Art Toronto 2022

Sonny Assu

Sonny Assu (Ligwilda’xw of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations) has been recognized for his mashups of Indigenous iconography and popular culture. Through a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, prints, large-scale installations and interventions Assu’s work maintains a profound connection to past traditions while speaking to pertinent issues of our time.

Assu’s work is included in numerous major public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), and the Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2021, Assu received the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, awarded every two years by the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana – the home of one of the finest collections of Indigenous art in the world.

Dempsey Bob

Dempsey Bob is a distinguished Tahltan and Tlingit artist of the Wolf Clan. Born in 1948, he began carving in 1969 under the tutelage of Freda Diesing who was his earliest mentor and teacher. At once a traditionalist and vanguard, Dempsey Bob’s sculptures blend traditional narratives and iconography with contemporary influences. His dynamic sculptures re-imagine convention with highly animated sculptures that acknowledge the lineage to which they are indebted while incorporating an expansive view and understanding of sculpture.

Bobbie Burgers

Bobbie Burgers is interested in the process of decay, transformation, and metamorphosis in nature. With a distinct style that merges abstraction with representation in increasing degrees, her work brings together instinctive compositions while revealing her precise powers of observation. Remarkable for their compositional rhythms, bold coloration, and sweeping gestural brushstrokes, Burgers’ paintings bring alive the fundamental quest to express something personal, subjective and emotive, in a poetic, abstract way.

Kim Dorland

Kim Dorland’s practice reflects a fascination with the enigmatic Canadian landscape as it comes into contact with contemporary urban experience. The psychological atmosphere represented by Dorland is confrontational and hallucinatory, disrupting conventional ideas that the natural world is a place of solace and contemplation. Using a dense matrix of intense colours, delirious textures, and passionate painterly touch, Dorland brings a paradoxical sense of displacement in which the artist’s relationship with nature is simultaneously one of awe and fear. In parallel with this, fragments of contemporary urban life materialize themselves in the form of ghostly figures and graffiti remnants. It is through these dueling representations of the landscape that Kim Dorland has created a body of work endowed with an emotional charge whose potential far exceeds the formal confines of the canvas.

Marten Elder

Marten Elder’s photographs offer a reconsideration of the way that images are captured in light of digital and technological developments. Through careful interpretation of the raw data, Elder produces photographs that disrupt spatial hierarchy and that are intensely vibrant in their tonal range. The colours may seem synthetic at first, but they all exist in the world in the same relative relationship to one another, and it is this representation of the world that is of great interest to Elder.

Adad Hannah

Adad Hannah explores historically trenchant themes through elaborate bodies of work that include installation, video, and photography. Inspired by the historical practice of tableaux vivants (translated as “living pictures”), Hannah’s overall practice invokes the durational form of early cinema, while also making reference to early photography by mimicking paintings at a time when it was the very goal of photography to do so. Time occupies a prominent place in Hannah’s production, forged by a lasting interest in temporality and its complex relationship with photography and video. Hannah adds to this history by bridging, or blurring, the divide between the tableau in photography and its originating form as living, i.e., live picture. 

The Estate of Fred Herzog

Fred Herzog was born in Germany in 1930, and immigrated to Vancouver, BC in 1953. Throughout his career he worked almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide film, and only in the past decade did technology allow him to make archival pigment prints that match the exceptional colour and intensity of the Kodachrome slide. Herzog’s use of colour was unusual in the 1950s and 60s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. In this respect, his photographs can be seen as a pre-figuration of the “New Colour” photographers of the 1970s.

Shawn Hunt

Shawn Hunt is a Heiltsuk artist born in Waglisla (Bella Bella), British Columbia. Hunt’s practice is directly informed by his Scottish, French and First Nations background and the visual culture and traditions that accompany it. He works with the traditional Northwest Coast design principle, known as formline, to create abstract, surreal, and sculptural artworks based on ancestral Heiltsuk Cosmology that often reference contemporary aboriginal life. Hunt is always seeking to push the boundaries of the art form, often combining non-traditional ideas with innovative uses of materials and motifs in his work. 

Jack Kenna

Jack Kenna’s artistic practice extends fluidly across painting and sculpture, often incorporating found images, objects, and text. Drawing partially from his material surroundings, his compositions are highly considered and incorporate unconventional juxtapositions, uncanny backgrounds and close-up cropping of objects of subjective and sentimental value. Kenna also makes great use of the extensive cache of online imagery to develop a vocabulary of motifs that are constantly appearing, morphing, and reappearing in his practice. Kenna’s works incorporate a broad range of techniques allowing him to use varied methods of representation. As a young artist, he is comfortable merging imagery from the history of still life painting with the archive of cell phone photography, allowing him to create works that convey the paradoxes inherent in the contemporary experience.

Devon Knowles

Devon Knowles investigates the histories, economies and social meanings of diverse materials – from denim fabric and aluminum to coloured glass and concrete. In moving such substances from their everyday context to a new environment, our appreciation of their properties and capacities becomes heightened. In working and reworking material, using traditional and contemporary fabrication methods, a rich language of the interplay of material and method emerges. As she engages with theories of perception, optical effects and tactility, alongside the direct act of making, Knowles encourages the viewer to access her work from a shared intimacy and sympathetic attentiveness.

Erin McSavaney

Inspired by the practices of 1960’s photorealist painters, Erin McSavaney carefully examines over-looked abandoned warehouses, factories, loading docks and alleys within urban environments. McSavaney’s paintings utilize photographs as an opportunity for immediate intervention, allowing him to explore the spacial effects of light and colour with a clearer understanding of the primary principles of his subjects. Taking real and imaginary interactions between nature and architecture, McSavaney’s paintings begin with photographic studies upon which vividly rendered graphic elements have been imposed using ink and acrylic paint.

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge, originally a landscape and architectural photographer, is primarily known for his groundbreaking images of animals and people in motion. In 1872, a racehorse owner hired Muybridge to prove that galloping horses’ hooves were never all fully off the ground at the same time, a proposition that Muybridge’s images would disprove. One of his main working methods was to rig a series of large cameras in a line to shoot images automatically as the subjects passed by. Viewed in a Zoopraxiscope machine, his images laid the foundation for motion pictures and contemporary cinematography.

Ben Reeves

Ben Reeves is known for his sumptuous use of paint in compositions that deftly explore the relationship between abstraction and depiction. His work is actively engaged with the theory of painting, raising questions about the authenticity of imagery, while remaining deceptively traditional. At first glance, many of his works appear to borrow generously from 19th-century realism, yet they are often meticulously conceptual. Reeves’ work continually asserts that the painted image is a vocabulary of brushstrokes, a culturally understood visual language. Dominated by thick daubs of oil paint, Reeves’ paintings command a physical presence with their relief-like impasto surfaces.

Angela Teng

Angela Teng’s work reconsiders what is traditionally required to make a painting, and then suggests otherwise by renegotiating how a picture can be made. Her painting practice utilizes a laboured dedication to the process of craft through abstraction and studio-based exploration of materials. Her crocheted acrylic ‘paint-paintings’ manipulate ways of paint handling, while her works on hand-made crocheted cotton/linen surfaces celebrate the application of thick oil paint with a brush. Her patterns generate an optical buzz created from the marbling of paint, wobbly form, and through experimenting and observing the optical interaction of colours one upon another.