Lucubrations
Nicholas Zirk

February 7 2023 - April 29 2023
Flying Books
784 College St, Toronto

In our modern world, many of us are searching for meaning and attempting meaning-making at every turn. If you’ve ever struggled with anxiety or excessive stress you may have found yourself searching for recommended anecdotes like deep breathing, meditation, prayer and others. This journey can feel winding, full of failed attempts and uncertainty. If you find something that sparks and starts to work, it can feel like magic.

Nicholas Zirk is a painter who creates still lifes in the tradition of vanitas - symbolic works that depict the transience of life, futility of pleasure and the passing of time (or, certainty of death). He’s curious about numerology, tarot cards, palm readings and astrology, all of which have heightened in popularity over recent years. Zirk has observed that the Spiritualism movement (which took rise in the mid-nineteenth century and has been practiced throughout history) seems to boost in popularity in times of political, social and economic upheaval.

In this exhibition entitled Lucubrations, Zirk creates formal inquiries around the themes of anxiety, language, and magic. He imagines magical acts through the arrangement of everyday objects in an effort to mollify the stresses and anxieties of contemporary life.

Lucubrations is a latin word that is defined as laborious work, study or thought especially at nighttime. The somewhat pretentiousness of this word paired with the paintings, is intended to be humorous - a tool Zirk often utilizes when creating work to draw viewers in. In Alter candle wax drips onto a smartphone. It’s a tool that one may be trying to ignore in a candlelite meditative moment but to the phone addict, the wax is painfully collecting on a piece of us, our ‘other limb’. We imagine the attempt at enlightenment halts in order to save the phone - a funny scene of the futility of life.

Zirk also references the Windows 95 desktop, a cultural shorthand for utopia, or techno-utopian ideas. It represents an era in which it felt like technology may have been our answer for everything, the perfect solution and fix to all our problems - an outcome we now know is not true. Collectively, this group of paintings invites us to contemplate, perhaps laugh and consider all the incongruous ways we create meaning in our everyday lives.

Contact us for more information and price list.

Marcas
Jasmine Cardenas

October 2022 - February 2023
Flying Books
784 College St, Toronto

Sagan Editions is pleased to present Marcas, a solo exhibition of a new body of work by Jasmine Cardenas at Flying Books, Toronto.

Jasmine Cardenas is a Canadian-Ecuadorian multidisciplinary artist, working in sculptural painting, collage and installation. She takes inspiration from familial oral histories, childhood, dreams and a multitude of traditions through the diasporic lens of her Latin American Canadian identity.

In Marcas, Cardenas presents four abstract paintings that use layers of collage, found materials, recycled textiles, pumice stone and sand to build up the canvas. Her unique combination of texture and rich, vibrant palette creates images that evoke natural shapes (leaves, trees, flowers) and landscapes.

A recurring shape in this group of paintings is an eye motif. In the history of painting, representations of eyes have evoked clairvoyance, gateways into the soul and have been utilized as symbols of light and truth. In these paintings, they are a memento mori, representing a spiritual connection to Cardenas’ descendants and family members who have left the physical plane but whose spirit lives on through her acts of making.

Cardenas creates a meditative space for personal exploration through the many hours spent painting, woodworking and molding clay. The tactile processes of making art supports her discovering, grieving, and comprehending stories and histories. In these moments she reflects and dissects experiences in relation to her bicultural identity. She honours her family; the cross-stitching her mother grew up with, the generations of women in her family that spent hours grinding corn, collecting husks and banana leaves to wrap humitas and hallacas, her father who apprenticed to become a goldsmith and grandfather who was a carpenter and furniture maker. The prolonged interaction between her body and the material holds space for absorbing the stories shared. The medium activates the multiple cultures and identities she carries.

Image: Jasmine Cardenas. Eyes on You. 2022

Illuminations
Holly Fedida
May 1 - Sept 1 2022
Curated by Sagan Editions
Flying Books, 784 College St, Toronto, ON

Illuminations is a new body of work by Holly Fedida exploring our connection to the objects we cherish and the sensations sparked by reading and looking.

Fedida configures and reconfigures small relics, books, tools, and textiles, setting the stage for them to become active subjects in her still-life plays. The objects in her paintings are alive, existing in relation with one another, buzzing with energy, and perhaps even having concerns of their own.

In many of these works, Holly paints books and the images she's gathered from them, honoring the worlds authors paint for us. She imagines scenes coming to life in the way we do when we read. In Illumination 1 (painting for Virginia Woolf), a small painting of a crocus emanating light, she references a passage from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, echoing a memorable moment of clarity for the main character, Clarissa.

The focus of Holly’s oil paintings, gouaches, and drawings blurs object and subject. Our expected hierarchies and categorizations become malleable and emphasis is placed in unlikely places. She offers the viewer new configurations that expand on and challenge the definitions of preciousness.

About Holly Fedida

Holly Fedida is an artist invested in the intimacies of observation and the objects we hold close. Working with painting and drawing, she aims to imagine different possibilities for the still-life genre, creating pictures in which objects can become subjects: taking on the roles of active protagonists.

Holly holds a BFA in Painting & Drawing from Concordia University. She currently lives and works in Tkaronto/Toronto.

PAST:

Layne Hinton: Site Lines

June 1 - 18
Curated by Sagan Editions as part of Toronto Art Book Week.
SOUVENIR, 1232 College St, Toronto, ON M6H 1C2
Reception: Saturday June 17, 2:00pm - 5:00pm

Layne Hinton thinks about the future. She even titled the experimental transformative art  festival she co-directed last year ‘in/future’ which exhibited 100 artists and performers from multiple arts disciplines at Ontario Place in Toronto. Since 2010, when we were both in art school together, Layne has worked as a co-curator of Art Spin, the team behind ‘in/future’ who facilitate mobile art experiences that take hundreds of cyclists on tours of art in unexpected places throughout the city. Hinton’s integration of alternative spaces, those spaces whose identities are fragile and are subject to changes through time, into the art world are at the heart of her curatorial practice. She’s a master at organizing exhibitions in abandoned or soon-to-be demolished spaces and selects artists who make work in response to the site. These exhibitions often explore ideas around infrastructure in Toronto, public space and urban densification.

Alongside this curatorial work Hinton has a dedicated studio practice, where she imagines alternative spaces and structures through drawing, collage, printmaking and sculpture. By continuously rearranging made and found objects in her studio, she explores new relationships between forms. These stacked assemblages reflect the temporary nature of her curatorial work with Art Spin, and often resemble cityscapes. Hinton’s mesh sculptures and geometric prints use frameworks of triangles, polygons and cubes while drawings of scaffolding and peculiar houses line her sketchbook. The analog projectors she builds examine how light and shadow play with space. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Hinton’s work reads as forward-looking blueprints of an imagined city - with spaces she dreams of taking over and transforming through creative activations.

Until recently, Hinton has regarded her work as a curator and that as an artist as separate pursuits. Through our conversations the direct relationship between them has become clear - Hinton focuses on and interrogates the future of city building, and art’s place within it.

Site Lines is a solo exhibition of Layne Hinton’s new body of work at SOUVENIR curated by Sagan Editions from June 1 - 18, as part of Toronto Art Book Week. Please join us in celebration on Saturday June 17, 2:00pm - 5:00pm.

- Sagan MacIsaac

See saganeditions.com and souvenir-studios.com for more details

Artist's Bio: 
 

Based in Toronto, Layne Hinton is a multi-disciplinary artist and independent curator. Her work often explores light and shadow, collections and multiples, and architectural forms through analog projection, sculpture, video, drawing and printmaking. Continuing her exploration of space, Hinton co-curates site-specific work as a member of Art Spin, a not-for-profit organization that presents unique, site-responsive projects in alternative and under utilized public spaces.

Hinton holds a BFA from OCAD University in Integrated Media, with a minor in Printmaking. She has received awards including the InterAccess Prize, OCADU Printmaking Award and OCADU Faculty Film/Video Scholarship. Hinton's work has been shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario, YYZ Artist's Outlet, O'Born Contemporary, InterAccess Electronic and Media Arts Centre, the Lower Gallery at University of Buffalo SUNY, Mono No Aware NYC, L'École des Beaux Arts Paris and the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Russia.

PAST:

see what happens

June 24 - July 29 Darby Milbrath

August 1 - Sept 2 Laura Mccoy

Sept 30 - Nov 4 Naomi Yasui

Public Window

Curated by: Sagan MacIsaac

‘see what happens' is a series of three solo exhibitions curated by Sagan MacIsaac featuring artists Darby Milbrath, Naomi Yasui and Laura Mccoy in Public Window, Toronto. Happenstance, play, and pleasure emerge in the multi-disciplinary works, which include ‘failed’ ceramic vessels by Yasui, a ‘boldly linear’ hand-painted installation by Milbrath and ‘poetically impulsive’ sculptural works by Mccoy. The artists will mount these new site-specific works to the Public Window space.

Darby Milbrath

Trained as a contemporary dancer, Darby Milbrath  is a multi disciplinary artist currently focusing on drawing and painting. Darby is the chief advisor and Toronto correspondent for The Editorial Magazine. She is based in Toronto, Canada.

Laura Mccoy

Laura Mccoy (b. 1981) works in sculpture, performance, painting and words and looks at the well-trotted dirt at the bottom of the collective shoe of the feminine – in order to consider objects and methods that adhere to a structural precariousness or vulnerability and to reform the fabric of becoming. Her work spans a variety of media including drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance and has been included in various group shows, including showing work with Soi Fischer (Toronto), The Power Plant (Toronto), Mercer Union (Toronto), The Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and as part of the monthly performance show, Doored, organized by Life of a Craphead. In 2015, she showed work at Western Front (Vancouver), Rodi Gallery (New York) and CK2 Space (Montreal.) She holds a BFA in Sculpture and Installation from OCADU and is the Art Director for the upcoming feature film Bugs, directed by Life of a Craphead, which is set to premier in December 2015 at the AGO in Toronto. Her work can be found online at lauramccoy.ca. She currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Naomi Yasui

As a ceramic artist, working in sculpture, performance and installation, Naomi Yasui’s conceptual practice revolves around process, form, and happenstance.  Her work enforces the notion of an aesthetic and spiritual pursuit rather than a concrete objective, lending insight into an ongoing practice.  Focusing on the act of making as an extension of sentient being, she explores the intimate bond between maker and object. Yasui uses the abstraction of traditional techniques to exercise artistic expression, to place side-by-side the domestic object and conceptual art.  

Yasui studied Material Art and Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design.  She has exhibited nationally and internationally.  Recent solo exhibitions include Chapter IV: Painting with Fire presented at ESP Gallery, Toronto (2014);Chapter XI: Vases at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto (2013); and Wardens Abroad at Sur la Montagne (with Heather Goodchild), Berlin (2012). Recent group exhibitions include The Japaense Canadian Cultural Centre, Toronto (2015); Narwhal Contemporary Art Projects, Toronto (2014); The Power Plant, Toronto (2013); and Battat Contemporary Gallery, Montreal (2013) Yasui was granted an artist-in-residence placement at Guldagergaard in Skælskor,Denmark in 2014. In collaboration with Heather Goodchild, Yasui runs the online project The Wardens Today.  She lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Public Window is a project space mounted in the window of Public Studio, the live/work space of artists Elle Flanders & Tamira Sawatzky. It facilitates the dissemination of contemporary art practices. Public Window is located at 1575 Dundas Street West, and is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Contact:

Sagan MacIsaac

647 228 0846

saganmacisaac@gmail.com

saganeditions.com