Liz Pead & Lisa Johnson | Phil Irish | George Boileau

Lonsdale Gallery
announces three exciting concurrent exhibitions!

October 5 – November 3, 2019

Join us for the Opening Reception: Saturday, October 5, from 2-5pm.
Artists in Attendance! 

Left: Liz Pead, Daviot, Inverness. Scotland, 2019, recycled hockey gear and acrylic paint on board with painted staples, 18 x 24 inches
Right: Lisa Johnson, You Are Here, 2019, oil paint on canvas, 36 x 48 inches

Liz Pead & Lisa Johnson
UNCharted Terrain

Main Gallery

Lonsdale Gallery presents UNCharted Terrain, an exhibition featuring fiber based works and ink drawings by Liz Pead and oil paintings by Lisa Johnson. Pairing two award winning female artists, each with their own signature visual and creative sensibilities, this exhibition mines the history of landscape painting. Liz Pead works are at once playful and provocative. Synthesizing craft and painting techniques, her works incite a dialogue about nationalism, art, representation and power. Lisa Johnson’s painterly response to nature investigates how geography becomes embedded in the psyche and culture. What emerges is an engaging exchange surrounding the materiality of painting.

For over a decade, Canadian artist Liz Pead has been crafting multidimensional paintings from recycled hockey equipment. Her Canadian Landscape Series interrogates the relationship between the landscape and hockey – two highly codified symbols of Canadian identity. When Pead developed her series in 2007, she sought to emulate works by the Group of Seven using quintessentially ‘Canadian materials’. What emerged was a potent contemporary critique, that turns that period in the history of Canadian art on its head. Swatches of brightly coloured hockey jerseys become bold colour fields representing the land and sky. White knits and padding are modelled into sublimely arresting cloud formations. Painted staples fleck the composition, further amplifying the artist’s explorations of alternative materials.

Painting Canadian landscapes for over 20 years, Lisa Johnson’s work engages with questions of space and the passage of time over an ever-evolving landscape. Johnson constructs expansive atmospheric vistas rendered through layering of loose planes of colour, punctuated with energetic gestural brushwork. When combined, these layers and fragments create a vibrant vision of the landscape; rooted memory, and the physical and psychological sensations of the terrain. Johnson’s compositions weave together pictorial and abstract sensibilities, designed to evoke a sense of space and movement. Grand rolling vistas that combine hard and soft elements, coalesce to form sumptuous sweeping depictions of the natural world. She invites the viewer to become engrossed in her compositions to experience the energy and the underlying poetry of the landscape.

Left: Phil Irish, Corinthian, 2019, oil paint on aluminum, 30 x 24 inches
Right: George Boileau, Myths & Metaphors (detail), 2003 (rev. 2019), bronze, steel, wood, and brass train parts, 64.5 x 50 x 9 inches

Phil Irish
subMerge

Project Room

Phil Irish’s latest series of paintings unearths what lies beneath the surface of our consciousness and awareness. Irish combines finely detailed brushwork, with narrative elements, and bold hard-lined abstraction to construct otherworldly visions of the arctic. Ethereal apparitions of classic architecture materialize from beneath his majestic icebergs, evoking the sense that these glacial formations have silently bore witness to the transformation of the geography and culture for millennia.

George Boileau
Myths & Metaphors

Upper Gallery

A special presentation of award winning artist George Boileau’s Myths & Metaphors, a large-scale steel and bronze sculpture, depicting a brass steam engine pulling a polished marble sphere back and forth between two monumental mountains. Boileau weaves together symbols of modernity and progress with the Greek legend of Sisyphus, a man condemned to forever repeat the same task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. Explored through a contemporary lens, Boileau reveals a potent allegory for modern life and the resilience of the human spirit.

410 Spadina Road, Toronto, ON, M5P 2W2
416.487.8733 | info@lonsdalegallery.com
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Wednesday to Sunday, 11:00 am to 5:00 pm, or by appointment

ACCESSIBILITY:
Lonsdale Gallery is a partially accessible venue with an entrance at street level to enter the main level of the gallery. Please note, we do not have an elevator to access second level of the gallery and the restroom. For any special assistance or queries about the venue please call or email the gallery.