George Shaw, resting and relaxing in New York City with guns, nuts and beer…
Yves Tessier, Guns, Beer & Peanuts, 2018
Yves Tessier, Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do To You, 2016-2017
Yves Tessier, Couple, 2018
Yves Tessier, Cedar Closet, 2018
Yves Tessier, Cherry Picnic, 2018
There is much to like in Canadian artist Yves Tessier’s show Cherry Picnic at SHRINE. In a dozen or so paintings, Tessier tells stories that are at once familiar, yet remain highly ambiguous. While figures are often grouped, they are also often emotionally detached from one another, as if acting a bad script. But, there’s a ‘however,’ as Tessier also often jolts his scenes with finger-snapping humour and absurdity to comment on humanity’s contemporary values and aspirations. Along the way, he references Japanese prints, Egyptian friezes, and comic books.
Katherine Bradford, One Man’s Tub, 2018
Katherine Bradford, All of Us, 2018
Katherine Bradford, Suits, 2018
Katherine Bradford, Olympiad, 2018
Katherine Bradford, Waiting Room, 2018
Katherine Bradford’s luminescent show Friends and Strangers at CANADA is another exploration of emotional spaces with groups of people often seemingly at odds with each other, or themselves. Bradford, however, approaches her large canvases as a figurative-colourist-mark-maker, turning her subjects into featureless figures not so much bereft of a personality, as much as a medulla oblongata. Although these chunks of humanity seem lost and bewildered there is enough absurdity in the air to find gentle humour. Bradford doesn’t have all the answers. What she has is confidence. In every colour.
Alex Dodge, Whisper in my ear and tell me softly, 2018
Alex Dodge, This Calm Embrace of Pain (Hanna Rosin), 2018
Alex Dodge, Boko Maru (Bokonon/Vonnegut), 2018
Alex Dodge, Like a Dream (Li Qinzhao), 2018
Alex Dodge, The flower of the human heart (Ono no Komachi), 2018
Each of the works in Alex Dodge’s show Whisper in My Ear and Tell Me Softly at Klaus Von Nichtssagend began life as a 3D-rendered object, draped using virtual physics simulation, and stencilled to allow reproduction on a 2D plane (a canvas). Dodge pushes paint by hand into the stencil to create a sculptural effect with thick paint raised enough to create a shimmering effect. Adding to the poetics, the fabrics convey verses from poems in various languages. And yet, all that politeness and perfection has nothing much to say.
