Plus, revisit Q's interview with finalist June Clark. "Art chose me — I didn’t choose art."
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Hi, Art!

Sunday, June 16, 2024

Hi, Art!

Sunday, June 16, 2024

Hi, art lovers!

 
Interior photo of a brown-walled art gallery. The light is dim and amber. The walls are covered with scraps of colourful fabric that have been printed with images. A lone figure dressed in black walks in the gallery. They are blurry with motion. Each scrap on the wall is illuminated by a string light.

Installation view of June Clark's exhibition, Witness, at the Power Plant gallery in Toronto. (LF Documentation)

 
Way back in January, Q aired this charming interview with June Clark, an artist whose work is now appearing at three major institutions in Toronto: the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, MOCA and the AGO. Known for her work in photography, sculpture and collage, June was born in Harlem, N.Y., in 1941 and came to Canada in the late 1960s, settling in Toronto with her husband so he could avoid the Vietnam draft. She wasn’t an artist when she arrived here, she told Tom Power on Q, but to make sense of being so far from home, she picked up a camera. “Art chose me — I didn’t choose art,” she said on the program. And after decades of embracing the “unpredictability” of life and creative work, June marked a career first last week when she was named a finalist for the prestigious Sobey Art Award.

Joining her on the 2024 shortlist are five artists from distinct areas across Canada. (A new regional category, Circumpolar, was added this year.) The nominees are Taqralik Partridge (whom you might remember from the CBC Arts series How to Lose Everything); Mathieu Léger; Judy Chartrand; Rhayne Vermette; and Nico Williams, whose work is on view at the National Gallery of Canada right now as part of the travelling group exhibition Radical Stitch. 

Come October, the NGC will open a show that highlights work from all of this year’s Sobey nominees. The winner of the $100,000 prize will be announced Nov. 9. 
 

And because we promised you eye candy ...

 
Vibrant oil painting embellished with seed bead flowers that blend into the painted image like camouflage. The painting is in a style reminiscent of 3D digital art. A plump cartoonish strawberry floats on a cyan backdrop amid bubbly white daisies.

Sierra Barber

This delicious beaded painting is the work of Sierra Barber, an MFA candidate at Concordia University in Montreal.
 
Pastel hued image of the back of a girl's head, surrounded by surreal illustrations. The girl has two long dark braids and wears an illustrated baby blue bucket hat. A USB appears to be at the end of one plait and a ghostly computer mouse hangs from the other. Tiny figures surround her and ghostly winking eyes appear above her in a translucent lilac frame.

Laïla Mestari

Choufi by Laïla Mestari. (Laïla has a solo exhibition opening at Patel Brown Toronto June 20.)
 
2D image. Three rows of horses in silhouette appear above three rows of green apples, rendered at different angles (all flat). The background is patterned in various ways. The top left corner is a greyscale grid, similar to a transparent background in Photoshop. Some portions are olive green. Others are striped in red and orange.

Andrea Chartrand

Would you believe this is a photograph? A photograph about photography, no less? It’s by Andrea Chartrand, whose work is on view in Vancouver as part of the Capture Photography Festival (info here).
 
Round artwork with burned edges and holes. The surface is like spin-paint art, creating an optical illusion-like web in black and grey.

Graham Wiebe

Snowflake #32 by Winnipeg-born artist Graham Wiebe.
 
Figurative painting set in a field with playground equipment visible on the horizon. Central figure is a man in a tracksuit blowing bubbles. A screaming infant hangs over one arm. A child with long dark hair reaches for the bubbles that rise in the air.

Larry Madrigal

And finally, some Father’s Day vibes courtesy of Larry Madrigal. (This painting from 2022 is titled Descendants.)
 
 

You've got to see this

 
 
 
Detail of a religious mosaic from St. Anne's Anglican Church. Depicts the Virgin Mary, seen in a blue veil and red robe, holding the baby Jesus, an infant surrounded by a golden halo grasping a golden key. The figures are flanked by two male figures in profile, shepherds carrying staffs.
The National/CBC Archives

Tour the priceless wonders of Canadian art lost in a Toronto fire

 
St. Anne’s Anglican Church featured murals by the Group of Seven as well as sculptures by Florence Wyle and Frances Loring.
 
White walled gallery. Dozens of metal sculptures are assembled on colourful plinths.
Toni Hafkenscheid

An anticapitalist fairy tale … about whirligigs

 
The Big Hat, a whimsical solo exhibition from Tony Romano, is on now at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ont.
 
Medium closeup of DJ Me Time, performing on stage and bathed in blue and purple lights. She is a woman of colour holding a microphone and wearing mirrored shades and a furry hat.

Red Eye Media

 

It’s not a rave — it’s R.A.V.E.

 
This new play by a Degrassi star doubles as a dance party, and it’s happening inside a vacant office building.
 

Follow this artist

 
 
 
Instagram

Vridhhi Chaudhry

@vridhhi
Portrait rendered in a cartoonish style. A human figure with pink skin, large oval eyes and purple hair nuzzles with a red poppy. The poppy has an eye that is the same  as the human figure's.

Vridhhi Chaudhry

Never mind Instagram, maybe you saw this piece while taking the subway. Vridhhi’s one of the artists featured in Spaced, an exhibition that’s appearing in select Toronto transit stations. We got the story behind the show.
 

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I’m Leah Collins, senior writer at CBC Arts. Until next time!

 
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