Bright Summer Nights

July 9, 2022 – August 13, 2022

Bright Summer Nights
Group Exhibition
July 9 – August 13

Featured Artists

Christine Davis
John McEwen
Lois Andison
Matt Donovan
Meaghan Hyckie
Shabnam K. Ghazi
Luca Soldovieri
Tim Whiten

Special Guest Artists

Dennis Lin is a Taiwanese-Canadian artist with an extensive and varied body of work that has been trialed, stretched and honed over a 20+ year long career. He studied at the Ontario College of Art and upon graduating, began cultivating his own studio practice. Today, sculptural works involving lyrical compositions in metal, wood and stone are featured in public and private collections globally.

His studio in Kimberley, Ontario represents a revelatory growth in the development of Lin’s artistic direction and process. The timber frame studio building is powered by solar energy, and as a result artwork created in this space is directly affected by seasonal rhythms. Each kilowatt hour, cut, form and addition to a sculpture is accounted for, marrying the reliance on somatic and environmental energy to generate form. The scale and diversity of Lin’s pieces attest to his highly productive and ambidextrous nature, having an excess of works that showcase a distinctively industrious and energetic praxis.

His works range in size from the handheld to the monumental. In recent years, new themes have emerged in the way materials are displayed: items are sifted and diarized into a cataloging system that is both reflective of Lin’s personal affinity for collecting and storing, and also speaks to the interdependent relationship between memory, fantasy, and objects. Raw, often castaway or deteriorated, materials define the direction of final pieces.

Pauline Sunhee Choi is a Korean born Canadian artist based in Paris. After completing her studies in film and experimental art at the Ontario College of Art and Design she attended the graduate study off-campus program in New York. Choi then proceeded to teach at OCAD before moving to Paris with an award from the Cité Internationale des Arts. Choi subsequently taught at the Parsons School of Design in Paris. She has exhibited her work extensively and received awards in Canada, Europe, and Korea.

Choi’s early practice as a filmmaker influenced two central aspects of her paintings: her interest in the play between shadow and light and her desire to inscribe the passage of time into her work. Her Luminous Paintings, which were first shown in 1993 at the Grand Palais in Paris, are executed on a semi-transparent, film-like material called mylar, which is lit from behind by slim luminescent panels of LED light. The artist builds up layers of color on this unusual base, working in traditional oils but sometimes drawing into the paint with graphite, and occasionally combining two or more sheets so that the resulting image has a slight shimmer and blur. This process of layering and superimposition allows the painting to grow and change as it evolves, and the final image is a synthesis of this multi-layered experience. Once the paintings are lit, they change in response to the controllable intensity of the LED panel or the passing hours of the day: the singing colors glow with new intensity as night falls and the illuminated paintings glow in the dark.

Choi draws the subjects of her Luminous Paintings from the vast arena of nature: night skies, dark forests, radiant flowers. Her preoccupation with nature, together with the scroll-like format of her mylar paintings, recall elements of traditional Asian art, not least the ‘spirit of resonance’ or vitality, which alludes to a flow of energy through an artist and their work. The artist’s glowing, back-lit colors also recall the jewel-like effects of stained-glass in dark churches, although traditional religious sentiment has been replaced by Choi’s awareness of an intense life force that pulses through both nature and her work.