Current Exhibitions

SIMONE JONES
All That is Solid

January 19 - March 24, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 24, 7 - 9 pm
Artist Talk: Friday, January 25, 12 pm

Our modern world is one that is filled with screens. Computers, smart phones, digital advertisements; the world is now perceived through a rectangular frame. How does this experience augment our view of reality? Does it make the two worlds, the virtual, and the real, less separate than they once were? This exhibition is a response to some of those questions.

Simone Jones, a Toronto-based artist and professor at OCAD University, has been investigating the artistic application of robotics and technology for over two decades. An evolving practice, her work started with analog robots made from bits and pieces she could find at surplus stores and now includes CGI (Computer Generated Images) and video installation.

In All That Is Solid, Jones explores spatial contradictions; near and far, surface and depth, illusion and realism. Using photography, film, and CGI, Jones explores how we document, and how our perception of reality can shift through various applications of what we record. In the central work of the exhibition, four screens lean against the wall with images, both black and white and CGI, flowing one into the other. Jones, by conjoining images, is attempting to create a hybrid space—asking the viewer to focus their attention on the nature of the images themselves.

In a related work, Jones produces stereograms—images that allow us to see in three dimensions without the use of external visual aids. Alongside this, a video installation combines illusion and reality, and a dialogue is created between what is real and what is “fake”. However, for the viewer, just one single reality is the result.

Simone Jones’ installation has been curated by Linda Jansma of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa . The touring exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue including texts by Stuart Reid and Chris Gehman, produced in collaboration with Rodman Hall Art Centre; Thames Art Gallery, Chatham, Ontario; and The Reach, Abbotsford, British Columbia.

www.simonejones.com

Image: All That Is Solid, 2011, four-screen 3D animation with stereo sound, 12 minute loop, installation.

KEVIN YATES with ROBERT YATES
Usher the Fall of the House

January 19 – June 16, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 24, 7 pm
Artist Talk: Friday, February 8, 12 pm

Known for his highly realistic miniatures that are at once familiar and strangely unsettling, Kevin Yates’s works possess a quiet, meditative quality, often likened to the pause of a film still. Responding to the historic character of Rodman Hall’s Hansen Gallery, Yates presents a major new sculptural work and a video produced in collaboration with his brother Robert Yates, an experimental filmmaker. Dream-like in their subversion of the expected, these works further Yates’s consideration of the uncanny, exploring domestic spaces as sites of memory, mystery, wonder, and fantasy.

OLIA MISHCHENKO
Ravine World

January 25 to September 8, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 24, 7 pm
Artist Talk: Friday, March 22, 12 pm

Olia Mishchenko’s intricate drawings depict urban spaces existing on the topographic and historical ledge. Ravine World is based on an aggregate study of the current and historic conditions of ravines in the cities around the Golden Horseshoe. The drawings include high-rise buildings, ravine properties, parklands and civic points of interest, both real and utopian. This cumulative drawing project will imagine new uses for the ravine spaces of the city and will propose a post-utopian vision for a site where the man made and the natural intersect in a strange, delinquent balance.

MARY ANNE BARKHOUSE
Settlement

Curated by Stuart Reid
Presented by Rodman Hall Art Centre with financial support of the Government of Canada through Cultural Capitals of Canada, a program of the Department of Canadian Heritage

October 14, 2012 to September 29, 2013

Opening Reception: Sunday, October 14, 2 – 4 pm

In creating this new outdoor installation for Rodman Hall, Barkhouse examines issues of sovereignty and confederacy from an indigenous ecological vantage point. As an aboriginal woman, Barkhouse is mindful of the history of conflict imprinted on this region of Ontario, particularly during this bicentennial commemoration of the War of 1812. Many of the conflicts and alliances between First Nations and settling cultures that played out two hundred years ago are still unresolved today.

Settlement incorporates sculptural elements into an artist’s garden built in the shape of a frontier house (16 x 20 feet). Last spring, the artist planted a series of border gardens of indigenous plants including corn, squash, beans and quinoa. Situated in the interior spaces of the garden are life-size bronze sculptures of a coyote and a badger, alluding to the cooperative nature of the allies involved in the 1812 conflict. Badgers and coyotes are known to be cooperative hunters in their search for small burrowing animals in the wild. Barkhouse is interested in the contentious nature of territory as is relates to struggles over land, whether between humans, amongst animals or plants.

An illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Stuart Reid and an interview with the artist by Michelle LaVallee, Associate Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, will be forthcoming in 2013. This publication is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Barkhouse was born in Vancouver and belongs to the Nimpkish band, Kwakiutl First Nation. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and has exhibited her work widely. A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, her recent solo exhibition entitled Boreal Baroque toured Canada.

Associated Programs

HOT TALK: Mary Anne Barkhouse
June 21, 2013, 7- 9 pm
On National Aboriginal Day, join the artist Mary Anne Barkhouse for an illustrated lecture about her work and the outdoor exhibition Settlement.

In the meantime, check out this audiocast with the artist discussing some of her intentions behind the work: