Group Show in London, NYC Art Fairs, New Interns

A few exciting things are coming up in March, here they are:


OK, NOW THE FLOOR IS LAVA! is a group show that my friend Tyler Bright Hilton from London (originally from Toronto) has curated. He's put a lot of hard work into finding some great artists and a great space. The opening is March 10th, below is the press release...

OK, NOW THE FLOOR IS LAVA!

Club Row – Rochelle School

Arnold Circus

London E2 7ES

11 March – 17 March 2011 (closed Monday)

Private View: Thursday 10 March 2011, 6-9pm

This exhibition collects the work of a group of artists whose practice focuses primarily on drawing. There is a shared ambition to create relevant contemporary art engaged and fuelled by a relationship with craft and narrative elements in a conceptually integrated way. Each artist is invested in creating their own environments, histories and stories, with content varying from entomological to autobiographical. Using a labour-intensive approach to craft, they aim to create a unique aesthetic married to, and further articulating, this content.

Given their developed use of rendering and immediately apparent debt to popular art forms such as classical Victorian era illustration or Marvel comic books, it can be challenging to position this type of work within a contemporary art setting. Comparisons can mistakenly be made with artists who have an interest in rendering but rely heavily on irony as a contemporising tool; or, who prize surface above innovation and believe industry can be equated with aesthetic or imaginative merit. The artists in this exhibition strive to avoid both.

The show’s title takes its name from a children’s game, where navigating through a space can only be done by moving from one piece of furniture, playground equipment, etc., to another without touching the floor, which is imagined to be lava. This simple metaphor refers to the imagined worlds represented in the work and playfully suggests the artists’ motivating impulse to progress through dangerous territory. One false move and it’s straight into twee illustration, tediously obsessive rendering, incomprehensibly idiosyncratic iconography or worst of all: thick, ironic, contemporary art discourse goo.

Including work by:

Alexander Brenchley

Nicholas Di Genova

Tyler Bright Hilton

Meaghan Hyckie

Amanda Nedham

David Price

James Pyman

Srdjan Segan

Andrew Wilson

It’s pretty easy to find:

I'll also be participating in two art fairs in New York at the beginning of the month, The Armory Show with Fredericks and Freiser Gallery, and Scope New York with Dukan et Hourdequin (who is in the process of relocating their gallery from Marseille to Paris)... If you are at the fairs, check out their booths. Both galleries show some incredible artists...

As I mentioned before, I now have two interns helping me out in the studio. They both fit in with the studio dynamic right away, and are great artists. Below are photos of them looking like they are having a really great time (although I think they were faking), and links to their respective blogs..

Melissa Luk

Vivian Rosas

Lastly, my studio mate Patrick was recently featured on the BMX website The Northern Embassy. Pat's been BMXing for years, but this feature focuses on his paintings, and a large part of the images are of our studio... Oddly, there are not a lot of images of his work, but there is a photo of his newest painting, his watercolours are amazing, and he's a great guy to share a studio with...

Here's the link.

And here's a painting of his.

Elle Canada

I have a small photo and mention in the March issue of Elle Canada in an issue on collecting Canadian art. The perfume ads gave me a headache when I read the article...

LE 7

Just a quick note to announce that I'll be in a group show tonight here at LE gallery in Toronto. The show celebrates the seven year anniversary of the gallery, it's been a really great seven years...

details below.

studio shots

Thanks again to everyone who applied for the internship position. I've hired two people for the time being, one person from the list of people who applied, and one person who I was already friends with. There is actually so much to be done that I am considering hiring a third person. Either way, I will be referring to the list of applicants when these people eventually quit or mess up bad enough that I have to fire them. For my next blog post, I will post their information, links, and some of their work. For now though, I'm just posting some studio shots and details of work in progress. I've said this before, because it takes me so long to do a show, there are huge gaps on this blog when I don't really have any new work to post, but I will try to do a couple of these updates along the way, and I'll be in a few fairs and groups shows as well...

So here are some shots and a few descriptions. This might be boring, you can click on any image to make it bigger...

My small drafting table and my computer desk covered in garbage.

A detail of an almost finished painting.

An empty checklist is really panic inducing...

I got this in the mail today, the new Kris Kuksi book. I met Kris through my friend Daniel, who did both of our websites. The book is excellent, if you don't know his work check out his website...

I listen to audiobooks basically every minute that I spend in the studio, unless I'm writing emails or reading real books. I just started listening to George R.R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire. My two favourite things to do are drawing and listening to epic fantasy novels, so when I combine them I'm in nerd heaven. I've taken it so far as to print off the maps of the worlds that the novel's take place in, and tape them to my desk so I can follow where everything is happening. If Jamiyla reads this I'm afraid she might make me sleep on the couch tonight, but I'm proud of my fantasy audiobook dedication...

A drawing I am working on, it is 14" x 18", a grid of carnivores.

Our fish tank, most of the fish are hiding.

Anyone who has read my blog for awhile might remember Patrick, he was my intern a couple of summers ago. He just finished school, and is now renting a portion of the studio. Having him in here is awesome, we trade a lot of audiobooks and he always cooks spaghetti. I really love his work, he hasn't updated it in awhile but you can see his blog here. You can see the blog post I made when he started as an intern here.

The painting area.

A piece in progress.

This is my bike, it's a bit of an old man bicycle, up until this summer I rode a roadbike, but I fell off of it and hurt my hip, and couldn't really ride it for the rest of the summer. Then I needed money so I sold it to a friend, and when I could ride again I bought this guy.

I really like the front rack, I do all my grocery shopping and art supply shopping with it. The dumb thing actually cost more than my bike did...

This is what my hip looked like after I fell. I couldn't really move around for a few days, but the World Cup was on, so it turned out to be awesome.

This is the little room that all of the store orders get wrapped in.

Below are a couple of drawing on mylar, 24" x 24", that need to be painted for my show. The show is November in Paris.

This is the big piece that I'm working on in my apartment above my studio. I've been working on it for about 2 hours a day for about 10 months now, and it is going so slowly, it's testing my patience. It will be a grid of 10 000 vertebrates, the idea is that it will be the centerpiece of the show, but I'm going to have to really move on it. It's about 40% done.

A detail.

Ok, that's all. I thought this update would take about 20 minutes to do, but it's been about an hour and a half and now I'm sorta anxious. I'm going to plan some new mylars tonight, I hope to have about 9 mylar paintings in the show...

Another reason that I haven't been updating this blog quite as much is I tend to post very small updates on facebook, and sometimes forget or am too busy to post them here. If you want more news, or to just read the dumb stuff I post when i forget that people I don't know are reading or watch the rap videos I put on my wall, friend request me here.

Internship Position

Thank you to everyone that sent me an email regarding the internship position. I am a bit overwhelmed, I left my computer in my apartment, went downstairs and worked all day, and now I've returned to my computer to see that I've received more responses than I had anticipated. I'm going to take my laptop onto the couch and go through all of the emails before going to sleep, and I will email everyone a response tomorrow.

If you do not receive a positive response, please understand that it is just because I have received more people responding than I could possibly employ. If I could, I would have everyone come in and help out in the studio. Also, I imagine that an unpaid intern position will have a high turnover rate, so I will keep this list on hand and email more people as positions become available, or if I discover that I could use a second intern.

Again, thank you to everyone who contacted me today, I will send out an email tomorrow afternoon.

Looking for part time intern

Hey Everyone, happy new year.

Lately I've become really busy in the studio doing things like packing orders, packing art, scanning stuff, and I've been having a hard time actually getting in full days of drawing. My solo show is looming closer and closer, and I'm getting more and more freaked out. Anyway, because of this, I'm looking for a part time intern to help me out with these tasks...

Ideally, I'm looking for an art student that is looking for some studio experience. The work is unpaid, but it is only half a day a week. I would like a student because I feel a student could find some value in this type of experience, seeing how an art studio is run and learning along the way. I did this type of work when I was in college, and I did find the experience useful. Tasks would mainly include packing and shipping online orders, preparing my surfaces for drawing, and documenting my pieces. The studio atmosphere is pretty fun and laid back.

If you are interested, email me at mediumphobic@gmail.com and we can set up an informal interview.

Happy 2011!

A few random things

Here are a few things I've been meaning to post...

First off, I've started doing some work with a company in France called Skinizi, adapting some of my mylar drawings to skins for things like laptops and Ipods... If you are interested in these, you can check them out in English or French.

Also, tonight is The Unicorn, a group show happening at Narwhal Art Projects. If you live in Toronto, you should stop by. A bunch of my friends are involved in it, including Jamiyla Lowe, Adrienne Kammerer, Andrew Remington Bailey, Stephen Appleby-Barr, Jennie Suddick, and Jacob Whibley, plus a bunch of other great artists. The night is also doubling as a launch for the catalog for the show I was in there in the fall, The Dazzle. I'll post pics of the catalog once I get a copy...
Lastly, thank you to Scott Sawtell and his 3rd year painting class at Brock University for inviting me in to do an artist talk and guest critique earlier this week. It's not often that I get to leave the city for a day, and I saw some great art... Downtown St. Catherines sorta scared the shit out of me...

Ok, that's it for now. I've been working hard on solo-show work and work for the fairs coming up in the spring, I'll post some of it and some studio shots soon...