explorations in toronto art.

The latest shows at LE Gallery have only been up for about two weeks, but I’ve already visited three times. OK, maybe the opening doesn’t count, since LE’s openings are always packed, fun, and full of people I want to talk so, making it a little hard to absorb the artwork.

Tristram Lansdowne and Amanda Nedham are the two artists exhibiting at the moment, and while there are some overlaps in their visual vocabulary and technique, the spirits of the works are quite different. Nedham, a rising star around these parts, has created some exquisite pencil drawings featuring animals and objects in strange configurations. The gallery has offered a text on the human capacity, throughout history, to treat animals in ways that are “brutal and depraved but also innovative and beautiful,” using armoured horses and other strangely rendered creatures to illustrate this. At first look, it’s all a bit dense, and I’m frustrated by my inability to make meaningful links between the images. But last week, I had the opportunity to chat with director Wil Kucey about it… strangely enough, it was through comparing Nedham’s work to inferior treatments of similar subjects that I began to appreciate it more.

I’ve just been seeing so much work concerned with animals lately. When I see more of it, it’s very tempting to lump it all together and dismiss the artists as simply following a trend. The exhibition that recently came down at LE’s Gallery’s neighbour, Show and Tell Gallery, crystallizes this nicely: nudes with animal heads just reeks of pure shock tactics, and the context lacks depth and cohesiveness (even reading the statement is frustrating, as it tries to pull in way too many threads.) So I think it’s partly Nedham’s fine technique and her thorough examination of a very small area of the larger topic “animals,” that helps her overcome this.

Lansdowne’s work, on the other hand, covers subject matter and themes that I will have to admit a bias for liking: architecture and geometry. This is a territory that’s been mined quite richly by other artists exhibiting at LE Gallery, so I’m glad to see it continuing as a thread. Lansdowne works in watercolour, at an impressive scale I have never seen before in that medium.

Watercolour is an interesting and somewhat under-appreciated medium. My associations with it are pretty much limited to vintage bird identification guides and the beautiful flowers my grandmother paints on her homemade greeting cards; skillful, but not exactly avant-garde. One thing I hadn’t considered about watercolour paintings is how the surface texture of them is almost a non-issue, especially when contrasted with the thick impasto used in a lot of contemporary painting. I like this paring-down of visual elements, and I hope to see more of it in the future. As a sidenote, there was a great piece in this summer’s Canadian Art about watercolour— it can be found at CanadianArt.ca. Full of good technique info (for non-painters like myself) and historical notes about watercolour and the Canadian avant-garde.

The paintings that comprise the exhibition all depict structures: trees with strange cubes built into them, decrepit buildings covered in graffiti, and the vintage-future-ish glassy bubble enclosing a mountainous island. I recognized his style from having seen a few works in MoCCA’s summer show, Empire of Dreams. The new works have the significant difference of not having their subjects isolated on white— the backgrounds are all richly rendered gradient skies, foggy horizons, and detailed terrain.

Lansdowne’s and Nedham’s works will remain on view at LE Gallery until December 19th— still plenty of time to go check them out.