interior of art gallery

Inside: Familiar spaces at new UTM art exhibit

Blake Eligh

Visit the Blackwood Gallery and you’ll likely recognize some of the portrait subjects. The gallery’s newest exhibit features several recognizable (and more obscure) spots around the UTM campus.

Inside, which opened last week, features the work of eight artists from across Canada and the United States, including four alumni from UTM and Sheridan’s joint art and art history program.

Curator and Sheridan College professor John Armstrong says the exhibit was partly inspired a North Building mural created by UTM alumna Denyse Thomasos, BA'87, when she was a student here in 1986. That mural made him think about the various ways interiors are depicted in artworks.

The works in the exhibit feature a range of techniques spanning from traditional painting to sculpture and collage. For the show, Armstrong enlisted artists who have a traditional painting practice. “I wanted to create a group show where the artists could push ‘painting’ in different directions,” Armstrong says. “All of these artists connect painting to built interior spaces in order to ask us to reconsider painting’s longstanding critical and poetic engagement with the rooms we inhabit.”

Much of the show is hosted in the Blackwood’s main space in the Kaneff building, but visitors shouldn’t miss the additional pieces on display in the e|gallery in the CCT building.

Several works, such as Mark Bell’s Reverse Obsolescence (Deerfield Hall), were commissioned for the show. Drawn directly on the gallery wall in charcoal and chalk lines, Bell’s installation shows a futuristic Deerfield Hall destroyed by flood. Sparrow in Midwinter, a large-scale wall piece by Sara Hartland-Rowe depicts a flip of a giant coin and dozens of tiny vignettes made from polyester organza and other materials. East Wind Brings a New Day: Revisted, an installation by Wasauksing First Nation artist and UTM alumna Maria Hupfield, BA'99, reflects on the many influences in her life with references to the Indian Group of Seven, her cultural heritage and more. In Blackwood II, Pierre Dorion’s minimalist oil painting captures a fragment of the e|gallery’s luminescent wall.

The exhibit also includes a live demonstration by Dorian FitzGerald, BA'05, who will be working on a large canvas in the gallery floor. The UTM alumnus uses an unusual technique, meticulously outlining image details with thick paint and flooding the outlines. Using this process, it can take up to three years to complete a work.

In the e|gallery, visitors will find Burial at Gorée, a painting by Thomasos composed of black slashes of paint inspired by the slave ships that brought African people to North America. Artistic collaborators Trevor Mahovsky and UTM alumna Rhonda Weppler, BA'96, created an commissioned sculpture of plaster and wax collage reminiscent of a university dorm room wall. A second painting by Dorion, Blackwood I, depicts an innocuous corner of the CCT building.

Inside runs at the Blackwood Gallery until March 1. Inside Job Part II, a talk featuring exhibition artists Bell, FitzGerald and Mahovsky, will take place at Sheridan College’s Annie Smith Arts Centre on February 12 from 12 pm to 2 pm. The panel will discuss how contemporary painters use elements of studio practice to create site-sensitive wallworks or performances. For more information, please visit the Blackwood Gallery website at www.blackwoodgallery.ca.