October 27 – November 26, 2011
Artist talks: Thursday, October 27, 6-7 pm
Opening: Thursday, October 27, 7-9 pm
Open Studio Gallery
George Gilmour Members Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 104
Toronto ON, M5V 3A8
T/F: 416-504-8238
E-mail: sara@openstudio.on.ca
W: http://www.openstudio.on.ca
2010-11 Scholarship/Fellowship Exhibitions
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 the common thread between these three 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.
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 O¹Born Family for their kind support of the 2010-11
Scholarship/Fellowship Program.