ADRIENNE REYNOLDS takes us through sci-fi landscapes in her drawing series

> ADRIENNE REYNOLDS: Cyborg Journeys

A drawing series presented at Fleishman Gallery

November 28th to January 10th, Opening Reception November 28th 7-9pm

In the drawing series, Cyborg Journeys, industrial and organic imagery morph into urban and sci-fi landscapes. Ink and gouache lines move in energetic patterns representing physical and mental travel, fragmentation and regeneration. Bolder marks give way to tenuous structures that are both conversely makeshift and impenetrable, jumbling references to the natural and manufactured. In the words of Donna Haraway “A cyborg . . . is a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. . . Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection. . .” These drawings explore a kind of searching for connection in a disjointed, fragmented space.

Adrienne Reynolds is a cross-disciplinary artist, who splits her time between New York City and Toronto. Drawing is a main part of her practice, along with work in sculpture, video, painting, and site specific installation. Thematically, her work deals with ideas around connection and disconnection through exploring psychological, emotional, and physical spaces. Questions around a nature/technology dialectic also inform much of the work, including how we navigate dualisms in an increasingly cyborgian world.

Born in Minnesota in 1966, Adrienne has shown in Chile, Mexico, Serbia, Brazil, Toronto and most recently at the Kitchen in New York City. She served on the Board of Directors for A Space gallery in Toronto for two terms. She has a Masters from Parsons (2008) and is an Associate of the Ontario College of Art (1991). Grants/scholarships include Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, the Parsons Deans Graduate Scholarship and the LCU Foundation grant.

LEZLI RUBIN-KUNDA, performance documents presented at Fleishman Gallery

> LESLI RUBIN-KUNDA: Outside In

Opening Reception: Friday October 17th 7-9pm

Lezli Rubin-Kunda is a multidisciplinary artist who uses live action, as well as installation, drawing, photography and video to explore her relationship with her surroundings.

The three video pieces presented here, all deal with a place. Through simple spontaneous actions and activities, using the materials of the immediate surroundings in interaction with the artist’s body, they connect to different sites, each with its physical, as well as symbolic, cultural, or metaphysical dimensions. Two of the works are created from documentation from performance festivals. In Down to Earth, the artist digs up earth, carries it through the streets and then descends into an old wine cellar where she acts and plays with the earth and other local produce and debris.

The third and longest work, Housekeeping, is an extended meditation on the reality and concept of home. It is comprised of 11 short video ‘poems’, each one related to different aspects, both material and philosophical, of the artist ‘s relation to her home in all its complexity. Home is the place of living, working , daydreaming, a rich and fertile ground for creating.

It is the hearth, and I am like the goddesss Hestia, guarding the domestic realm; it is the meeting place between sacred and profane space; it is an arena of daily life, from the trivial and banal to the most transcendent: sometimes a trap, sometimes a shelter. Seeing the house as a performance arena blurs the boundaries of art and life, of domestic and artistic pursuits; when I set up my camera every action becomes fraught with layers of significance.

In these works, any assumptions of home as refuge, as order against the chaos, as domestic vs wordly - are reexamined. Rootedness and permanence are brought to question: human constructs cannot keep out the inevitability of flux and dissolution. The built world and the natural world continually fuse, shifting positions.

The artist holds a BA from the University of Toronto in Interdisciplinary Studies, and an MFA from the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She currently lives in Israel, teaching in the Architecture and City Planning area at the Technion, Haifa, Israel. www.lezlirubinkunda.com

PAM PATTERSON explores mortality in her work "Travelling", presented at Fleishman Gallery

> PAM PATTERSON: TRAVELLING

Presented at WonderWorks Fleishman Gallery from June 20^th to June 30^th

^{Performance and Opening Reception Friday June 20th 7 – 9pm}

The shift from being one person to being another person is what I call travel... Those of us who are “world” travellers have the distinct experience of being different in different “worlds”... The attitude that carries us through is [a] playful [one]... We are not worried about competence. We are not wedded to a particular way of doing things. We are there creatively... (Lugones 1990: 396)

Travelling as exhibit/performance continues my work in and around mortality. As a person who has chronic health issues and is mobility challenged, travel is a difficult and problematic task. Travel, though, also implies for me, an informed action, a journey of re-discovery, re-historicizing, a ritual re-making. The site is the body - my body. Projected mages of my feet moving in and through various locations mark like various biopsies my "travel" through and past these issues. At the opening, I will perform an action/exchange, I will take up this investigation as a "dance" and in dialogue. To accomplish this, I have traveled to London, UK, St. John's, Newfoundland, and into the body - my body - in play as I continue to reconfigure the self.

Pam Patterson has, for 25 years, been active in the health, art and women’s communities. Her research, performance and teaching have focussed on embodiment in art practice, the “body” in art, women and health, disability studies, women’s studies and feminist art education. As a performance and visual artist she has exhibited and performed with Leena Raudvee in Artifacts and solo internationally. Her recent work A Cellu(H)er Resistance : A Body without Organs? was presented by FADO in Toronto 2008.

LEENA RAUDVEE on her work, presented at Fleishman Gallery

>LEENA RAUDVEE: STORM (2)

Showing from May 15^th to June 7^th

^{Opening Reception – Thursday May 15th 7 – 9pm}

Water and waves constantly move stones and rocks on the beach, hiding, revealing, and sorting them. Over the course of a day, I moved stones from one area of the beach to another, mimicking the effect of a storm passing through.

For this exhibit, I am working in the space between two active interests - the use of the hand to physically mimic natural forces and the use of the hand to manipulate images. This tension creates a visual movement-as-metaphor. Pondering a recent onslaught of unwanted but valued things and their emotional weight, I began to investigate both the accumulation and release of things - objects both natural and human-made - metaphorically activated with/through handmade forces and images. This exploration takes form in large photo images and small framed collages both referencing rocks and the hand.

Leena Raudvee is a Toronto-based visual and performance artist. Her drawings, mixed media work and performances have appeared over the last 20 years in Ontario galleries. As co-director of Artifacts, a performance art company, she performed for the 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival in 2000 and at the V.MacDonnell Gallery. In 2006, she presented a performance, "the fear of pleasure", at the Collision symposium in Victoria, B.C.

SUE LLOYD renders perception in new works presented at Fleishman Gallery

>SUE LLOYD: Void
Opening Reception: Friday, March 7th at 7pm
Exhibition runs through Saturday, April 5th
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm

VOID, a solo exhibition of new works by Sue Lloyd, continues her interest in making “textually-based” work in a digital environment. Composed of existing images remixed from a wide variety of source material, the new works are large digital prints. Having begun with images of the sky, VOID arrives at a much less concrete place. By using existing imagery, the task of rendering appearances is de-emphasized and focus can shift to the rendering of issues less visible but more primary: speaking, knowing, seeing. Lloyd finds the rendering of perception more compelling than the documentation of visual appearance: landscapes and figures describe interior as much as exterior states of being.
"Viewing the thirteen images of Sue Lloyd’s VOID provokes a visual consciousness reminiscent of a haunting. Whether pleasurable or disturbing, the heightened memory states that haunt each of us retain a vivacity outside of linear time. Sue Lloyd’s digital remixed images quietly ambush us in a similar manner." Betsy Warland.

SUE LLOYD is visual artist who lives and works in Toronto. Her work has been exhibited locally and nationally; past solo exhibitions include Presentation House in Vancouver and Kamloops Art Gallery. Her work has also appeared in publications including BRICK and Public. She has received Council grants and her work is represented in private and public collections. She is a past member of the Red Head Gallery, and the Out of the Frame and Giant-S Collectives. She received her M.F.A. from York University and teaches in the Visual Studies Program at University of Toronto.


Flock of Hands John Constable: Hampstead Heath, Looking towards Harrow at Sunset, 9 August 1823. Paintings of the Annunciation, PHAIDON, London 2000: Bedoli, El Greco, Gentileschi, Gerard David, Barocci, Murillo, de Zurbaran, Beccafumi, Vouet, Rubens, Poussin, Poelenburgh, Pittoni, Masucci, Procaccini; Giordano, Remi, van Poelenburgh, de Champaigne, Bougereau, Bordone, Veronese, Tiepolo, Strozzi.
Digital archival print, 23”x 28”, 2007