Public Opening: Sunday, January 15, 1-3 pm
Exhibitions on view from January 15 to April 15, 2012

AN INDELICATE PRACTICE: Paintings by Leslie Watts

Leslie Watts uses one of the oldest and most versatile painting methods – egg tempera – to create her portraits. The mixture of egg yolk, water and raw pigments is applied to a gesso made from rabbit skin glue, ground chalk and talc warmed in a water bath, for a beautifully sleek and absorbent surface. A single small egg tempera painting may take hundreds of hours. A similar process is replicated for the acrylic works, in which the artist gradually refines the image through glazing.

The exhibition also includes a new body of work inspired by the artist’s source photos taken on a trip to England in 2010. The purpose of sites such as Oxford Castle and The Foundling Museum has evolved over time. The artist captures the renovated spaces with modern elements, yet marks of the past remain. The interiors are void of humans, but evocative of the atmosphere and people who occupied the hospital rooms and prison cells. The contrast of the historical and contemporary is further emphasized in a series of works in which the Townley Caryatid is removed from the British Museum and placed in a hangar in Montreal.

About the Artist: Leslie Watts was born in 1961 in Weston, Ontario and raised in Toronto, where she received a B.A. in Psychology from York University. After spending year in Italy writing and illustrating her first children’s book, she moved to a small town in southwestern Ontario. Since then she has worked full-time as both a writer and artist.

In 2004 Leslie moved to Stratford, Ontario. In 2007 she gave up commercial illustration in order to paint full time. Her paintings in acrylic and egg tempera may be seen on line at www.lesliewatts.ca.

Image: Leslie Watts, "Corpusse", egg on panel, 16"x16", 2011.

Peter Sibbald: ELEGY FOR STOLEN LAND

The exhibition includes photographs distilled from a decade-long exploration of changing land use in Southern Ontario. Peter Sibbald was compelled to investigate the sheer rapaciousness of human activity in Ontario’s countryside upon returning there to raise a seventh generation of his family. The artist presents landscape as a nexus of human will and nature where politics, spirituality, environmental science and commerce collide.

"GPS coordinates are the best way I can keep track of the places I’ve been; yet they convey falsity, both in solace and in their implication of accuracy. For place is a thing of the senses – the foot and the eye – and landmarks on the heart. Returning to a coordinate, the place is gone." — Peter Sibbald

About the Artist: For over 25 years documentary photojournalist, Peter Sibbald has photographed for many of the world’s most prestigious magazines, meanwhile concentrating the focus of his personal work on the themes of land, home and colonization. Raised on the land of his pioneer ancestors near Sibbald’s Point before moving south to Toronto, it was while returning home to raise a seventh generation that he discovered the rapacious assault on Ontario lands. “It struck me that it fell to people like me to focus public attention on both the loss of aboriginal and non-aboriginal heritage and our capability of ensuring a secure food supply.” Sibbald rejects the convention of Landscape, which objectifies land as something compartmentalized and apart, and rather presents land as an nexus of human cultural will and nature where social justice, politics, spirituality, commerce and philosophy collide.
Peter Sibbald, "Stouffville, Ontario. Dewatering", Lambda chromogenic print mounted on Dibond, 45"x15", 2005.