3 To See: October 2nd, 2024 Edition

Installation view of Erin Armstrong's Paper Thin. Photography courtesy of Bau-Xi Gallery.

Erin Armstrong, Paper Thin

On until October 3rd at Bau-Xi Gallery Dufferin

Figurative painter Erin Armstrong’s current show Paper Thin at Bau-Xi Gallery’s Dufferin location is a poignant interpretation of a tumultuous year-to-date. Here, Armstrong boldly materializes the processes of “grief and self-examination” that, as the artist explains in the exhibition’s statement, “compelled me to retreat into my own world, confronting the profound ways we experience loss and time.” After her father unexpectedly passed away – and having to navigate that experience in addition to health issues and a long-term partnership breakup – Armstrong now generously allows us to bear witness to the scope of emotional and physical turmoil she endured while simultaneously ruminating on life’s big and ultimately unanswerable questions.

This universally experienced existential ambiguity and unrest is harnessed beautifully through Armstrong’s characteristically saturated colour choices, which are in this series are enhanced using gradients meant to symbolize a spectrum of fluctuating internal states; palpable brushwork further augments a sense of interior calamity. The abstracted figures in each painting, alone and contorted into various physical positions, serve as embodiments of the perplexing aspects of the human condition. Some of these figures are seen juggling, as Armstrong aims to visually capture a sense of “the daily balancing act we all perform in our lives.”

With faces evoking melancholy, confusion and fatigued desperation, these contemplative characters are indeed each of us (though we’re probably hesitant to reveal it so obviously). In some works, they make eye contact with the onlooker plaintively, like they are begging us for an illuminating response, a kind word, or someone to shake them from the mental cobwebs that are woven throughout our own familiar voyages of inner disorientation. A kinship forms between viewer and subject, the artist and beyond. As Armstrong highlights at the end of the show’s text, “Paper Thin aims to transcend the literal, offering a space for reflection on the complexities of our inner worlds and the shared human experience.”

Learn more about the exhibition in this video.

Installation view of Kate Newby's Who Is This Song?. Photography courtesy of Cooper Cole Gallery.

Kate Newby, Who Is This Song?

On until November 9th at Cooper Cole Gallery

Rejoice! A ceramics show that wants you to pick up the pieces.

In her third solo exhibition at Cooper Cole Gallery, Who Is This Song?, sculptor Kate Newby invites us to interact with an appealingly inscrutable array of multi-hued lumps and loafs crafted from stoneware and glass. The bulbous works in the collection, calculatedly sprawled across the space’s first floor, can be jiggled to produce sound – perhaps a nerve-wracking proposition given the usual distance gallery-goers are expected to keep in relation to the art.

While it’s rare to see ceramics presented in such a deliciously performative fashion, Newby’s ideas eclipse the novelty of it through the undeniable sense of intimacy that’s forged as curious hands clutch and caress the craggy surfaces she manifests. We are meaningfully beholden to the senses in a most organic way while engaging with the artist’s lumpen cache – a sensation in sharp contrast to the held-breath moments we sustain when gazing at more “perfectly” hand-hewn sculptures.

By compelling us to not only take note of, but to actually feel her labour, Newby challenges the staunchly formal perimeters which are commonly placed around her craft. And what ultimately transpires is the development of a new perspective on an artist’s output and what it has the potential to make us feel, literally and figuratively. As Natalie Power notes in the exhibition’s text while describing Newby’s intensely process-focused practice: “What these actions beget, ultimately, are objects of disarming relatability. Rocks like friends. Metamorphic bundles of color with discernible attitudes––asking to be cradled and shaken, or else left the hell alone. Decisively assertive things, though hardly smug. They humbly anchor space. They command more than what they are given.”

So, pay them mind and give in to the spectacle of their existence.

Katherine Takpannie, Il faut cultiver notre jardin #1, 2024. Archival pigment ink print. Two sizes available. Photography courtesy of Olga Korper Gallery.

Katherine Takpannie, Itiitiq | ᐃᑏᑎᖅ

On until October 5th at Olga Korper Gallery

Through her gracefully assertive and sensitively conceived of photos, Katherine Takpannie elucidates ancestral connections and investigates her identity. “This exhibition is grounded in learning more about who I am,” she says in the accompanying text for Itiitiq | ᐃᑏᑎᖅ, her second solo show at Olga Korper Gallery. “Unlearning the impacts of acculturation and further reconnecting deeply with myself and my heritage.”

Takpennie’s vividly illuminating work employs narratives both long-lived and still unfolding to frame and reframe traditional and contemporary considerations of her own personhood, as well as those of her community. A couple of photos in Takpannie’s stirring show call attention to the resistance held in the preparation of traditional Inuit foods, her mother’s hands adoringly captured in a moment of quiet domesticity that, when context is understood, in fact proudly vocalizes resilience. Other images arrestingly highlight Inuit creation stories by way of role play; in one case, there’s an artistic transcription of her own personally written tale using the Sea Goddess Sedna to tell a story about climate change.

Takpannie uniquely transposes these stories by infusing her own presence into each evocative frame. Crouching in dirt, laying on ice, dangling from trees, peering out from behind masks – Takpannie’s physicality represents the notions of being both reader and listener as she interprets and chronicles her Indigeneity.

Revealing similar themes of tension and tenderness extracted from archival inquiry to those explored in the recent exhibition Gestures of Remembering by Linda Sormin and Emma Nishimura, Takpennie affords her ongoing personal and communal stories a future as well as a past: Intertwined durations that are resolute in reclamation, and defiant in response.