Category: reviews

by Chunbum Park

Allan Rand’s solo exhibition titled, “Transportation,” at YveYang is an earnest exploration of painting in all of its conceptual, material, and formal dimensions. How does Rand treat painting as a material and aesthetic object rather than an illustrational endeavor? This is a body of work, which Rand began as he researched the subjects sent to the penal colony of Australia, where he currently lives (he is from Denmark). The artist exhibits an ideological affinity for egalitarian and progressive thought that questions the state power and the oppressive nature of the law by the nature of its uniformity.

To an uninformed eye, “Icon for Safe Passage across the Seas” (2025) could be literally seen as a t-shirt fragment pasted onto a cotton stretched onto a wooden board. However, the work expands the material vocabulary, substituting the large brush work with the pasting of the fabric, which then becomes this wide expanse of a turbulent sea. The use of iridescent medium invokes the mysterious quality of the light of the celestial bodies visible in the night sky (perhaps within the eye of a hurricane or typhoon), as in J. M. W. Turner’s paintings. The work is very much a post-minimalist type that asks the viewer to give more in order to receive. It neither illustrates nor gives in a literal fashion; the work is highly abstract and minimal, asking the viewer to settle into the quietness of the painting and to ask questions within a slow, meditational-style state of mind.

What are we looking at? Is this representational or abstract, or both? Is this a cropping of a life-sized portrait or a scene cut from an expansive landscape? Are the colors staying consistent, or are they flipping between warm and cool colors, and what does this mean for the painting? The use of abalone shell glitter alongside the iridescent paint material is highly symbolic, conjuring up the idea or the metaphor of a defensive shell that protects a treasure-like core. Furthermore, the flipping of hues suggests the artist’s inclination to seek freedom and to resist conformity or uniformity. A lot is being said, and a great deal needs to be heard, despite the silent nature of this painting.

A favorite in the show could be “Stoop Culture (for B.B.)” (2025), which the artist began off a story that he had heard of a building in the West Village of Manhattan that had its front facade fall off during a hurricane. Rand also heard stories of a demi-monde badger game taking place in another building, where extortionists had men lured by women into having sexual intercourse with them and then exposed the men through the setup by kicking down the door (and entering at the moment of climax). Rand’s work does not involve illustration in a literal fashion, but combines the two buildings into an atemporal archetype that stands outside a particular reference to a time within a linear or historical timeline. The narrative elements manifest as lines of charcoal, gently colored with passionate, rosy, and warm pinks and hot burnt siennas, some of which are made with ground-up bricks that originate from the Australian prisons.

This is the contradiction of Rand’s work – he positions the criminal figures in the story as the protagonists , like the movie “Ocean’s Eleven,” rather than automatically condemning them. This tendency of Rand’s to question the uniform requirement of the law, for everyone to obey the law and to not question it, could serve as a healthy dose of counter narrative or non-conformity against easy condemnation and judgment. Similar to how Philip Guston tried to understand the KKK by depicting himself as one, Rand feels the need to investigate the inner workings of the criminal mindset and psyche and thereby positions them within his own imaginative framework as the protagonists and the self. It is akin to method acting, in which the artist positions himself as true to the roles of his story, whether they are the “good” or “bad” characters.

It is this flipping of color, value, or perspective, which gives us the hint that Rand’s art is actively trying to understand… He is attempting to comprehend criminality in relation to the law and the subjectivity of the criminals. This understanding for the criminals involves the psychological, and the qualitative and quantitative complexity of and the subjective reasons for the criminal acts and the subjecthood of the criminals themselves. The complexity could manifest as a graph or a spectrum (in terms of the degree and the nature of the crime, whether petty or severe, and the person’s situational difficulty). (The law would be Procrustean if it treated petty and severe crimes with similar or same sentencing beyond the seas.)

What is justice if we are not allowed to question and challenge it? The bedrock for Rand is the need to understand the subjectivity and the shared humanity… or the need to respect criminals as human beings, despite their denigrated status and their denied humanity. This is the kind of painting and the accompanying dialogue that we should all learn to appreciate, despite their demanding nature… which requires bravery and honesty from us for ourselves… for the sake of truth, whichever that may be.

by Steve Rockwell

In his exhibition at the Christopher Cutts Gallery, Peter Templeman, having gone “Into the Void” returns here with the painted evidence of his journey. “Big Phase No. 5” (1997), an oil on canvas measures 72 x 84 inches, and the appropriately named acrylic on canvas “Wheel” (2022), at a mere eight inches square, serve as bookends to Templeman’s odyssey. The 2024 acrylic on panel, “Petroglyphs” have the qualities of an Egyptian cartouche, its “hieroglyphs” enclosed within their customary oval. Cryptic, yet conversely transparent, the panel amounts to an artist signature or seal, somehow punctuating his work as official – as if carved in stone.

Centrepieces of the “Into the Void” works are four major paintings that Christoper Cutts acquired subsequent to a late 1990s visit to the artist studio. After decades in storage, these were combined and displayed here with contemporary works from Templeman’s studio. A visit by the artist by the artist to the Cutts Gallery this past winter tweaked a reminder of the stored works, thereby kicking its exhibition wheel into full gear. The “Phase Series (No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, and Big Phase No. 5)” are significant paintings in Templeman’s oeuvre. Besides their relative scale to the rest of the exhibition, they exemplify a successful synthesis of control and abandonment. Templeman’s painterly forays into his “void” divide variously into the more or less ordered. His “Paintings 1 – 9” as a group, paints the abyss as roiled chaos. His 2014 “Rocking on the High Seas” has the artist steering directly into the eye of the storm.

An unflinching resolve to go to the wall with each painterly outing is typical fare with Templeman. Relatively early in the artist’s career, the French Symbolist literature of Gide, Rimbaud and Beaudelaire, had primed the young artist to a receptivity of the unconscious realm. The “wall,” seemingly without exception here, is the dark unknown, against which every scumbled brush stroke gleams. In geologic terms, “Big Phase No. 5” may be seen as a motherlode, the artist’s repository of countless layers of paint. Their formation amounts to the congeal of phantasms into ever-shifting tectonic plates of pigment. Through a kind of alchemy, the deposit of everyday sight and sound minutiae is made precious in the act of having been made visible.

Templeman’s 2014 oil on panel ,”The Void,” features a window or portal. The viewer, once entered, is drawn into a vortex where tumult is the price of admission. The effect is one of tunnelling, amplifying a sense of dimension within dimensions. Here the artist is possibly throwing us the key to his creative “tripping,” with some of the GPS signposts along the way. Its loosely brushed “O” shape around the window hub might suggest the Greek last letter omega. Regardless, a sense of the cosmic is inferred with the artist stretching his craft to an existential limit. The 2015 canvasses such as “Top Knot” and “Physual” read as an interlacing of enigmatic glyphs. As syllabic utterances that coalesce, they exemplify the body of works where Templeman has tamed his tempests.

With a 50-year-long career and many artists of note that Templeman has rubbed shoulders with, a consistency of development and vision predominates. While Graham Coughtry had impacted the artist as a student, Toronto’s Three Schools of Art introduced him to the art of John MacGregor, who’s improvisational surrealist method provided a significant building block. Templeman’s now distinct brushed iconography is part of a connective abstract tradition that threads generations.

by Emese Krunak-Hajagos

Seeing the description for Sylvia Galbraith’s Loretta’s Place in the catalogue for CONTACT 2025 I was hooked right away. Then I received an email from Abbozzo Gallery promoting Galbraith’s exhibition and the image looked as though it was in 3D—projected on the wall of the gallery. But when I finally visited the gallery, I saw the actual artwork—a large photograph on the main wall. I stood rooted in front of it, forgetting about the place and time— I just floated into its magic world.

There are two different worlds combined into that one image of a rather abandoned looking room with a bed frame, as though someone had just departed or the room was waiting for a new occupant. There is a rug on the floor and wood we expect to see on the floor now on the ceiling. But what makes this image unique is the upside-down landscape on the walls. Galbraith used a camera obscura when photographing the landscapes in Newfoundland, so the inverted images are inverted. But it is much more than that. Neither the room nor the rural landscape is interesting in its own. However, through combining them in this way, they undergo a metamorphosis. The interior opens and the landscape becomes part of the room, but not like a picture on the wall. Grass grows, buildings emerge, and we no longer know when the inside ends and the outside begins. Inside and outside become one, a mesmerizing symbiosis.

The Exhibition Statement mentions that the artist was “particularly interested in relationships between buildings and people”. However, none the photographs include people. Galbraith talks about people in their absence, like poetry does. The objects and landscapes resemble history, social status and there are real landscapes in their physicality. But what is physical? Can it be modified by our perception or even by the technique of the camera obscura? When does reality end and our dreams and memories start filling the place? In these photographs you can no longer separate them, they merge, creating an illusion that overshadows any possible reality. Looking at them you find yourself in a very different world, where interior and exterior no longer exist; an ethereal place has been created.

The title of the exhibition What Time Is This Place?, is very important. The photographs depict the rural landscape of Newfoundland in reality, as an outpost with common buildings. How do those people get here? Why? Is it an escape or a conscientious choice? Do they fit in or misplaced? We can guess their history, past and present and their social status. In Loretta’s Place the bottom of the walls in the room are sky-blue, the landscape is green, the buildings are yellow and white while the floor, the bed and the ceiling are dark, creating a dramatic contrast. The bed made me think of possible interactions between objects and people. It is just the frame, hinting at the absence of a person. But what does an absence really mean? Years ago, when I moved into my apartment, there was abandoned furniture in it that an old person left behind. For some time, I felt the presence of him, like a imprint of his memory was still there. The same is true for Galbraith photographs. Loretta might be a poor person, in a small, rural place, who still needs to buy a mattress and bed clothes. Very little else can fit into that tiny place. I think she is somewhat misplaced. This room can’t be the place she dreamed about.

Gary’s Place, Living Room (2019) is a comfortable space with a couch and framed pictures on the wall, that are overlapped with the landscape. A piano at the wall suggests that he is a music lover. His story is very different from Loretta’s. I am aware that I am creating my own narrative here, and I am sure everyone else will do the same. It is a good thing to be so deeply involved in the image.

Some of the photographs give away their locations, like Main Road with Boats and Butterflies (2022), where the landscape is dominant. It is a nicely painted room with an antique lamp and books on a dresser, suggesting that the person who lives in it can afford beautiful, expensive things. The landscape depicts a harbor and a more populated area, a village or a small town. Butterflies fly out of the landscape, further confusing the viewer about where the landscapes ends and the interior takes over. The ceiling is another photograph that looks like a rock with some grass. It is not easy to decipher what we see or where we are.

Morning in the Red Cliffe Kitchen (2024), located in a town, where the only thing you can see is the wall and windows of the neighboring building, giving me the feeling of a suffocating, little space. Everything is old—almost grandmotherly—the stove, the couch, covered with a blanket, a chair with a pillow, the lace curtain. As in all Galbraith’s photographs, the colors are important. The vibrant reddish brown on the left contrasts the white stove, the shining kettle and the white fence, creating a quiet interior.

Each photograph combines the inside of a living area with the surrounding landscape, focusing on the interaction between them. Every place has a strong impact on the people occupying them. Our personality is formed by our surroundings, whether it’s a busy city with noisy traffic or the countryside with a lake or ocean. According to that we become busy, hurried or eccentric, peaceful.

Our influence on the landscape can be positive or hurtful. I also believe that we may influence the buildings we live in. Whatever we do—work, cook or play the piano—our happiness or sadness leave a print on the walls and our memories live on in them. These photographs capture these ideas beautifully. As gallery manager, Blake Zigrossi said, they are more than photographs, they are “meta-photographs”, metaphors of our life.

Sylvia Galbraith, What Time Is This Place?, May 9 – June 7, 2025, Abbozzo Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 128, Toronto. Gallery hours: Tue – Fri 11am – 6pm, Sat 11am – 5pm.