. Currently, he is working on releasing a small print book with Grow and Grow that will feature meaningless photographs, weird drawings, and some short comics.
Michael McGlennon
mikemcglennon@gmail.com
Michael McGlennon is an artist working in Toronto, currently finishing his last year of a BFA program at York University. He is a printmaker and illustrator who works to reveal potential life cycles of unclassifiable forms, and the physical potential of the material universe; this work has been described as graphic, bold, and fantastical. His fascination with the possibilities of outer space began after his dream of being an astronaut was crushed by motion sickness and a severe lack of mathematical aptitude. He is currently working on a series of intersecting life cycles and atomistic reduction prints.
Briar Murawski:
Likes Include: Sitting quietly, working on various art type things, repetitive and mindless actions, cats, people watching, colours.
Dislikes Include: Being in crowds, public speaking, meeting new people, inescapable social engagements, taking transit and loud noises.
Born in 1990.
Graduated from York University's BFA Visual Arts Program in Spring 2013.
Main Mediums of Focus: Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture
Awards: I've got a few.
Aspirations: To work a little harder, be a little better. Passtimes: Anxiety attacks. What do I do and why do I do it: -uses repetition and multiplicity to address issues of tension and anxiety -spectacle in the mundane -issues of gender, representation of the self/ other and their relationship, notions of identity, resituating the individual and its value in contemporary art, passive observer of the idiosyncrasies, anachronisms, absurdities of people and their day to day doings, thinkings and going ons.
Monika Wahba
monikawahba@gmail.com
Born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, Monika Wahba moved to Toronto, Canada at the age of 10. She is a contemporary artist who uses photography as a means of visual representation. Her most recent body of work consists of a series of images shot over the summer of 2013. Her constructed images invite the viewer to create open-ended narratives in hope to evoke a deep sense of curiosity. Monika is a recent graduate of the BFA program at York University where she received the Senior Photographer Award as well as the CASA Grant.
Virakone Sonethasack
He works mainly as a printmaker, through screenprinting and lithography, largely operating digitally — as well as traversing the realms of video, photography and other traditional media forms.
The senses are important.
Influenced by literature and philosophies of materialism, Virakone aims to create work that is in flux. Existing as matter that affects sensory perceptions of a work, the experience is first and foremost.
The energy one receives and gives back to art.
It is a relationship of horizons, where the surfaces of an artwork meet surfaces of the self — like the sky meeting the ground, the horizon is only an illusion.
Katerina Takeda
Katrina Takeda is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto ON. Working with drawing techniques, she is interested in line and its ability to create subtle yet graphic work. Utilizing the medium of Screenprinting to explore the reproduction of multiples that retain a hand rendered quality.
Aspirations: To work a little harder, be a little better. Passtimes: Anxiety attacks. What do I do and why do I do it: -uses repetition and multiplicity to address issues of tension and anxiety -spectacle in the mundane -issues of gender, representation of the self/ other and their relationship, notions of identity, resituating the individual and its value in contemporary art, passive observer of the idiosyncrasies, anachronisms, absurdities of people and their day to day doings, thinkings and going ons.
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