IMAGINARY

Niwah Visser
Gwen Ramsay
Erin Finley
Linda Martinello
Hui-Yun Tsai

January 2005

Work by five Ontario artists who have all graduated from the Art and Art history program at Sheridan College and the University of Toronto at Mississauga. This show of young emerging artists casts a light on the issues and preoccupations that concern this new generation of artists.

The large black and white photographs of Niwah Visser probe the tentative intimacy between a young girl and her father, alluding to a posture of touch and gesture as a darker, more discomforting reading of the implied relationship.

La Chandelle - Ramsay
The paintings of Gwen Ramsay address her infatuation with the overloaded presentation of hanging light fixtures displayed in a typical lighting store. The monochromatic painted surface and slight use of tonal contrast create a light ephemeral veil of obsessive intent.

Erin Finley's paintings explore the legend of Nadia Nefariously, a punk rock star who died in 1982. The artist introduces the viewer into a world of blacks, reds and pinks, themselves a somewhat punk gesture of visually jarring theatricality, provocatively playing with the parameters of jovial sexuality and good taste.

Linda Martinello assembles her canvases from the detritus of her everyday life, not unlike Dylan Thomas’s “the fag ends of one man’s year”. The rich, shimmering surface is opulent and yet contains factual discards, such as of streetcar tickets, that are layered as archeology within the canvas. Fruit is also a trailing motif that imbues the canvas with the hierarchy of its own particular palette, dictating the whole colour code from ripe to rotten as a limitation of possibility.

Hui-Yun Tsai paints from the romantic memory of place and time, layering exotic architectural forms as a stage set, enacting her own particular drama. A tree entwined within a windowed wall that defies spatial logic approaches the mythic, climbing into the sun of its own mythology.