Publication Launch: April 4 2014, 6:00- 9:00 PM
Forest City Gallery, 258 Richmond Street, London, ON
Forest City Gallery is proud to present Extra Ordinary the curatorial debut of Jenna Faye Powell, featuring emerging-artists Matt King, Sam Mogelonsky and Bree Zorel.
About the Exhibition:
Seduction is a powerful thing. Seduction, here, is not limited to just the animate – objects too have the ability to entice a second glance, to provoke feelings of infatuation. The artists chosen for this exhibition have crafted works that may seem too shiny, too humourous or too ubiquitous to hold any other agenda than that of tempting their viewer. Yet, while the drawings, sculptures and things in this exhibition draw us in for one reason, they keep us attuned for another. They are masters of the double-take.
Works featured in Extra Ordinary speak to the excess of everyday objects, whether it be a pile of used books or a junk-drawer-amount of thumb-tacks; items that are so further, beyond commonplace, so ordinary, they are extraordinary. Artists in this exhibition transform unremarkable objects to first optically captivate and then interrogate. Taking cues from the Situationists of the 1960s, humour and a lite-heartedness is employed to subvert or destabilize the everyday, allowing new engagement with our worlds. Upon closer inspection of the works in this exhibition infatuation fades and colours dim, permitting social commentary around the everyday, consumerism, and everyday consumerism, to emerge.
-Jenna Faye Powell
www.jennafayepowell.com
Bree Zorel
Born and raised in Calgary, Bree Zorel is an artist and art educator currently living and working in Toronto. She holds a BFA from Alberta College of Art + Design, and an MFA from NSCAD University. Her artworks utilize diverse media to investigate the relationship between art and everyday life, and explore the performative possibilities of everyday circumstances. Characterized by a self-conscious optimism and a mixture of humour and pathos, her works shift continually, crystallizing in formations of drawing, sculpture, video, textiles, and photographs that alternate between artworks and documentation of actions and activities. Playfully DIY, her use of materials tends towards the provisional, using a makeshift yet heartfelt aesthetic to invite in the viewer an acknowledgment and acceptance of imperfection and the unfinished nature of the human project. The near-failure of the materials symbolically calls attention to the social, cultural and personal failures we experience every day, and thus situates itself at a starting point for rebuilding. In Zorel’s current series of drawings, imaginary book covers describe the mundane experiences of daily life, while also inviting modestly magical interventions. Fictional instructional manuals, storybooks, and puzzles interject hope and laughter into the experience of the daily struggles and frustrations of surviving as a young artist in Canada.
http://breezorel.com/home.html
Matt King
Matt King is an emerging artist and musician based in Toronto, Ontario. Matt holds a diploma from Ontario College of Art in Integrated Media and a Bachelor of Fine Arts also from OCAD Univeristy. His current practice explores the language of visual symbols and the malleability of information conveyed. Slight alterations to an object’s expected physical characteristics or visual context can implicate new meanings through a viewer’s interpretation. King’s focus is the re-contextualization of representation and he aspires to create a disruption between expectation and experience. King continues to exhibit his works locally and nationally most recently in Micah Lexier’s curatorial project, More than Two: It Makes Itself exhibited at the Power Plant in Toronto. Matt co-currently performs in the art-rock band, Absolutely Free.
http://mattkingdotcom.com/
