This gallery contains 10 photos.
Bio: Tara Cooper’s art practice draws from meteorology and creative non-fiction, resulting in projects housed under the moniker Weather Girl. The creative outcomes conflate the language of meteorology (forecasting, predictions, and atmospheric conditions) with the personal impact and experience of weather—visual … Continue reading
This gallery contains 10 photos.
Liz Menard’s practice explores our relationship to nature, which shapes our sense of place and sense of self. Our relationship reflects us as a society and as individuals. Through nature, Menard’s work considers resiliency and rejuvenation. Watersheds are rich … Continue reading
This gallery contains 6 photos.
Dana Tosic is a Toronto based artist who works in printmaking, installation and digital media. She holds a BFA from Queen’s University, an MFA from the University of Calgary, and was the 2010 participant in the Tim Mara Graduate Student … Continue reading
This gallery contains 10 photos.
Bio: Anna Gaby-Trotz, printmaker and photographer, often travels to the most remote places in Canada to explore our relationship to the land. In 2012, Anna received funding to travel through The North West Passage, furthering her work in the Canadian … Continue reading
Bio Carlina Chen
Born into a traditional Chinese family in Taiwan, Carlina came to Canada to study printmaking at OCAD University, and stayed to pursue her art practice. She is currently working towards her MFA at OCAD University.
The experience of dual cultures has enriched her life, and inspired her art practice, often reflected in work juxtaposing text and image. With her recent installation-based work, she has been focusing on video and performance to explore the in-between, the ephemerality of experience.
Artist Statement
“The Thaw came” series starts in responding to Carlina’s experience of living in Toronto where she love the distinct seasonal variation, especially winter and spring. For example, she enjoys walking on sidewalks or park paths at nights in winter season, hearing the crunching and squeaking sounds of her own footsteps on the snow-covered surfaces. In springtime, she likes to watch the buds on the tree branches when strolling around in parks or nature.
Therefore, Chen uses a very fibrous Thailand handmade paper, crumbling them before or during or after printing to recreate that crunching, squeaking sounds/feeling that she likes.
William Steinberg writes the following about his art practice:
Architecture inevitably erodes and as it moves towards entropy, it transforms. No longer part of the new and useful, it takes on a new persona and character—the ruin. It now possesses the remnants of its past glory, the physicality of its present existence, and the potential to inspire the future.
William Steinberg began printmaking in architecture school in the early 1970s under the instruction of his professor, Leslie Laskey, who was a student of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy of the Bauhaus. Prior to his joining Open Studio in 2015, he printed at The Saidye Bronfman Aetilier in Montreal from 1980 -1992 and Malaspina Printmaking Society in Vancouver from 1992-2015. Since 1985, his prints have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are included in numerous public and private collections in North America, Europe, and Japan.
Find out more about Steinberg’s work by visiting his website: www.williamsteinberg.ca
Irina Schestakowich spent her childhood in Montreal and has been in Toronto since the 1980’s. Irina graduated from the University of Victoria, BC in Fine Arts. She specialized in printmaking and early classical Buddhist imagery. She is an active member of Open Studio.
ROUNDISH
From disorder, the universe manages to recreate always anew.
The circle tries to contain the chaos. The chaos is always aggressively pushing out so the circle is imperfect.
Irina Schestakowich likes the challenge of confronting disorder and struggling to translate it into her sense of beauty and perfection. The final result is never too perfect and always slightly open to change, because change cannot be stopped.
When Schestakowich starts working on a print she begins with a vague idea and the idea itself becomes a journey. Some of us have to have a road map with a clear destination in mind— Irina does not. For her it is always like starting a new book. Imagination takes over and she has no idea what the ending will be like.
The circle never ends.
As for her approach, Irina states that she is a printmaker who never editions. She is obsessed with paper and also working with ink. Her inspiration and imagery is usually nature based and her work tends to be gestural and immediate. Words matter to her so titling is almost as equally important as the image itself. She sees imagery as a poetical means of expressing herself. She says, “I am about the line and where it takes me.”
Walter Procska was born in Quebec and has lived in Toronto since 1994. Procska studied Fine Arts at Concordia University. He received the Helen McNicoll Art Prize in 1976. Collections include: Art Gallery of Hamilton, Bank of Montreal, CIBC Wood Gundy, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM Canada, Mississauga City Hall, National Bank of Canada, Sakimi Art Museum, The Export/Import Bank of Japan.
Statement:
Walter Procska’s prints are filled with shapes that are often strongly mathematical. Like Kandinsky and other artists as well as scientists, he feels a strong sense of spirituality in mathematical forms. Notwithstanding the circuitous course of our daily lives and our thought processes, many of his lines fight to be straight, to find the shortest distance between two points. This is often how we remember and plan, that is, in a pared down, simplified way that we should know cannot be fully trusted. His minutely offset screens express that uncertainty that at the same time that they suggest visual depth.
With a background in film and video, Laurynas started exploring print media after a workshop at Open Studio. He is currently an Open Studio member, working in screenprinting.
Statement:
Over the past few years, I have been working on a series of 15” x 15” (and sometimes 7” x 7”) screenprints with abstracted, minimalist images derived from real or imaginary architecture, objects and nature. My process usually starts with computer-aided design, and every final screen print has one, or often more than one, digital image file. While exposing and deconstructing the process is not normally a part of my practice, I feel that Varied Editions presents an opportunity to present something that otherwise would remain a work product.
Images selected for this gallery are paired up: a digital file, and a photo of printed screenprint. Some digital files contain all layers, including different variations, colour tests, guides, etc. all turned on (e.g. digital files of Structure and Structure 4). I have briefly considered the idea of printing separate editions of these prints to actually match their digital counterparts, but decided against it. Nevertheless, I believe that these digital files present interesting, and very separate counterpoints to their paper counterparts. Other pairings are with earlier versions: some, like the Gary Object, have gone in a completely different direction; others, like Structure 3, contain photography guide layers providing very specific real-life context to my images. Finally, some files contain ready-to-print separations that, as in case with one colour separation of Landscape, I feel are interesting images on their own.
Varied Editions 