Fresh, abstract pieces centre stage this week
On heels of naming conflict with corporate 7-Eleven, 8-11 Gallery’s novel new show opens Thursday
Opening Derek Liddington — Reclining Nude, Sitting Fruit: Lost, sometimes, in his high-concept performance and installation works (he once rebuilt the engine of a ’60s Mustang in the gallery, a protracted performance of sorts launched by an opera duet he had written) is Liddington’s dizzyingly acute gift for graphite drawing. Here it takes centre stage. He embraces art-historical convention — figure drawing, still life — but not quite. A bowl of bananas, ghostly indistinct, are less captured than liberated, their slow fade from fresh to mottled more central than the things themselves. A nude figure drawing is similarly unarrested: Liddington draped a canvas over his model, shading and sketching on the surface as the body shifted and stirred underneath. It’s a poetic and ultimately futile quest: to draw not things, but time itself.
Opening Thursday, 6 p.m., Daniel Faria Gallery, 188 St. Helens Ave. Until Jan. 9. danielfariagallery.com Jeremy Pavka and Sean Procyk — Choice Interface: Best known, perhaps, for their dust-up with the convenience store behemoth 7-Eleven over naming rights, one should never overlook the content of this plucky collective, which routinely delivers some of the freshest programming in the city. Their new show, video work coupled with installation and sound, portrays a paradise lost on multiple levels, as the artists set up camp in the wilderness to relearn an Emersonian kind of self-reliance, with mixed results. Speaking of lost: the project was undertaken amid the bitumen-rich soils of Northern Alberta, where despoilment takes on particular meaning.
Opening Thursday, 5 p.m., 8-11 Gallery, 233 Spadina Ave. Until Dec. 2, on.fb.me/20HhfFK Ongoing Shawn Kuruneru — Rotator, plus Jesse Harris: An unlikely pairing, Kuruneru’s current work is moodily menacing, mostly abstract ink on canvas and draws equal inspiration from gestural abstraction as from 10th-century Chinese landscape painting, which offered multiple perspectives at once. Harris, known best for his text works, here offers works even more dark and equally ambiguous from a representation/abstraction point of view: big sheets of steel are embossed with microgrooves of vinyl, which when black leave the eye searching for the image embedded in the material. Add that the images are photos culled from the East Bay punk scene in 1980s California and the darkness — of a long-dead rebellious idealism now preserved, dirgelike, in black — is equally present.
Until Dec. 12, Cooper Cole Gallery, 1134 Dupont St., coopercolegallery.com Jane Ash Poitras — New Paintings: Poitras, a pioneering First Nations artist (she’s Mikisew Cree, from Northern Alberta) is a painter to be reckoned with, equally at home with fine figure work and gestural; impressionism and abstraction; freely collaging a mix of styles and materials to give her work a mix of the historic and the thoroughly contemporary. Her subject is less peripatetic a target: disappearing elements of our world, nature and culture, which human activity tramples underfoot in the name of progress.
Until Nov. 27, Kinsman Robinson Gallery, 108 Cumberland St., kinsmanrobinson.com