Scholarship/Fellowship Exhibitions: October 27 – November 26, 2011
Artist talks: Thursday, October 27, 6-7 pm
followed by Opening Reception from 7-9 pm

Image credits (L to R): Lauren Nurse, ESP Cards, letterpress on Maidstone paper, 2.5 x 3.5 inches each, 2011; Tara Cooper, Weather Girl, ultrachrome ink on cotton paper, 24" x 18", 2010; Flora Shum, RLPA2011THFP1 (detail), etching, 18 x 24", 2011.

Open Studio is pleased to present the 2010-11 Scholarship/Fellowship Exhibitions from October 27 – November 26, 2011, featuring artists Tara Cooper (Nick Novak Fellowship), Lauren Nurse (Donald O'Born Family Scholarship), and Flora Shum (Don Phillips Scholarship). Each year, Open Studio awards three scholarships/fellowships, providing artists working in print media with both professional support and access to studio facilities to create new work during a one-year period. All three artists will give illustrated talks about their work and the progress of their projects over the year on Thursday, October 27 at 6 pm at Open Studio, followed by an opening reception. As London, ON-based artist, writer and academic Patrick Mahon points out in the accompanying essay, the common thread between these exhibitions is that all three artists are engaged in complex practices of making art generated in response to living/thinking experiences, which ultimately point to the artists themselves.

Tara Cooper: Weather Girl's Field Guide to Lightning
Derived from true stories documenting recent encounters with lightning, Tara Cooper's Weather Girl's Field Guide to Lightning (Open Studio Gallery) depicts a myriad of subject matter from meteorological equipment, weather patterns and cloud formations to the quotidian — a light bulb, a metal chair, a bottle of Jack Daniels and a lottery ticket. Combining print with film and sculpture, the exhibition conflates the impersonal language of the statistic with the impact of the personal experience — a place where both the weather and the viewer share the role of witness, impartial bystanders to the events of everyday.

Lauren Nurse: There's always room on the broom
Lauren Nurse's There's always room on the broom (Print Sales Gallery) synthesizes the artist's interests in the modern separation and opposition between culture and nature, and in locating the mythological/uncanny in evocations of the "wild." Nurse is interested in the dissolution of boundaries between categories, ideas, and objects, the tension between inside and outside, and the intersections that occur when borders of the body become fluid and porous. Cultural perceptions of nature have always held a certain amount of anxiety, and have spawned numerous myths, legends and fables. These narratives expose culture's uneasy relationship with the natural world. In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, Nurse considers the mythic as a symbolic expression of the cultural unease that pervades a society and shapes its collective behavior. Her work has revolved around the idea of collisions between nature and culture — passing comment on some of the ways in which we see nature as existing outside of culture and society, yet simultaneously influencing the ways in which we live.

Flora Shum: RLPA2011THF
Flora Shum's RLPA2011THF, an acronym for The Rules of Life – Project A: To Have Face, 2011 (George Gilmour Members' Gallery), explores identity and the need to save face and conceal personal weakness. The work reflects the artist's compulsion to dissect and analyze identity. While science allows us to split something open and magnify it to find answers which are understood as facts, in matters of identity, we are left to explore the confusion of boundaries we are given, the expectations of others and of oneself, the scramble to always advance and the desperation of finding a sense of belonging. This series of etchings explores the possibilities, blurring the boundaries, creating new bodies, new bones, new organs, new tissues, new cells, inserting information into nuclei. The idea is to create, alter, clone and construct new super-cyborgs — technology fixing what technology created.

Open Studio thanks The Catherine and Maxwell Meighen Foundation and the Donald O'Born Family for their kind support of the 2010-11 Scholarship/Fellowship Program. Open Studio also gratefully acknowledges the on-going support of The City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, the generous support of our members and numerous foundations, corporations and individuals. For further information about Open Studio's Scholarship program, including submission guidelines, please visit our website and click on Scholarships.

Varied Editions – Open Studio Online Members' Gallery Launches October 27, 2011

Open Studio is also pleased to announce the launch of Varied Editions, a virtual exhibition space to showcase the work of Open Studio's Artist Membership. Varied Editions will be launched on October 27 at the opening reception of Open Studio's 2010-11 Scholarship/ Fellowship Exhibition. This online gallery will feature a rotating schedule of solo exhibitions of work by Open Studio's artist members, scheduled to coincide with the exhibition dates of the Open Studio galleries. Each exhibition will include images of recent work by the profiled artist, an artist statement and biography, and may also feature video interviews or artists' online projects.

The first featured artist is Jennifer Linton, an interdisciplinary visual artist who works in new media, drawing and printmaking. Linton holds an MFA in Visual Arts from York University (2010), and a BA in Art & Art History from the University of Toronto (1992). She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. She currently teaches Drawing and Printmaking at Sheridan College (Oakville) and Drawing in the Faculty of Design at OCAD (Toronto).

Click here to visit Varied Editions.

Open Studio
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 104
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
416-504-8238
office@openstudio.on.ca
www.openstudio.on.ca
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 12 - 5 p.m.

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