Candice Breitz

Inner + Outer Space

Candice Breitz investigates contemporary media culture using the language of the entertainment industry, including pop music, television and Hollywood films. Stradding the sometimes ambiguous terrain between art, entertainment and consumerism, she edits, re-contextualizes or otherwise re-interprets familiar elements of our mediated mass culture landscape to produce aesthetically dazzling and critically engaging multi-channel video installations. In addition to being technically accomplished and conceptually rich, Breitz’s works engage wide range of participants and audiences from diverse backgrounds thanks to their committed engagement with the codes of popular culture.

ueen (A Portrait of Madonna), 2005/2006

Same Game, 2009

Matthew Sweig

Matthew Sweig is not only a prodigiously gifted painter but also a landscape architect – one will be amazed by his astonishing representational ability. He can make black and white paintings that look remarkably like black and white photographs, with much stronger texture.

His show Arable land at XEXE gallery in Toronto:

Arable land is an agricultural term used to describe land that can be used for growing crops. Agriculture is the key development in human history that enabled humans to develop and maintain complex societies. Agricultural production has provided a reliable, predictable food source and out of this abundance, human civilization has grown.

Today agriculture has been pushed further and further from our everyday experience. The means of producing food is disconnected from urban populations, both geographically and psychologically. The very cities that agriculture has made possible now sprawl over the earth that once fed them. Still, the romanticized notion of the farmer mindfully tending crops from seeds in the spring into a plentiful harvest in the fall still lingers in the corners of our memories.

The exhibited works show seemingly mundane views of agricultural landscapes. These symbolic images of the agricultural landscape of the past are ingrained in our collective unconscious. The memory of ‘the farm’ that we all drove by on the highway while growing up serves as a benchmark from which we might evaluate the present.

Pierre Durette

Pierre Durette’s paintings are the result of ongoing research, both historical and art historical. With an interest in Bruegel the Elder, Byzantine art and stories of conquest and war, his works, have a catastrophic element to them: the canvas or blank paper take on the role of an unknown place under siege. White backgrounds create an empty pictorial space allowing the artist to focus on the narrative of his characters.

“Between the grotesque detail and the poetry of the ages, and where these two meet, I present a revision of linear time in a rigorous mix of centuries, cultures, and traditions.” Durette’s canvases incorporate faraway, aerial view and a conscious staging of characters, with meticulous attention to detail. Pierre Durette lives and works in Montreal, where he completed a BFA at the University of Quebec at Montreal.