Posts filed under ‘Launch Projects’
Launch Projects Gallery
On going Submissions for Launch Projects
Launch Projects is currently accepting submissions for the Winter 2010 Term.
For more info please visit http://launchprojects.wordpress.com/, or email us at info@launchprojects.ca
Susan Gosevitz / Interpretative Landscapes
Solo exhibition by Toronto artist Susan Gosevitz
February 25 – March 8, 2009
Opening reception: Thursday Feb. 26, 6-9 pm
Gallery hours: Wed. – Sun. 12-5 pm
Artist present Saturday & Sunday
Presented by Launch Projects
404 Adelaide Street West, Toronto
416-364-2475 www.launchprojects.ca
Interpretative landscapes, encaustic on paper is a one time body of work and a must see exhibition. This body of work is the result of a year-long exploration in encaustics bringing drawing and painting together depicting the Canadian landscape through the use of line, light and depth. Carving through thick layers of wax, exposing the paper beneath allows a form of expression that highlights the landscape using texture. This effect of contrast, where exposed paper acts a source of light, illuminating the sky and water, is weighted heavily by the dark opacity wax affords giving forth a robustness to the hilly terrain.
“After experimenting with a new medium, in this case hot and cold wax, an intuitive process takes place that is hard to put into words.” said Susan Gosevitz, visual artist. “After life-long observation of the Canadian landscape, images of hills, valleys and lakes are ingrained in my unconscious thoughts. In creating these images, I closed my eyes and entered the dreamy world of my imagination and everything flowed from there”
About the Artist
Susan Gosevitz is a Toronto based visual artist and a graduate of the Toronto School of Art. A naturalist and painter, Gosevitz paints the Canadian landscape combining realism and imagery. Gosevitz paints scenes of natural moments to wake up, to calm and to invite the viewer to feel as one with nature. In this one time body of work, artist Susan Gosevitz has stepped outside her traditional landscape oil paintings to explore the abstraction of an idea.
For more information visit: www.susangosevitz.com
e: susan@susangosevitz.com / p: 416-930-1892
Nancy Oakes / Humans: Walk
AN EXPLORATION IN DRAWINGS, SOUND AND TEXT
Two venues:
1) Jan. 21 to Feb. 1, Gallery 1313, 1313 Queen St. West, between Dufferin and Lansdowne. Wed. to Sun. 1-6, reception Sat. Jan. 24, 2-5 p.m.
2) Jan. 28 to Feb. 8, Launch Projects, 404 Adelaide St. West, 2nd building west of Spadina on the north side. Wed. to Sun. 12-5, reception Thurs. Jan. 29, 4-8 p.m.
Three elements to each show:
1) walking drawings (the result of drawing and walking simultaneously, and whose subject is mostly other people walking);
2) a new audio recording each day of the artist’s footsteps and the environment she walked through that morning;
3) short writings on the theme of walking, contributed by gallery visitors.
One wall in each gallery will be devoted to these writings – thoughts, reminiscences – whatever people contribute. Length: anything from one word to one page. All submissions received by Thurs. Feb. 5 will be posted. In the installation, names will not appear with the writings. Contributors will be acknowledged on a separate “thank you” list.
Writings may be sent through www.nancyoakes.ca
Call for Submissions / CONTACT
CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival 2009 / An exhibition at the Toronto School of Art and Launch Projects.
Thematic Focus / Still Revolution
‘You Say You Want A Revolution’….
As expressed by John Lennon in reaction to the Vietnam War, the title of this show provokes an exploration of the dual nature of revolution. Spinning the Contact festival theme at a pivotal time in technological, political and environmental realms, this exhibition will explore how we respond to changes in our world.
‘You Say You Want A Revolution’ is a group show juried by Lise Beaudry (Director at Gallery 44).
DEADLINE: Friday April 3rd at 4.30 pm.
Please submit:
• Six images on a cd. Images that will visually depict the nature of the work the artist has in mind. Please submit jpegs res.300 dpi, max. of 1024×768 pixels. Label each image with a number and title (01InitialsTitle.jpg – 10InitialsTitle.jpg)
• Style, subject matter and medium should be consistent in the examples. The images should show a cohesive body of work.
• An image list in a word document should show the titles, medium, size and date of each work.
An artist statement or project description that describes the body of work to be shown.
• A Curriculum Vitae (showing education and experience relevant to the artist’s career).
• A non-refundable $35 submission fee
Please mail or drop off submissions to:
Launch Projects
Toronto School of Art
410 Adelaide St. West 3rd Floor
Toronto, ON
M5V 1S8
Sorry, we will not be accepting email submissions for this exhibition.
In/Sight/Out Exhibition
January 14 – 25, 2009
Opening / January 15, 4 – 7 pm
Gallery Hours / Wed. – Sun. 12 – 5 pm
A survey of current works produced by the Professional Studio class at TSA
Narges Alavi
Adrian Barrera
Sheila Ghazarin
Susan Gosevitz
Ashley Guindon
Rena Okada
Beverly Ring
Call for Submissions / POLARITY
po⋅lar⋅i⋅ty [poh-lar-i-tee, puh-]
-noun
1. physics
a. the property or characteristic that produces unequal physical effects at different points in a body or system, as a magnet or storage battery.
b. the positive or negative state in which a body reacts to a magnetic, electric, or other field.
2. the presence or manifestation of two opposite or contrasting principles or tendencies
3. linguistics
a. (of words, phrases, or sentences) positive or negative character.
b. polar opposition.
Launch Projects is also looking for submissions for multiples of objects for the Launch Multiples cabinet with the theme of polarity.
Deadline: February 8th / Show dates: February 25 – April 29, 2009
Your object(s) may embrace the idea of being something it’s not – an imposter, or they may express the versatility of being two extremes at once, embodying two opposites.
Multiples will be displayed for approx. 8 weeks and will be sold with 60% commission going to the artist.
Submit: Please email 3 – 6 jpegs of work proposed or a previous (similar) body of work to submissions@launchprojects.ca. (attention Stephanie Cormier and Tara Bursey). Please include a list of the works (with medium, size, year, price) and a short bio or CV.
Launching into New Skies
written by Liz Phillips
One thing about artists, they need space. In order to grow, they need to show.
With the opening of the LAUNCH PROJECTS gallery space located at Spadina and Adelaide, the skies just opened up.
An umbrella exhibition space for Toronto School of Art students, as well as for unaffiliated emerging and established artists, LAUNCH PROJECTS fills the gap left by the exodus of galleries in the late 1990’s, when they moved away from the downtown core.
LAUNCH PROJECTS’ vision – mixing established artists, who can provide a kind of mentorship through example, with emerging artists, who will have an opportunity to test their chops – will provide a mutually beneficial cross-fertilization of ideas and expressions. Cultivating this kind diversity usually results in healthy boundary pushing of ideas and practice, ensuring exhibitions offer thought provoking, surprising and fresh works.
LAUNCH PROJECTS occupies a modest space about the size of a living room. Yet its second show, a group exhibition of emerging artists appropriately called Launch, beautifully illustrates the old adage that small is mighty. It’s hard to imagine seven artists displaying one or two works in this space without overcrowding each other, but they pulled it off. The exhibit successfully showed an array of complementary pieces in a variety of media and scales, ranging from abstraction to representation, from print and photography to painting and sculpture.
Ron Wild exhibited a digital poster in which he “takes the figure and makes it all ground,” representing/performing one of the biggest paradigm shifts in our digital age, i.e. that everything is now available for appropriation and sampling. Mashing together text, graphics, icons, clip art and anything else you can imagine into a democracy of images, old concepts of foreground and background dissolve, while the over-population of content over-signifies to such a degree that each thing both counts and does not count. And it all happens on one surface.
In contrast, Joann Maplesden’s blurry, black-and-white photo portraits are all figure and no clear background context, except for an off-white blankness. Yet as representational as these photographs appear, we still cannot identify the subject. Are these self-portraits, portraits of someone the artist knows, or are these found photographs? The serialization of the image, as well as its blurry, black-and-white nature evoke a nostalgia of photo-booth photographs, a technology from a few decades ago, visually reinforced through hairstyle, glasses and clothing styles of a bygone time. All these clues could date the person in the photograph, but they still do not tell us who it is. What this project does asks us is, can we trust what we see? Are these found photographs from the 1960s, or are they digitized manipulations made to look that way? In the digital age, anything is possible.
Jane Adams’s acrylic paintings, over layered with Japanese paper collage, explore Peruvian Nazca lines – scars on the landscape thought to have spiritual implications. Adams draws her imagery from digital pictures she downloads from the Internet, but the resulting abstractions evoke other things – one flat shape looks like a frog, another like a snake. Adams transforms her source material into hand-made tactile works that no longer even hint at their digital source, yet the ubiquity of this source, even when it is no longer obviously traceable, seems to have become the foundation for how many artists create their visible worlds.
Similarly, Dana Peebles works with tactile materials, layering etching techniques with actual rice paper collage, creating virtual and physical surface textures as well as visual depth. Her two works – “Lilly Pad” and “Galaxy” – both the same diminutive size, feature two very differently scaled worlds, blurring the lines between the micro and the macro. The integration of these seemingly disparate worlds – tiny things on earth and the vastness of the sky – play off Wild’s image mash-up, exposing the ways in which our digitally-informed seeing tends to level the playing field, making all things exist on one plane of possibility. We no longer feel any compunction about joining worlds that seem light years apart.
Launch also featured works by Julita Wolanska, Huma Faiz and Kae Sasaki.
With the mixture of the digital and the tactile in this show, the virtual makes its presence felt through physical manifestations. It is the connection of space and things, the locus where ideas and objects interact and reformulate each other. And perhaps that is the gift of the digital age: to remind us that everything is connected: all is one.
Acknowledgements
It takes a small army of people to mount the TSA Open House events each year. A huge note of thanks must be extended to all the students and faculty members who gave generously of their time to install all the work from their classes and to all the show sitters as well.
The volunteer army was a little light on the ground in terms of cleaning the space this time around, but special mention has to be given to those students who did turn up.
Kathryn Harison, Carmen Talavera, Adrian Barrera, Adrian’s friend Juan
In particular Michael Cairns and Gianluca Primucci, the two tank engines of the day. Also, special thanks to Daniel Borgatta for putting time into the wee hours.
A massive tip o’ the TSA hat to all the office staff who pitched in to fill volunteer gaps: Rani Glick, Stephanie Cormier, Kitty Au, Amanda White, Elizabeth D’Agostino
And finally, thanks to Brian Burnett for the curation and hanging of the “Faculty Picks” exhibit in LAUNCH PROJECTS.
There are many more left unmentioned who contributed to this, so thanks again to all who came through in so many ways. Without everyone, we couldn’t get these done in our particular style.
Thomas Hendry
~ Open House Organizer
Call for Submissions / MULTIPLES
Multiples at LAUNCH PROJECTS for the TSA Open House.
We are looking for small innovative and inexpensive art multiples (anything you can make alot of!) for the art multiples cabinet at LAUNCH PROJECTS. They will be exhibited from Dec 11 to Jan 14.
Please bring your works to the office by 4pm Dec 10th. All work may not be included pending space restrictions.
The art multiples cabinet is designed for objects for sale. Artists receive 60% of sale and 40% goes toward maintenance of the Launch Projects Exhibition space.
