“The Simple Life” December 3 – 26, 2020

Our curated December exhibition features artworks that are inspired by the home, domestic life and simple, everyday objects made extraordinary.  The exhibit celebrates the everyday, delighting the senses and highlighting the beauty of intimate moments and shared meals.

Keiran Brennan Hinton is known for his plein-air paintings of his surrounding environment.  Interested in capturing moments that are often overlooked or ignored, his “Unmade Bed” painting included captures a lush, warm summers day.

Jack Chambers was known as a “perceptual realist” who painted moments from his every day life in a high-realist style. “Diego Drawing” is of Jack’s son Diego, drawing at the dining room table.  The simple moment includes Chambers’ signature lighting, incredible detail and spiritual sensibility.

We are proud to now represent Regina-based artist Vic Cicansky, one of Canada’s best known ceramic and bronze sculptors.  Over his 60 year career, Cicansky has celebrated his passion for the prairie landscape and love of gardening through his sculptures.  We have included some recent clay canning jars, “Shovel Appetizers” and his elegant bronze “Orange Bonsai”.

Greg Curnoe‘s artwork deals with the everyday and is often auto-biographical.  He observes, comments and records through both images and words.  The “Cote Rotie” and “Pelee Island” lettered works included in our exhibit describe two very different wine terrior.   As wine lover, Curnoe highlights his interest in the concept of region as well as his obsession with listing things in his surrounding environment.

Aganetha Dyck is well known for her transformation of commonplace objects such as sweaters, shoes, buttons and figurines into things which are simultaneously metaphysical, delicate and sometime humorous.  She shows us that the “exotic” can be found in the most mundane and everyday of things, like a beautiful sweater, once loved and now transformed into a sculpture.

Gathie Falk has spent more than five decades creating artworks that aim to “venerate the ordinary”.  Her home and the objects in her daily life act as the source material for these new still life paintings.  In the paintings included in our exhibit, Falk has reconstructed intimate details from her own existence: carefully set dinner tables, flower arrangements and portraits of guests lovingly invited into her home.  Through these paintings, Falk celebrates simple pleasures, elevating the ordinary objects, and appreciating the joy and love for the things and people in her life.

Brian Jones‘s work depicts people during moments in their everyday lives – walking the dog, shovelling snow, picnicking in the park and visiting the grandparents.  His strong narrative quality touched with subtle humour or charged with suspended energy links the artist and the viewer to common experiences mirroring life in Canada during the 50’s and 60’s.  The small painting “Winter Night” included in our exhibit is painted in a pointilist style from the early 1980s.

Dorothy Knowles is known for working directly from nature.  In the winter of 1984, the prairie winter was particularly dreary.  To cheer herself up, Knowles bought bouquets of flowers into the studio to paint.  “Cathy’s Bouquet”, named after her daughter, is a delightful expression of a simple, natural pleasure made beautiful.

Liz Magor is well known for her sculptures that address themes of history, shelter and survival through objects that reference still life, domesticity and wildlife.  In the cast sculpture “Hat and Gloves”, Magor highlights the psychology of desire and addiction through the representation of chocolate bars.

Mary Pratt‘s artwork was inspired by the everyday objects of women’s domestic lives.  By depicting objects close-up and in detail, she suggested larger symbolic meaning, as well as a sense of absurdity.  The “Jellies” lithograph is characteristic of Pratt’s elevation of banal domestic activities to the state of ritual.

Sage Szkabarnicki-Stuart‘s autobiographical photographs are self portrait / dioramas from her life.  Her photograph “My Room” is her childhood room.  She has dressed herself in a cage dress accented by collected wildflowers from the house’s property and re-creates a child-like fantasy from her youth.