Contemporary artists are links in a chain of influence that manufactures the possibilities of an artwork and are no longer its source.

- The Value of Things, Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska

Creating homages from objects found around her house – food stuff, office supplies, dishes and cleaning items – Toronto-based artist Susana Reisman‘s ongoing series entitled Domestic Disclosures playfully speaks to the ‘history of art’ and engages with the idea of influence.

Susana Reisman, One and the Same (after Hilla and Bernd Becher), 2010

Susana Reisman, The Real Thing (after Andre and Judd), 2007

Susana Reisman, Endless Column (after Constantin Brancusi), 2010

This series engages with the idea of familiarity, repetition and transformation, in relation to that which makes up our everyday. For this project I have turned inwards to take a close look at my domestic environment and the everyday items I use during the daily routines of cooking, cleaning and working at home.

To begin, I decided to set up a ‘stage’—a neutral background—where I could photograph these objects outside of their everyday environment and function. Each day, I would choose a new item, set it on the stage and perform a series of improvised alterations to it. In making these ephemeral sculptures I soon realized, and became interested in the fact, that in some instances the gestures I performed and the forms that these objects assumed, subconsciously referenced artworks of which I am very fond.

In retrospect, this seems fortuitous and indeed bound to happen, as I am continually engaging with art of all kinds (in galleries, museums, books, magazines and on the web). Inevitably these artworks are processed and digested in various ways. And it is those artists, whose work, strategies and interventions I admire the most that have been more fully digested and have become such familiar territory. They have influenced how I work and how I see the world and they have become a part of my own visual vocabulary and repertoire.

Do these homemade, domestic sculptures—and in some cases homages—allow us to view these displaced materials (and their art historical references) any differently? Are we, as contemporary artists, indebted and possibly even bound or limited by the work of our predecessors and the history of art?

Susana Reisman, Permutations (after William Wegman), 2010

Circuit Gallery is pleased to feature new limited edition works from this series by Susana Reisman that playfully nods towards William Wegman‘s series Before/On/After from 1972.”

William Wegman, Before/On/After: Permutations, 1972

Susana Reisman, Permutations (after William Wegman) #2, 2009

Susana Reisman, Permutations (after William Wegman) #6, 2009

Susana Reisman, Permutations (after William Wegman) #4, 2009

Susana Reisman, Permutations (after William Wegman) #7, 2009

Susana Reisman, Permutations (after William Wegman) #5, 2009

Susana Reisman was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1977. She received a BA in Economics from Wellesley College (Boston, MA) in 1999 and an MFA in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, New York) in 2005. An internationally exhibiting artist, she is represented by Marcia Rafelman Fine Arts (Toronto), Peak Gallery (Toronto) and Spazio Zero Gallery (Caracas). She lives and works in Toronto.

Website: www.susanareisman.com

See more photographic work from this series by Susana Reisman available through Circuit Gallery.

Akihiko Miyoshi, Ode to the Pictorialists (2003)

Circuit Gallery @ upArt

Find Circuit Gallery at the 2011 upArt Contemporary Art Fair. We are very happy to be participating again in Toronto’s alternative art fair, scheduled to coincide with Art Toronto.

Our showcase exhibition features affordable and highly collectable works by:

Robert Canali
Alejandro Cartagena
Paulo Catrica
Leanne Eisen
Andrew Emond
Akihiko Miyoshi

+ TPW Silver Editions 2011 (a limited edition portfolio)
Kotama Bouabane
Michelle O’Byrne
Michael Snow

upArt 2011 Contemporary Art Fair

Thursday, October 27 through Sunday, October 30

Gala Opening Reception: Thursday, October 29, 7:00 – 10:00 PM
Exhibition Hours: Friday, Saturday + Sunday: 12:00 noon – 5:00 PM

The Gladstone Hotel
1214 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON, M6J 1J6

[map]

We hope to see you there!
Claire + Susana

Andrew Emond, Board, Buffalo Color (2005)

Kotama Bouabane, Bridge (2010)

Leanne Eisen, Laneway Lansdowne (2010)

Robert Canali, Untitled 7 (In Dust), 2010

NEWS RELEASE

INTANGIBLES: New group photography exhibition featuring Robert Canali, Wayne Dunkley and S. Billie Mandle

Toronto, ON— Circuit Gallery is pleased to present INTANGIBLES, a group exhibition of work by three photographers who all, in their own way, attempt to give representation to something experienced, perceived or felt, but not otherwise tangible—be it the phenomena of light, color, energy or the more transcendent, indeed spiritual state of being.

From his project In Dust, Robert Canali gives us a series of highly abstract and beautiful images about light and its corollary colour. Exploring the oppositions between the tangible and the intangible, abstraction and representation, Canali uses the very materials of photography—glass, paper, film, fluorescent tubes—to give objective representation to the essential yet utterly immaterial aspects of the medium.

In her own way, S. Billie Mandle’s work also relies heavily on the representation of light and color, in this case as metaphor, for spirituality and transcendence. In her series, Reconciliation, Mandle gives us photographs of the interiors of catholic confessionals. Here she shines a light, literally drawing the curtain, on these small, dark, non-descript and indeed well worn rooms for private introspection—spaces not meant to be seen or experienced in themselves as such. Mandle is interested in how the materiality, indeed how the tangibility of such space gets transformed into a space for the intangible ritual of confession. In these exquisite images, Mandle powerfully evokes, the presence of others, their secrets, and ultimately something of the desire for and experience of transcendence.

And finally, like other artists attempting to give representation to the “sublime”, Wayne Dunkley uses photography to capture something of the intangible, specifically something of his embodied and emotional connection to the landscape. Literally each image in his series TransForm is the product of a single hand-held exposure that effectively records the movement of his body, his breathing, as he experiences and connects with the land and its most basic elements: water, rock, trees and light.

In Dunkley’s photographs of the landscape he is bringing into the foreground what he describes as a “resonating energetic space” that exists below the surface of objects and within landscape, and that can be experienced when we are open to such experience. Dunkley’s photographs are less about the material world and any clear objective representation of it (photography’s traditional role) and more about our affective experience of being-in it.

INTANGIBLES runs September 15 through October 22 at Gallery 345, with an opening reception on Thursday September 15, from 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.. Both Mr. Canali and Mr. Dunkley will be in attendance.

Please visit Circuit Gallery online to see and learn more:
http://www.circuitgallery.com

Circuit Gallery at Gallery 345
345 Sorauren Avenue, Toronto, Canada
[ Google Map ]

Gallery Hours:
Saturdays, 12:00 noon – 5:00 p.m., or by appointment
For more information contact Claire Sykes: claire[at]circuitgallery.com | 1-647-477-2487

Wayne Dunkley TransForm5, 2011

S. Billie Mandle Saint Peter, 2008

Please visit Circuit Gallery online to see and learn more about this work.
www.circuitgallery.com

About Circuit Gallery

Circuit Gallery is the shared vision and collaborative product of Susana Reisman and Claire Sykes. The gallery specializes in high-end editions of works by emerging and established contemporary artists with an emphasis on photographic, digital and print-based works on paper.

For more information, visit www.circuitgallery.com or follow the daily conversation at www.twitter.com/circuitgallery.

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For more information, contact:
Claire Sykes, Partner, Circuit Gallery
Tel: 647-477-2487
E-mail: claire[at]circuitgallery.com

Circuit Gallery presented, as a Featured Exhibition in the 2011 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, a solo exhibition of work by Alejandro Cartagena from his acclaimed project “Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect” (2006 – 2009).

This is a video recording of the artist talk that Cartagena gave in Toronto, on Saturday, May 7, 2011. (Run time: approx. 32 mins.).

The photography exhibition Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect ran from April 28 – June 17, 2011.

Suburbia Mexicana is a documentary project deeply rooted in the local and the particular, in the artist’s own experience living and working in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey. It is an ambitious and committed project that seeks to tell the complex story of the region’s rapid suburban expansion: from urban gentrification and inner-city ‘ghettoization,’ to the seemingly unplanned and unhampered suburban sprawl emanating from many of its fast growing cities, including the environmental consequences.

See More work by Alejandro Cartagena

Alejandro Cartagena, Girl Coming Home To Suburb In Juarez From A Night Out In The City from Suburbia Mexicana, 2009

NEWS RELEASE

ALEJANDRO CARTAGENA: SUBURBIA MEXICANA

Circuit Gallery brings acclaimed project to Toronto for CONTACT Photography Festival Featured Exhibition

Toronto, ON – April 28, 2011 — Circuit Gallery is pleased to present, as a Featured Exhibition in the 2011 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, a major solo exhibition of 30 large-format works by contemporary Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena from his acclaimed project Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect (2006-2009). The exhibition features works drawn from the project’s constituent parts—Urban Holes, Fragmented Cities, Lost Rivers, and People of Suburbia.

The recent monograph Suburbia Mexicana, co-published by Daylight and Photolucida (2011), accompanies the exhibition. The book features 36 colour plates, an Introduction by Karen Irvine, an Essay by Gerardo Montiel Klint, and an Interview by Lisa Uddin.


Suburbia Mexicana is a documentary project deeply rooted in the local and the particular, in the artist’s own experience living and working in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey. It is an ambitious and committed project that seeks to tell, in multiple chapters, the complex story of the region’s rapid suburban expansion: from urban gentrification and inner-city ‘ghettoization,’ to the seemingly unplanned and unhampered suburban sprawl emanating from many of its fast growing cities, including the environmental consequences.

Alejandro Cartagena’s project pays homage to and distinguishes itself from the New Topographics—a 1970s American exhibition of landscape photography that evolved into a movement. His subjects include: tract housing, inner-city vacant lots, desiccated or polluted rivers, and the residents of these new developments. Yet beyond simple documentation, Cartagena is interested in foregrounding the larger picture: “the Mexican suburbs are symbolic; they represent corruption, a lack of standards in planning, and personal obsessions.” Through a sustained and holistic visual study, Cartagena effectively conveys something about the deeper mechanisms at work–the ideological, political, economic, and social ground–in his “man-altered landscapes.”

Cartagena’s work equally diverges from earlier New Topographic approaches in that it does not simply reject beauty, or seek to coolly “aestheticize the banal.” His images are aesthetically alluring and offer multiple points of resonance, reaching beyond the specific place represented and attesting to something more pervasive and palpable on a global level—greed, corruption, ecological fragility and loss—as shared issues under advanced capitalism.

Alejandro Cartagena lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His work has been exhibited and published internationally, and is in several public and private collections in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, and the United States, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, and the Joaquim Paiva Collection, Sao Paolo, Brazil. He is the recipient of several major national grants, numerous honorable mentions and acquisition prizes in Mexico and abroad. He is represented by Circuit Gallery (Toronto).

Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect runs April 28 through May 29 at Gallery 345, with an OPENING RECEPTION on Thursday May 5, from 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.. The artist will be in attendance.

On Saturday, May 7, from 1:00 – 3:00 p.m., Mr. Cartagena will talk about his project and be signing books.

Please visit Circuit Gallery online to see and learn more:
http://www.circuitgallery.com

Circuit Gallery at Gallery 345
345 Sorauren Avenue, Toronto, Canada
[ Google Map ]

Gallery Hours:
Saturdays, 12:00 noon – 5:00 p.m., or by appointment
For more information contact Claire Sykes: claire@circuitgallery.com | 1-647-477-2487

Alejandro Cartagena, Fragmented Cities, Escobedo, 2008

Alejandro Cartagena, Business In Newly Built Suburb In Juarez, 2009

Alejandro Cartagena, Fragmented Cities, Santa Catarina #2, 2008

Alejandro Cartagena, Untitled Lost River #16, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, 2008

Alejandro Cartagena, Father With Children After Gathering Wood In Juarez Suburb, 2009

Please visit Circuit Gallery online to see and learn more about this work.
www.circuitgallery.com

About Circuit Gallery

Circuit Gallery is the shared vision and collaborative product of Susana Reisman and Claire Sykes. The gallery specializes in high-end editions of works by emerging and established contemporary artists with an emphasis on photographic, digital and print-based works on paper.

For more information, visit www.circuitgallery.com or follow the daily conversation at www.twitter.com/circuitgallery.

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For more information, contact:
Claire Sykes, Partner, Circuit Gallery
Tel: 647-477-2487
E-mail: claire@circuitgallery.com

Would Picasso have sold online?

The Web is shaking up the art world. But some see it as selling out.

By Joanne Latimer

The article was originally filed in Arts+Culture, Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Read the entire article online at Macleans.ca

Alphabet City Festival 2010: AIR – Toronto Book Launch and Exhibitions

Toronto’s Alphabet City is celebrating the publication of its 15th anthology AIR – and the completion of its five-part biblioblitz on the environment – with events in NYC + Toronto.

The thin layer of atmosphere that clings to the surface of our planet is a fragile and corrupted brew. Air is in constant, restless migration around the globe, connecting us in the most intimate fashion. From the dust storms that sweep into Beijing from faraway deserts to the smog from Chinese factories that shrouds Los Angeles, our air, the ultimate commons, is tragically defenseless. Breathing air is an involuntary physical function, but keeping the air breathable requires acts of political imagination and will. AIR considers the condition of this basic component of life on earth from a range of perspectives. It reveals the thick materiality of air, air as stinky, clotted, corrupted matter – in a word, dirty. AIR leads us to perceive air, and the imperative to protect it, anew.

AIR art + talks + party – Toronto

Saturday, December 11, 3:00 p.m. – midnight

Toronto Free Gallery
1277 Bloor Street West (Lansdowne subway station), Toronto
www.torontofreegallery.org

Presented in partnership with Toronto Free Gallery and Circuit Gallery

ALL DAY – Exhibitions and Print Sale

3:00-6:00 p.m. – MUSEO AERO SOLAR: Help build a giant balloon artwork!

6:00-8:00 p.m. – CITIES OF AIR: Readings and interviews with four AIR authors: Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Megan Griffith-Greene, Amanda Jernigan, and Lisa Rochon

8:00-midnight – PARTY-AIR!: Celebrate with the authors, artists, designers, partners and editors of the AIR project.

LEARN MORE – visit the AbC Festival site

TRASHFOODFUELWATERAIR

December 11 through February 23, 2011
Toronto Free Gallery

Christine D'Onofrio, Smarties (Group of 4), 2004 - from the anthology FOOD

TRASHFOODFUELWATERAIR features fine art prints for sale from ABC’s five-volume series on the environment. The exhibition and print sale are part of our ongoing fundraising collaboration – Art from the Anthologies – with Alphabet City.

Find work, exclusively available through this project, by: Michael Cook, Eamon Mac Mahon, Stefan Petranek, Christine D’Onofrio, Ian Spence, Susana Reisman, Meredith Carruthers + Susannah Wesley (Leisure Projects), and Cynthia Lin.

Susana Reisman, Untitled 9 from the Plastikos series, 2002 - from the anthology TRASH

Eamon Mac Mahon, Lake Ice, 2005 - from the anthology WATER

Michael Cook, Beaconsfield Overflow, Garrison Creek Relief Sewer, Toronto, 2008 - from the anthology WATER

Please visit our Projects section to see and learn more about this collaboration.

About Circuit Gallery

Circuit Gallery is the shared vision and collaborative product of Susana Reisman and Claire Sykes. The gallery specializes in high-end editions of works by emerging and established contemporary artists with an emphasis on photographic, digital and print-based works on paper.

For more information, visit www.circuitgallery.com or follow the daily conversation at www.twitter.com/circuitgallery.

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For more information, contact:
Claire Sykes, Partner, Circuit Gallery
Tel: 647-477-2487
E-mail: claire@circuitgallery.com

CRITICS CHOICE: Roberta Best writes about Circuit Gallery artist David Grenier‘s Petalhead series and retro masculinity.

David Grenier, Petalhead Portrait 18: circa 1952, 2007

David Grenier and Retro Masculinity
by Robert Best

I wear a vintage wristwatch that I inherited from my grandfather, a lovely man whose loose interpretation of masculinity strongly imprinted and affected my own gender development and identification. It’s a men’s timepiece of another age: elegant, understated and ‘masculine’ without the need for a series of unnecessary bells and whistles to proclaim a testosterone-driven life spent conquering aeronautics and the deep, dark sea.

A similar chord of gentle-manliness is struck in David Grenier’s “Petalheads” portrait series. I have to say, I crushed out a little with the men in these pictures the first time I came across them. These smartly-dressed fellows of earlier eras, whose facelessness belies a beauty all the same, prompted me to think about the ways in which some of my favourite topics—gender, memory, portraiture, sartorial splendor—all converge contemporaneously within the frame of these works.

David Grenier, Petalhead Portrait 17: circa 1944, 2007

Traditional portraiture is meant to affix a certain image of a person to a specific time and place. It is a genre often defined by the visage, the ‘mask’ that the subject wants to portray to the world, or alternately, the way in which the artist wants us (the viewer) to see the sitter. Grenier’s replacement of the sitters head with a flower undermines this convention, of course, as it would if he had used any object, but the specific use of a motif generally thought of as ‘natural’ and ‘beautiful’, gently tilts the viewer’s gaze towards his male subjects ensconced in a world that is both earthy and elegant. I would resist the urge to suggest that in removing the corporeal heads of his subjects, Grenier invites the viewer to extend their gaze to an actual implantation (pun intended) of their own self-image upon the sitter, except, well, I certainly did that with these pictures, finding myself strongly identifying with these nameless, faceless “Petalhead” figures.

The “look” of the sitter then, lies primarily in the pose, and specifically, in his clothes and accoutrements. At first I noticed the details: the watch fob in Circa 1939, the pocket poof in Circa 1944, the scarf in Circa 1984; even the greyhound, draped like a muffler around the neck of Circa 1977, all these little details which evoke their era, or at least the idea of it, in subtle, sartorial ways. I use the word ‘evoke’ here intentionally. Most contemporary uses of the term “retro” are often so heavy-handed—either in a tongue in cheek “I’m so cool I can wear these ugly leg warmers” kind of way, or with a waxy nostalgia for a glorified era that may, or may not, have even existed—that it’s hard to see beyond the uber-irony.

David Grenier, Petalhead Portrait 23: circa 1984, 2007

David Grenier, Petalhead Portrait 21: circa 1632, 2007

“Petalhead Portraits” takes a much more nuanced glance back at earlier times, and in particular, at types of masculinities which have since been incorporated into current styles and modes of being, contributing to an evolution of gender and sexuality. The materials in these works—ink with watercolours—combine specificity with softness, at once creating a certain image and then opening it up to interpretation. I suppose at first superficial glance the “types” of men in these portraits are indeed just that: preppy, dandy, businessman, etc., but the stereotypes they portray and clothes that represent them, and which originated in another era: the sweater vest (1952), the glen check jacket (1939), the military shirt (1984) are now all items worn by any manner of stylish gent or gent-identified gal on any given day (okay, perhaps not the shirtless Elizabethan collar worn by Circa 1632, except at Pride…) and in any and all manner of sexual stripe.

Who are these men? What are they thinking? Why are they there? With the traditional recognizable trait of portraiture, the face, removed and replaced with, essentially, a metaphor, these questions remain unanswered, and the portraits venture beyond the immediacy of the moment. Although dated then, as in most traditional portraits, these pictures are, I must assume, specifically titled “circa” their particular date, to denote an approximation of time. These portraits are not a reproduction of someone, but rather a reminiscence of an idea, the idea of a certain kind of ‘man’, and the era that produced him, though he clearly continues to walk among us still in contemporary variations. The dandy (gay) now shakes hands with the metrosexual (hetero), the boy with the boi. And like my grandfather, they are all, without regard to time and date, “my kind of guys”.

David Grenier, Petalhead 7: Attack No. 2, 2007

David Grenier, Petalhead 15: Black Dawn, 2007

David Grenier, Petalhead 11: Homicidal Hummingbird Maneouvre No. 2, 2007

Bill Finger, After Psycho from the series Gravity Wins, 2006

NEWS RELEASE

Circuit Gallery Presents Bill Finger: Distant Smoke

Toronto, ON – November 15, 2010 — Circuit Gallery is pleased to present Distant Smoke, a solo exhibition of eleven large scale photographs by Seattle artist Bill Finger. This will be his first solo exhibition in Toronto.

Creating images that explore both television crime drama and the photographer as “unreliable narrator,” Bill Finger’s photographs elaborately play with both fiction and reality. Within each image Finger evokes and entwines memories of specific places from his childhood with those of the Hollywood movie sets he has worked on during a 20 year career as a motion picture Assistant Cameraman.

Each photograph in the exhibition began with a handcrafted miniature diorama that Finger painstakingly constructed for the point of view of the camera. Pulling back slightly with the camera, on certain images, he further exposes the illusion while allowing the viewer a glimpse off the set. With the edges exposed, Finger adds an emphasis to the constructed nature of photography. Where most photographs make a claim to represent the truth, Finger’s images do just the opposite, each one an elaborate fiction.

Without the physical presence of people or actors within his miniature sets of tenement bay windows, hospital rooms and derelict fields, he is still able to create a feeling of tension and foreboding that something has either just happened or is about to occur. It could be an approaching storm, the loss of something valuable or perhaps something much more sinister.

Bill Finger received his MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2005. His work has been exhibited across the United States and Canada and is included in the permanent collection of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography. Bill’s images have been published in the books Light & Lens and Exploring Color as well as the European magazine Fotograf.

Bill Finger: Distant Smoke

November 23 – December 5, 2010

Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 24, 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.

Department Gallery
1389 Dundas St. West, Toronto M6J 1Y4
[ Google Map ]

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday through Friday, 2:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday 1:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Bill Finger, Watch from the series Gravity Wins, 2009

Bill Finger, 1969 - Age 8 from the series Paramnesia, 2004

Bill Finger, Forest Set from the series Gravity Wins, 2006

Please visit Circuit Gallery online to see and learn more about this work.
www.circuitgallery.com

About Circuit Gallery

Circuit Gallery is the shared vision and collaborative product of Susana Reisman and Claire Sykes. The gallery specializes in high-end editions of works by emerging and established contemporary artists with an emphasis on photographic, digital and print-based works on paper.

For more information, visit www.circuitgallery.com or follow the daily conversation at www.twitter.com/circuitgallery.

-END-

For more information, contact:
Claire Sykes, Partner, Circuit Gallery
Tel: 647-477-2487
E-mail: claire@circuitgallery.com

Join Circuit Gallery for the upArt Contemporary Art Fair at the Gladstone Hotel as we engage head-on with this year’s theme—For What It’s Worth—and challenge you to consider the question of “value” in art!

Our exhibition features work by:

Robert Bean
Alejandro Cartagena
Dan Larkin
Akihiko Miyoshi
Sharon Switzer
Andrew Wright

What do we value in art? Why do we collect? How do we attribute worth to an artwork? In the case of digital or photographic work—where there is no “original,” simply an infinitely reproducible image—what determines the edition?

The consideration of these questions and the multifarious meanings of value, lie at the core of Circuit Gallery’s intervention. Our business model is based on questioning the very idea of “value” in art—what this means and where we find it. Instead of polemically answering these questions, we seek to make explicit their terms and entanglements, to create a new model of circulation for art, and to offer new options for both artists and collectors.

The 2010 exhibition theme, For What It’s Worth: Curios, Collections and Counterfeits, could not be more appropriate and we are very happy to have been invited to participate in this year’s event, scheduled to coincide with the Art Toronto.

UpArt 2010: For What It’s Worth

Friday, October 29 – Sunday, October 3

Gala Opening Reception: Thursday, October 28, 7-10 pm
Friday, Saturday & Sunday Hours: 12 noon – 6 pm

The Gladstone Hotel
1214 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON, M6J 1J6

[map]

We hope to see you there!
Claire + Susana