United Contemporary

Greenland is Blue is an exploration of Nature’s curiosities, specifically those found in the Arctic. These northern landscapes are remote, with minimal human context to help us comprehend the enormity of the terrain. Rather than try to capture the vastness through a distant panoramic approach, Ashwini Gupte illuminates the details and leaves the sense of scale up to the viewer’s imagination. Her portrait orientated compositions are antithetical to the traditional landscape orientation, and encourage the viewer to look deeper and further. Simple elements, without peripheral context, can be imagined in the context of our own perspectives and moods.

Ashwini Gupte has a background in engineering and has spent much of her career in the financial and consulting world. While her ‘day job’ requires a structured approach, her photographic work allows her to explore more subjectively and experiment freely. Her photography started with capturing the spirit of adventure, but has since developed to focus on a deeper acknowledgement of the details. Her process begins with the viewfinder, ignoring the distractions and searching for relevance within the camera’s frame, and continues in post-production, amplifying the story.

“Taking a few moments from my adventure, slowing it down just enough to simply observe - what catches my eye, where does my mind rest? That is what I’m trying to examine. But without a camera in hand, I could miss the details. And without the images, I could forget. Sometimes the connection is immediate, but other times, it is when I get home and sit down to work on my images that the process of falling in love begins. Spending time with my images, working on them in post-production, deepens the intimacy with the place and the experience. Trying to remember how I felt when I took the image keeps me connected with the place long after I have returned from there. And then I go back again to tell another story.”

Huy Lam’s berg sculptures complement Gupte’s photographs, and share a disregard for scale in relation to the icebergs that inspired the works. Instead, Huy Lam presents intimate, mysterious works that activate the spaces they inhabit.

Berg's work focuses on the shifting Toronto landscape where nature and architecture meet; the Gardiner, Don Valley, and the 1970s apartment complexes the Main Square and the Crescent Town Towers. Each painting takes months to complete and is painted from life, therefore the subject shifts multiple times in the course of a painting. The result is work that embodies the themes of urbanization, gentrification, and climate.

The view out of Stefan Berg’s studio window is of an apartment complex built in 1972. The four buildings, each of various heights, form the Main Square. Berg repeatedly returns to this configuration of architecture in his paintings. His interest lies in the practical, tangible, elements of the Main Square apartments: how the brick absorbs sunlight, the way the buildings’ cast shadows on each other, the space between the towers that give way to the sky.

The Main Square to Berg is what bottles were to Morandi. A still life of architecture.

Similar to the prevalence of the view out his studio window, Berg is drawn to subjects that are significant in his life. He paints scenes from his lived experience that are imbued with memory and nostalgia. For this reason, most of his landscapes are of the east end of Toronto where he lives. The subject shifts over the course of a painting, resulting in work that captures the constantly changing nature of the city, seasons, and light. The evidence of time is visible in the surface of the painting: layers of paint and re-working captures the temporality of the subject.

As the viewer scans the surfaces of Berg’s paintings, past days, months and years reveal themselves. In 2010, Berg’s first solo show included paintings of the Main Square and the Gardiner Expressway. Now, nearly ten years later, the Main Square is now in its 16th variation. As a result, the paintings in Still Lives of Architecture depict Toronto landscape today, yesterday, last year, and ten years ago. Each variation is informed by the previous versions, as Berg revisits the subject layering onto the canvas another day’s deliberate observations. These paintings depict a time which is neither the past nor the present, but rather a prolonged time condensed in an instant. The buildings and structures we call architecture lead very still lives, like bricks set in mortar; yet, when seen through Berg’s eyes, in different light and across time, these still lives become something active, something moving.

Stefan Berg received a BFA from OCAD University in 2008. His work has been exhibited in Canada and the United States with positive reviews in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the Telegram Journal. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Solomon Painting Award and Eric Freifeld Award, and grants from The Canadian Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council, and The Toronto Arts Council, support he gratefully acknowledges.

Stefan Berg has two solo exhibitions in Toronto in 2019: Still Lives of Architecture, March 2 - April 8, at United Contemporary; followed by Three Motifs, April 6 - June 30, at the historical Montgomery Inn Museum. His work will also be included in the Art Gems art auction in Toronto on April 16th, and the Haugesund International Artistic Relief Print Festival in Norway, May 10 - August 4, 2019.

Opening Reception Saturday, February 2nd, 2- 6 pm.

Followed by an acoustic performance by Lysa Fina.

This series of sensual paintings explores the origin of sin. Here the concept of Original Sin, taken from The Bible's classic narrative in the book of Genesis, serves not only as a storyline but, also a personal reflection.  It is an inner conversation about Love, Lust, Greed and Remorse. What is Sin? How do we divine it, verify it? How do we reconcile judgements passed on from others and from within ourselves?

Julie Fina talks/texts about her thoughts on Lust: “Lust. Primal urges. That’s a touchy subject. I experience that emotion daily. And, often suppress that natural feeling. Is it out of guilt? Yes, I think so. I was taught that lust was a sin. And, it’s a thought I struggle with. It’s an inherent natural feeling that can cause multiple effects and change people’s lives. It’s a “dirty” selfish thought with inner consequence that can lead to shame...or, is it a very human act that is inquisitive and joyful?”

Julie Fina was born in Toronto and studied oil painting with Paul Richard James. Her current practice is rooted in the exploration of Lust and how it is expressed and repressed in religion, art and in her Italian catholic upbringing. Fina has exhibited in solo and collective shows in Toronto, and is also an accomplished photographer working in both black + white and colour film.

In this new body of work, Mireau draws inspiration from roots to rebar, blurring the edges between the industrial and the natural. Constructed of wood and metal, Mireau’s sculptures form a balance between the organic and the geometric while playing with gravity and scale.

Growing up in Saskatchewan, Mireau developed a fascination with abandoned, broken farm machinery. Weed-buried wagon wheels, splintered wooden axles, and other often unidentifiable objects led to his imaginings of their former lives and functions. Signs of Life builds on the earthy, elemental themes of his earlier work and moves beyond, offering new perspectives on the tension between the manufactured and organic, the terrestrial and the celestial.

This exhibition of elemental sculptures comes to United Contemporary on the heels of his monumental solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Peterborough, curated by Fynn Leitch: https://agp.on.ca/exhibitions/rod-mireau-signs-life/

Mireau was born in Saskatchewan and is currently based in Peterborough. His work is held in collections in Canada, France, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, and the USA.

Photographs by by Priam Thomas

Objects + Ritual is an exhibition of predominantly darkroom produced photograms with some digitally altered darkroom-based images. It expands on some of the ideas explored in the 2006 Contact exhibition Still Film, where different types of photographic film acted as still life objects.

This exhibition contemplates the purpose of objects. We fetishize objects. We collect some. We hoard others. Their meaning changes over time and across classes. Objects have both history and potential. The past ritual of having tea with Mom and Nonna is layered with their daily rituals of taking pills in old age. The juxtaposition of a kettle and these life-stretching pills, together with the devotional images of Christ and the Virgin Mary, the same ones that littered the homes of Paterson's Italian relatives, are memories which he represents in these photograms. They speak to various human attempts to stave off and transcend our inevitable mortality, where pills and private devotional rosaries compete for sainthood; and secular products become ritual objects.

These objects also represent other personal and universal histories. The wedding gift Mixmaster continues to function decades after the marriage broke down. The fan harkens back to cooler times. The toaster, disconnected from its power source, nevertheless pops. These vintage factory-made products have lived long past their built-in obsolescence dates, having secured their identity as family heirlooms, and objets d’art. We may spend less time than ever cooking in our kitchens, but we spend more money on kitchen objects than ever before. Whereas small appliances once freed us from the drudgery of domestic labour, today they are objects representing beauty and status. Kitchen porn to be consumed as much by gaze as utility.

The bicycle as muse, deconstructed: once a mere transportation mechanism to get from A to B, it has morphed into a symbol of freedom and leisure.

Opening reception: Saturday May 12th, 12-6 pm

Gallery hours during this exhibition are Saturdays and Sundays 1-5 pm until June 3rd.

Objects + Ritual was created between 2015 and 2018. All images are unique analogue darkroom prints, except for Mom’s Kettle and Bicycles Deconstructed, both of which are digitally produced inkjet prints, each limited to an edition of 10.

All frames custom made by The Gilder, Toronto, ON

http://scotiabankcontactphoto.com/2018/open-exhibition/united-contemporary-objects-ritual