Maura Doyle, New Age Beaver, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday July 11, 2014 / 7 – 11 p.m.
Paul Petro Contemporary Art
The exhibition Second Time Around at Paul Petro Contemporary Art engages works by Maura Doyle, Gretchen Sankey and Carol Wainio in a playful and sometimes nostalgic dialogue about the unattainable innocence and the environmental toll of human activity.
Protruding from the walls, like paintings coming to life, the fantastic spaces of Gretchen Sankey’s sculptures evoke childhood dreamscapes with their colorful presence and mesmerize the viewer with their masterfully crafted details.
Gretchen Sankey, Untitled, 2014 (detail).
A young visitor next to Gretchen Sankey’s Mountain Slide, 2014
Carol Wainio’s dramatic paintings engage the viewer with symbolic imagery of wondering children and naively drawn silhouettes of birds, overshadowed by the iconic “oil derrick”.
Carol Wainio, Nature of Things (Archive), 2014
Maura Doyle’s ceramics shift the discourse onto the infancy of civilization. Intrigued by the shapes of primitive pots, which she characterizes as one of the earliest human inventions and an ancient springboard for experimentation, she adopted historical pottery-making techniques. The painterly quality of the surface of these artworks is a result of open firing. Each one of these objects mimics contemporary items, and yet their shapes echo ancient aesthetics. If you did not get a chance to see these precious objects at YYZ gallery in May and June, it is definitely worth visiting.
Visitors in front of Maura Doyle’s Toronto 2010.
Artist Maura Doyle.
Maura Doyle, Paper coffee cup (#1); Spray bottle.
Furthermore, on the second floor, the exhibition is complemented by a solo show of new abstract paintings by Julie Beugin, And the green streets though parallel run far from each other. The poetic title is actually coming from a poem, John Ashbery’s Rain in The Tennis Court Oath, 1962.
Julie Beugin, Stairs, 2014.
Installation view of Julie Beugin, And the green streets though parallel run far from each other.