Opening Reception: Thursday, February 23, 6-9PM
“Staging in the sense we are talking about is a kind of framing; in theatre, the stage is the frame that allows us to make sense of what is to follow – that the execution wasn’t really an execution, that the newlyweds aren’t really married. While not a part of the performance itself, the frame is what allows us to see it as a performance” (Chris Fleming & John O’Carroll, The Art of the Hoax, 47).
Sharon Katz and Véronique Sunatori, two artists at disparate points in their lives and careers, explore the themes of temporality and materiality through their contrastive but complementary works.
An accomplished animator and filmmaker, Sharon Katz brings her mixed media work incorporating pages of encyclopedias, ink, paint and found objects to the exhibition. Katz’s works depict movement and action, merging the stasis of her painted frames with the vitality in her work, notable in String Theory, where the tennis player yearns to engage below the glass with the ball, finding itself in a “perpetual state of suspended animation.” Katz has only recently begun working with paint and its role in her work varies within each piece - from background to foreground, from heavy touches to light. A set designer for theatrical production, Katz is cognizant of the ways in which each work becomes a storyboard, a natural extension from animation.
Véronique Sunatori, currently working towards her MFA at York University, creates work that offers alternative perspectives, as can easily be seen in her series of severed and modified frames, effectively reintroducing the “stage” as the art itself, albeit disjointed from its original purpose and appearance. Sunatori also incorporates her identity, born to a Japanese father and Québécoise mother, to her Portraits series wherein she has drawn over glass covering photographic portraits of the artist, and her Skillfully series, which references traditional Japanese wood and paper screens. For Sunatori, invoking sculptural forms allows for her work to breathe conceptually and both asks for and offers up alternative points of view.
Staged together in the juxtaposed space of the gallery, the performativity of both artists’ works is present, provoking debate on the functionality of staging and framing and, indeed, of a suspension of disbelief.
Text by Rose Ekins, Curator
---
Fleming, Chris, and John O'Carroll. "The Art of the Hoax." Parallax 16, No. 4 (2010): 45-59.
