Group Exhibition: Playful Tangents – Curated by Kelly Manikoth

Playful Tangents is a group exhibition curated by Kelly Manikoth featuring work by artists who previously worked at Open Studio under the auspices of the Visiting Artist Residency program: Suzanne Nacha (2008 – 09), Endi Poskovic (2008 – 09), and Suzie Smith (2012 – 13). Each artist uses traditional printmaking techniques—from lithography to screenprinting—to deconstruct, morph, and toy with familiar forms and settings. The resulting altered structures are new and unsettling, urging us to re-evaluate our relationship to our surroundings.

Suzanne Nacha is an artist working in printmaking, painting, sculpture and animation. Her work is imbued with a unique visual language enriched by her experiences mapping the far-reaches of Canada, creating geologic maps that span the earth’s continents and the study of structural geology. She has exhibited her artwork in Canada, the United States and Europe and is represented in public and private collections, including the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the National Bank of Canada, The Donovan Collection and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery.  Born in Hamilton, Ontario, she holds degrees in both Fine Art and Geology. She has taught in the Fine Art departments of OCAD, Sheridan/UTM and York University, and for the past fifteen years has worked in the geological sciences mapping geographies of fortune and need.

Born in Sarajevo, Endi Poskovic was educated in Yugoslavia, Norway, and the United States. His graphic works have been exhibited worldwide in numerous important international biennials and triennials, and have brought him many notable awards and honors, including grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the United States Fulbright Commission, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Norwegian Government, the Camargo Foundation, the Flemish Ministry of Culture, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Macdowell Colony, and the Art Matters Foundation, among others. Museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Harvard University Fogg Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Art Museum of Estonia, Fondation Fernet Branca France, Jincheon Art Museum, South Korea and others. Poskovic is Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design.

Suzie Smith is an interdisciplinary artist from Winnipeg, Canada. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Concordia University in 2004 and a Master of Fine Arts from The Glasgow School of Art in 2011. She has shown both nationally and internationally and has had solo exhibitions at Atelier Circulaire (Montreal), Malaspina Printmakers (Vancouver), Open Studio (Toronto) and Ace Art (Winnipeg). She is represented by Lisa Kehler Art + Projects in Winnipeg.

Kelly Manikoth is a Master of Museum Studies candidate at the University of Toronto. She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelors of Fine Arts and Psychology. In May to July 2017, Kelly was the Collections Management Intern at Open Studio. Kelly dreams of leading a travel-filled life, discovering how museums act as places of interconnectivity that collapse different time periods, geographies and cultures in a single space. She hopes to pursue a career in accessibility services, ensuring that everyone can enjoy the artefacts held in museum collections and the stories they reveal.