Visual harmonies
Group show offers variety of subjects and styles
“A big group show is like a lively cocktail party,” says Bryce Kanbara. “Everyone speaking at the same time in small groups, harmoniously or not.”
As the owner of You Me Gallery, the longest running gallery on James North, he should know.
Kanbara has curated OMG@YMG, an exhibition of about 100 pieces by 45 artists. Some are regular contributors to the gallery, others are showing for the first time.
Paintings, photographs, sculptures, and textiles are on offer with a wonderful variety of subjects and styles.
Hamilton artist Maureen Paxton, who has been exhibiting for more than 40 years, paints in a lifelike style. Her subjects, however, are inspired by quirky situations and settings.
“‘The Snows of Value Village,’” she says, is “probably one of the gentler things I’ve ever painted. A benevolent universe.”
Paxton comes up close to a collection of seven ceramic figurines on a table top. These are objects people have rejected, but Paxton has adopted them.
“I didn’t see the composition or arrangement per se at Value Village but had just brought a few of the pieces home, added a couple more from my collection and started moving them around on the kitchen table,” she tells me. “No agenda. I just wanted to see if any ideas arose.”
The humans and avians are arranged in a narrative relationship to one another.
A pear tree on the right suggests an outdoor setting. Nearby stands a woman sporting an old fashioned hairstyle. Wearing a long pink evening gown with shoulders exposed, she leans forward with her head raised and her mouth open as if singing.
A goldfinch, one of three birds, sings along. They are accompanied by two barefoot 18th-century-style shepherds with flutes.
Paxton paints white dots of different sizes onto the surface to suggest snow.
“The kitchen was filled with a honeycoloured light. It was summer and late afternoon, early evening,” she recalls. “I think because of the light, the figures looked as if they occupied their own little world and ‘snow globe’ occurred to me. All these little tchotchkes are standins for characters we think we know, just as we think we ‘know’ snow.”
Playing music, dancing, dining and embracing are what the humans and animals in Roman Zuzuk’s paintings do.
Zuzuk, a native of Ukraine who lives in Etobicoke, has been exhibiting for more than 25 years.
In “Evening Conversation,” two men sit outdoors at a table in the centre of the foreground. A cloth with a checkered green and blue pattern covers the table. A bowl of green fruit and one yellow piece lie on the table.
Zuzuk works in a linear style, enclosing his figures and objects within thin dark lines. He simplifies the men’s faces by juxtaposing dark shapes with lighter ones. Their eyes are almond shaped, their bodies chunky and solid.
The men let their goblets almost meet, but they do not seem to look at each other. They appear lost in their own thoughts, or perhaps they are listening to the music provided by the other two men in the scene.
One plays an accordion, the other a fiddle. They occupy the same strip of landscape as the diners, but they stand a bit behind them, thus encouraging us to slowly move into the distance.
The setting then rises in three more sinuous, moonlit horizontals. A village takes over the right side of the painting, its red-roofed houses clustered close together and balanced by some trees on the left.
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator, YouTube video maker and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com
MAUREEN PAXTON “I think because of the light, the figures looked as if they occupied their own little world and ‘snow globe’ occurred to me. All these little tchotchkes are stand-ins for characters we think we know, just as we think we ‘know’ snow.”