Visiting Artists’ Residency Exhibition

We are excited to announce our 2019 – 20 Visiting Artists’ (VA) Residency exhibitions featuring work by Kotama Bouabane, Meaghan Hyckie, Luke Painter and Annie Wong.

The Visiting Artist Residency Program allows artists to realize a creative project in print media using traditional and experimental methods.

During the residency, VAs work with a collaborative printmaker and are encouraged to explore how print can contribute to, or expand, their artistic practice. The culmination of this exploration results in a dynamic group exhibition.

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An image list is available here.

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Two-Ply & Fold
Kotama Bouabane

Two-Ply & Fold is a new series of lithographs produced by Kotama Bouabane during the Open Studio Residency. The series plays with motifs and patterns referencing Laotian culture and photographic material. An image of a swan, found on traditional Laotian fabric, alters and transforms into a graphic symbol by printing it onto mass-produced paper napkins and rolls of paper towel. Similarly, photographs of spring rolls made by the artist’s mother change and become patterns that tether between abstraction and representation. The various coloured napkins and paper towel rolls are also associated with colours found in Laotian textiles and materials.

The design used in the piece Stereo comes from a film negative sleeve found in Hong Kong circa the 1980s. Stereo Quality Photofinishers’ processing services used Kodacolor technologies that we were able to mimic and translate through lithography.  The vibration of the colours ties into the use of the napkins and the industrial/commercial nature of the work.

Two-Ply & Fold was printed at Open Studio in collaboration with Pudy Tong under the auspices of the Visiting Artist Residency Program, 2019-20.

Kotama Bouabane is a Laotian born artist and educator. He is a sessional instructor in Photography at OCAD University and holds an MFA in Studio Arts in Photography from Concordia University. He has shown extensively throughout Canada in notable galleries including Centre A, Vu Photo, Contemporary Calgary, Parisian Laundry and Gallery  TPW. His work has been published in Prefix Photo, Art Papers and Ciel Variable.  Bouabane has received funding through the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. He is currently the Chair of the Board of Directors at Gallery 44 Centre For Contemporary Photography.

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Rises
Meaghan Hyckie

Rises 1 & 2 are part of Meaghan Hyckie’s ongoing series about suburban space. Using analog drafting techniques Hyckie creates iconographic patterns depicting suburban landscapes and architectural forms. The sentiments and anxieties this imagery evokes are channelled into prints and drawings that oscillate between feeling appealing and unsettling. Screenprinting was a natural fit with Hyckie’s work, enabling an exploration of repeated compositions and emotional variations through subjective colour palettes.

Rises was printed at Open Studio in collaboration with Jessica Palmer under the auspices of the Visiting Artist Residency Program, 2019-20.

Meaghan Hyckie is a Toronto-based artist. Her work has been shown across Canada, including exhibitions with Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto; Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montréal; Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver; the Art Gallery of Windsor, and Museum London. Meaghan has been a resident at Vermont Studio Centre, the Banff Centre, and was a 2018 Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence. Her work has been supported by the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

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Ding/Dong
Luke Painter

During this residency, Luke Painter made four screenprints that played with shallow architectural space, featuring anthropomorphic elements. Pattern is approached in humorous, metaphorical and narrative ways. In the work Ding/Dong, the title is evocative of both an action and a sound. It describes the in-and-out motion of pushing and releasing a doorbell and the correlating sound it makes. In slang, it refers to a penis and also describes a person who is a total idiot. The print titled, House of Lestat, is in reference to the fictional vampire, Lestat de Lioncourt authored by gothic writer, Anne Rice. Here, Lestat is either absent from his own house or the wall of mirrors simply can’t detect his visage.

Ding/Dong was printed at Open Studio in collaboration with Miles Ingrassia under the auspices of the Visiting Artist Residency Program, 2019-20.

Luke Painter is an artist working in Toronto. Recent exhibitions of his work include Fair Adaptations at Patel Brown (group), The Teasers and the Tormentors at Harbourfront Centre (solo 2018) Modern Wand at Cambridge Galleries (solo 2017), The Teasers and the Tormentors at Galerie Clark in Montreal (solo 2016) and Ways of Something at the Whitney Museum of American Art (group 2016). Luke has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council and was nominated for the K.M. Hunter Award in the Visual Arts through the Ontario Arts Council.  His work has been reviewed by Canadian Art, Border Crossings, The Globe and Mail and was included in Carte Blanche Vol 2 – Painting, a national survey of Canadian painters. Luke is an Associate Professor at OCAD University in Toronto.

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一百鬼 / 100 Ghosts
Annie Wong

一百鬼 / 100 Ghosts is a reimagining of the printing process as a ritual for invocation. The work uses joss paper (also known as spirit money), muslin, and images of Wong, her grandma, and the female icons represented as 100 Ghosts in Chinese eschatology. Leading from Wong’s research in Chinese ancestral worship practices and diasporic hauntology, print and its procedures became the media and ritual to look for ghosts as they manifest as traces of an un-representable history and obscure future.

The process of print involves the meticulous execution of a ritual intended to control an image. To disrupt this order is to surrender control and enter the forsaken space of errata. In collaboration with printer Meggan Winsley, Annie Wong’s residency risked entering this space in an obsessive hunt for ghosts sublimated through an imperfect performance of the printing ritual. The quantity of the images alludes to the abundant offerings in Chinese ancestral ceremonies as much as to an excess of errata symptomatic of a repetition-compulsive ritual. What emerges are unforeseen faces of accidental design, surfacing as spirits situated between history and prophecy.

Created in collaboration with the spirits, this body of work is not intended to be circulated as an object for human consumption or pleasure, or to exist too long with the living. It will be burned in a ritual following the artist’s future death.

一百鬼 / 100 Ghosts was printed at Open Studio in collaboration with Meggan Winsley under the auspices of the Visiting Artist Residency Program, 2019-20.

Annie Wong is a writer and multidisciplinary artist working in performance and installation. Conceptually diverse, her practice explores the intersections between the political and poetic in everyday life, intergenerational feminist anger, the melancholy of ancestral amnesia, and hauntologies of diasporic displacement. Wong has presented across North America including at the Toronto Biennale of Art, Studio XX and SBC Gallery (Montreal, QC), and Third Space Gallery (Saint John, NB). She has been awarded residencies with the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Power Plant (Toronto, ON), The Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax, NS), and Banff Centre for Creativity and Art (Banff, AL), and is currently the community artist in resident at the Varley Art Gallery. Her literary works in poetry, art writing, and non-fiction can be found in Koffler. Digital, The Shanghai Literary Review, C Magazine, Canadian Art, and MICE Magazine.