Beth Stuart, The Swimsuit Edition (V.S.), 2015, 50" x 30", woodcut on Kozuke. Printed by Pamela Dodds under the auspices of the Open Studio Visiting Artist Residency, 2014-15.
Hazel Meyer, The Shape is Unmistakeable, 2015, lino block printed on a Vandercook press, 12" x 18” (middle panel of a triptych). Printed by Olga Wieczorek under the auspices of the Open Studio Visiting Artist Residency, 2014-15.
Main Gallery
Visiting Artists Exhibition: Hazel Meyer and Beth Stuart
May 22, 2015 – June 20, 2015
Artist Talk Time: 6:00 - 7:00 PM
Each year Open Studio selects four professional artists with or without printmaking experience to create traditional and/or experimental works in the print medium of their choice, working collaboratively with a print media artist. The Visiting Artist Residency, in operation since 1983, is a popular program that receives applications from artists from around the world. In conjunction with the residency, each artist exhibits the work produced during their period in the Studio and gives an artist talk. These exhibitions are the result of this intensive work period. Click below to download the accompanying brochure, with essays by Cait McKinney and Kathleen Ritter.
Hazel Meyer’s The One About Baby documents minor events and objects—outdated ads, old porn magazines, pin-buttons, empty plastic bottles, discarded lesbian comic books, and cut-off hair—offering a queer archive of throwaways rescued by the act of drawing and printing. The One About Baby presents drawings and letterpress prints combining images and text referencing subjects ranging from vintage Playboy magazines to Italian lesbian zombie comic books to bottles of collected fluids—bodily, or otherwise.
From the monumental to the modest, Hazel Meyer’s projects range from large installations to small woven tags meant for an audience of one. She explores seemingly disparate yet overlapping preoccupations—intestines and athletics, feminism and the absurd, anxiety and textiles—using scale, language, play, repetition, gentle confrontation and ecstatic immersion. She holds an MFA from OCAD University, Toronto, a BFA from Concordia University, Montréal and coaches junior girls basketball at Queen Victoria Public School in Toronto. Meyer would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Embassy Of Foreign Artists, Genève, Suisse.
—
Beth Stuart’s READ.PLAID.CLAD is a new aspect of Stuart’s ongoing play in progress, BLACK AND WHITE AND ALL OVER, a fictional dialogue between historical figures Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958), a Constructivist artist and textile designer who is perhaps most well remembered for her complicated geometric patterning and clothing designs, particularly those for sports costumes; Ida Craddock (1857-1902), a mystic, freethinker, pioneering sex educator, and advocate for progressive reform of sexual relationships; and Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944), a poet, painter, sometime-scenographer, and bohemian flâneuse from a wealthy New York family. READ.PLAID.CLAD interprets Stepanova’s patterns and prints into large format woodblock prints, using Stuart’s particular approach to abstraction, humour and the body.
Beth Stuart is a Canadian artist based in Hamilton, ON. She holds a graduate degree from the University of Guelph, and an undergraduate degree from Concordia (Montreal). Notable recent presentations include a solo project at the Esker Foundation in Calgary Alberta, The Painting Project curated by Louise Dery at UQAM and More than Two: Let it Make Itself, curated by Micah Lexier at the Power Plant. In 2010 she was shortlisted for the RBC Painting Prize and in 2011 she received an honourable mention. She is represented by Battat Contemporary in Montreal.
Exhibition Brochure: Download Brochure Here