Inhabiting Landscapes, Modal Strata
Alex Livingston amalgamates fields of painting, photography, drawing and engravings of the 18th and 19th century while digitally transforming and revising his subjects. Animals pose in states of alertness, sheltering in places alongside magnificent solo trees or at the edges of woodlands. A distinctive blend of media is achieved through the use of digital interfaces, collage techniques, and expansive formats.
Alex Sutcliffe navigates a dynamic interplay between evocative painterly traits, rich historical allusions, and innovative digital forms, accentuating the stark contrast between each layer of production involved in the work. The texture and layers serve as an important counterpoint to flat surfaces of the digital screens employed in their creation.
Both artists speak to the intricate connections of past and present, analog and digital.
Circumstantial Portraits
Artist Margarita Fainshtein’s work suggests self and family portraits, through canvases, works on paper, ordinary cast acrylic objects, and suitcases constructed from plexiglass. They are imprinted with family documents including Communist party tickets, passports and birth certificates. Fainshtein was born in Ukraine and like many of her family migrated first to Israel and Canada.
“The suitcase is a container – it contains the memories and emotions my family carried with us to every new place we had to move to in order to survive, to live. In this search for safety, for home, we had to change cultures and languages, we had to change ourselves.”
Fainshtein holds an MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the University of Haifa, Israel. Her work has been exhibited in the US, Israel and Canada.
Luminous Night
Studio 21 welcomes photographic artist Kristine Richer to the Gallery for a solo exhibition. Richer, a full time artist and educator working in Nova Scotia, completed two undergraduate degrees at NSCAD and has worked as a commercial product photographer and designer.
Richer’s images have been shown all over the world, including billboards in New York and Germany. Her nightscape images have been awarded the coveted NASA Astronomy Photo of the Day, twice.
“My work invites viewers to slow down and reconnect with nature and our place in the universe. My ongoing body of work, Luminous Night, uses specialized long exposure techniques to capture the extraordinary spectacle that our natural eye cannot perceive.”
East of the Peaks
Studio 21 is pleased to exhibit Peter Di Gesu for his first solo exhibition at the Gallery.
Peter’s landscapes are a balance of realism and abstraction. His primary concern is the relationship of form, colour, space, and light moving towards an elusive horizon line. The paintings are the result of meticulous layering of oil pigment.
Residing in Halifax, NS, since 1988, Peter was born in Los Angeles and received an MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work is displayed in Galleries across North America.
“Peter di Gesu’s finely described landscapes seem to exist in their own realities, neither in the present nor the past, but suspended between waking and dreaming.” – Tom Smart
Hidden Fires / A Plague Upon This Howling
This exhibition features two artists, who work in comparable manners, with very different results. Both Spielmann Rose and Perkins layer handmade and digital content. To some extent, the medium and technique become the subject. Both employ drawing, exploring line, colour and form.
Spielmann Rose mechanically incises lines into oil and oil pastel creating visual undulation. In his large pieces he photographed one such small painting, reproduced it in multiple digital prints and collaged them onto panels. Layers of oil stick and oil pastel were then worked on their surface.
Perkins exhibits small sketchbook paintings made using simple materials and influenced by contemporary conversation. His larger work layers and incorporates a found digital image to transform the original.
Never Before Seen Together
Marcel Kerkhoff’s recent paintings place imagined paintings containing animals, animal characters, fairy-tale characters and pop culture icons in interior spaces. All the works in the exhibition are small – none larger than 12 x 14 inches. Marcel explains:
“There is something poetic, intimate and precious about small scale work with a particular level of handcrafted detail. It draws one in, seductively forcing engagement, causing the eye to focus yet meander. In a sense, these interiors are used to moderate and regulate a collection of thoughts reflecting the importance, significance and insignificance of things. Accepting that all of our belongings and ideas become a part of something else, in its isolation we are left with traces of life.”
Marcel Kerkhoff was born in New York, raised in the Netherlands and India before immigrating to Canada. He completed a BFA from NSCAD University and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan.
Holiday Exhibition
Studio 21 Fine Art Holiday Exhibition is here for the Holiday Season. From Art Maker to Art Lover. Gift ideas from our gallery artists and an opportunity to choose from some of the best ceramic makers in the region.