Algonquin Dream

It sits on the land..having dreamt on dark waves....


Algonquin Dream
Oil On Plywood (with routered details)
48" x 48"
2009

Tom Ngo
Invalids
Lennox Contemporary Gallery

I've considered the show's title "INVALIDS " suggesting something broken, somehow dysfunctional, and yes Tom has presented us with images of post modernist machinations that have no obvious function, and as machines or structures couldn't possibly work. Tom also suggests that his vision is somehow rooted in absurdity and humour. I can see how he has had a good chuckle either with or at the Bauhaus. Yet all this said I would say that these are rather serious almost cynical images that portray post modernism as it actually is. Tom has reassured me that all things architectural are doomed to suffer their own trade of vision for lust. As absurd and unworkable as these images seem to be I see them wherever urban society thrusts itself forward into a world of mine is bigger and better than yours. An urban world where the banality of mushrooming condos glorify the vision of architectural absurdity. They don't F%#@**ng work.
Trained as an Architect Mr. Ngo has slyly used gypsum board, drywall to the rest of us, and old faded drafting paper as his backdrop. This pleases me to no end. Being a painter and lifelong construction worker I love to see common construction materials used to defy the insistence of the academic world of art making to be relegated to the same old same old. His obvious skill as a draftsman shows through with his confident line and bold geometry. These drawings resonate with an exacting mathematical relationship with we mere mortals that live and work within. His colours are on the soft side but never invisible. Balance after all is the rigueur.
Tom Ngo's vision of our invalid world is on the walls of the Lennox Contemporary Gallery, 12 Ossington Ave. Toronto, 416-924-7964 from Sept. 3rd - 20th.

Arctic Lament

Sadly it melts into memory...

Arctic Lament
Oil On Plywood
4' x 4'
2009

Prairie Possibility

It stands stoic...an icon in the prairie breeze...

Prairie Possibility
Oil On Plywood
4' x 4'
2009

*New* Abstracts

Come one come all....

IV

Michael Willems
IV
*New* Gallery

Michael Willems, Art Photographer, and Photo-Journalist spent one year documenting the lives of Kim and Robert. To look at this couple, at first glance, they seem to be a perfectly normal couple, albeit with significant age difference, he being several years older than her. Other than that nothing seems amiss, until you walk through one year of their lives as documented in this exhibit. You see they are both recovering junkies.
The most difficult part I have found about writing this article is to do so without going into the pathology of the subject matter. This after all is an Art exhibit, and I chose to view it as such. What Michael has done is created several images that when linked serve as a slow motion documentary. However each piece also stands alone. There are some of the images that if viewed without the overall context escapes the context, and are actually beautiful portraits of two beautiful people. As a matter of fact the one thing that initially disturbed me was that when I viewed each piece separately, I was not disturbed. Michael and I discussed this, and his take is that the exhibit shows that, even as junkies they are still complex humans, not just the emaciated lost in the world heaps of human excrement that we as a collective consciousness think of the addicted amongst us. Indeed there are moments of playfulness and child like abandonment portrayed in the individuals that they are. There is an image of Kim praying and I asked Michael with every bit of cynicism I could muster. "Is she really praying or is she posed?" To which he retorted that nothing was ever posed and he always had his camera at the ready. Are the images toyed with on a computer, again, no. Yet I still have to get through the beauty of these images. As a painter I saw many of them as Dutch masters, with soft endearing light. Never does Michael want you to fear his subjects, but to compassionately draw you into their world. One element I think would have added another dimension to the show would have been a spontaneous sound track, and not the 60's drug laments from the Artists' I-Pod. A little bit of their world recorded as they naturally dialogued day to day. All in all, an effective exhibit if you are not fooled by the beauty of it all.
*new* gallery
906 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON M6J 1G6
416-588-1200
Wed-Sun 1-6
info@new-gallery.ca

ABC-Tree-123
Mixed Media On Paper
2009