Please join us on July 30th for an exhibition of new work by four promising young Toronto-based artists working within the mediums of sculpture, installation and painting.
... Using resolutely traditional materials and fabrication techniques, and deliberately adopting outmoded formalisms, Dickie, Maltese, McGuane and Triggs each conduct distinct but overlapping investigations, delving into the uneasy zones between function and decoration, painting and sculpture, pictorial and phenomenological space. The recently launched Sennate Gallery provides an ideal setting for this exercise, its white-walled storefront exhibition space merging with a residential apartment to create a zone that perpetually oscillates between the quotidian and the prodigious.
Employing a working methodology borrowed from abstract painting, Georgia Dickie’s sculptural work combines found objects and constructed materials that investigate primary form, functionality, and embellishment. Utilitarian appendages are grafted onto sculptural forms as if to enable unacknowledged spaces, to gain access to that which normally serves no purpose.
In Vanessa Maltese’s painstakingly crafted images, geometric constructions create the illusion of three-dimensional space while simultaneously undermining their plausibility as objects in subtle ways. In an obverse manner, her sculptural pieces occupy real space, while also revealing themselves as an accumulation of surfaces through the language of painting.
Using appropriated images and found objects, Abby McGuane interrogates conventions specific to both two-dimensional work and object-based sculpture. In two wall-mounted pieces that make reference to long -debunked formalist tropes, namely the monochrome and the grid, found shelf units are reworked and combined with found objects to create poetic, if obtuse, pieces that sit uneasily between the realms of fine art and interior design.
Dealing in gestures of anthropomorphism reminiscent of surrealist objet-trouvés, Amanda Triggs’ sculptures consist of discarded furniture, in which utilitarian elements such as handles and legs are detached and recombined into new configurations that convey a sense of empathy, enlisting the unknown histories of disparate objects as well as the trace of unseen human actions.
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