EXHIBITION TAKES FLIGHT
I cut through Ottawa city hall on a sadistically cold day, and popped into the Ottawa Art Gallery Annex to see Canadian paintings that had been chosen by local celebrities as personal favourites from the gallery’s collection. Meh. The show is more about celebrity than about art, as a person’s favourite painting says more about the person than it does about the painting.
Then I noticed, in the adjacent annex space, works on paper that were quietly calling for attention — which they richly deserved. Sally Lee Sheeks’s exhibition, Flight, is a delightful escape from the cold and ice, or from any burden, for that matter.
Sheeks writes in her artist statement that, “within my work there is a search of how to express silence,” and the sentiment captured my reaction to her paper and mixed-media assemblages. The papers hang from nails or rods suspended above, which allows the sheets to move slightly, and thereby impart a sense of motion, and life, into the bird shapes cut into the sheets.
The centrepiece is a series of 10 vertical white sheets, hung side by side in a row and each cut with its own distinct pattern of birds in flight. Sheeks placed sheets of copper — also free to swing — or plates of bronze behind the white sheets, to give colour and shadow to some of the birds, and to other shapes (principally, trees).
There’s a fragility to the works, which adds to their appeal. Like birds in the air, Sheeks’s sheets of paper are a mix of vulnerability and inspiration. For the time I stopped to look at them, I forgot all about the wrathful winter outside. Flight: New works by Sally Lee Sheeks When & where: to April 12 at the OAG Annex in city hall