Visiting Artists’ Residency Exhibition

We are excited to announce our second of two 2018 – 19 Visiting Artists’ (VA) Residency exhibitions featuring work by Maura Doyle and Sidney Masuga.

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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Dear Mother
Maura Doyle

Maura Doyle presents new screenprinted works based on her daily practice of mind-stream journaling and left-hand ink drawing. Doyle brings to her printmaking a background in artist publications (including zines, posters, maps, and books) and a deep appreciation of object qualities of the print medium.

Using the format of “the letter” as a vehicle for an artistic dialogue, Doyle writes to objects, people and ideas. Together, these texts form an ulterior narrative about the artist’s life told from shifting perspectives.

Her Vitruvian Mother (Flesh Knot) (2019) prints are drawn in counterpoint to the classical proportion and symmetry of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Created through layers of brush strokes and line, the artist draws limbs becoming entrails becoming arms becoming the artist’s self-portrait. From that same line is drawn her baby, hanging like Spiderman overlooking his city.

All of these works are made from and ultimately transform Doyle’s intimate life experiences as an artist and single mother. From a private journal to editioned work, publication (root word: public) aligns with the act of creation: making something out of messy, illogical and childlike emotions, in contrast to the controlled, rational adult word of acceptable civic behaviour.

Maura Doyle lives and works in Ottawa. Her multidisciplinary practice has included video, ceramics, sculpture, printed matter and drawing. Her most recent work, titled Gone: Removed public art in Ottawa / Anishinaabeg Aki is an artist’s publication commissioned by the Ottawa Art Gallery. She has exhibited her work across Canada in artist-run centres and art institutions, as well as internationally in New York, Japan, Sweden and Vienna. Doyle is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto (http://paulpetro.com).

The artist gratefully acknowledges support from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and City of Ottawa.

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Colour Fields
Sidney Masuga

As 5:30 p.m. becomes 6:30 p.m. a shift occurs in the sky’s palette:
The setting sun’s light retreating behind the Earth’s curvature;
The planet turning toward darkness. 

The 5:30 spectrum is a hazy wash — still deepening red of a glowing horizon. 

Red followed by orange and yellow;
Yellow turning to green;
Green to blue;
Proceeded by indigo. 

At 6:00pm the solar angle has sharpened the rainbow to a clarity of form:
A bold smear of light contouring the horizon. 

By 6:30 the fading wavelengths — scattered and diffused through particles in the atmosphere — resemble the warm but melancholic radiance of a dying fire.

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The works, 5:30 pm, 6:00 pm, 6:30 pm in Sidney Masuga’s Colour Fields, exist as three four-colour process CMYK screenprints and document the shift of colour and light relative to the horizon on a day in November. These three moments over the course of the sunset follow the climax and decay of the visible spectrum. Colour is divided and layered in particles — abstracting landscape to dot and colour field.

Sidney Masuga is an interdisciplinary artist working between digital and analogue mediums; she holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Coming from a background in illustration, her work utilizes symbol, form and abstraction to articulate her interests in communication, narrative, and metaphysics. Places of recent exhibition include Art Metropole (Toronto, ON), Redline (Denver, Colorado), The Kitchenette (Toronto, ON) and Sea Foam (Toronto, ON).