A Very Special Post to Highlight My Friends in the Arts.

A few months ago, I had my work up in the Tarragon Theater in Toronto. It was maybe one of my most successful showings. It's a very well-traveled venue, with people coming out for shows every night in droves. Many of their shows end up being sold out, and all of those people end up in the lobby, looking at art. I ended up selling two pieces at that viewing, which is about two more than I usually end up selling at my shows. The arts are not for the weak!

Yesterday, I helped two of my very good friends put up a tandem show. We had a lot of fun, and everyone seems so happy, I don't think we could have done it better. Their works look so good on those walls.

Instead of posting about my own work today, I'm going to post about the Encaustic and acrylic works of Vashty Hawkins, and the Shadow Boxes of Karen Loomer.

The first photo here is of the wall across from the box office. It highlights three of Vashty's image-transfer encaustic pieces. Vashty is inspired mostly by classic films, silent films, and bygone beauties from pop culture. She highlights women with sometimes very psychedelic colours. After using heat to move pigmented wax around her substrate, she adds an image transfer, which is time consuming, and labour intensive, but ends up giving you this ethereal vintage look. Gorgeous stuff.

Karen has one piece in this selection, to the bottom right. Karen uses found materials to create the environments that haunt her imagination. She reaches into the darkest parts of humanity, rips chunks of pain as from a baguette, and transmutates that pain into art pieces. Some of her art has been seen on film and TV sets, like American Gods, and The Strain.

I took several pictures of both of them putting up their artwork after we curated the show together. I'm not going to share the ones where they're doing the work, because I don't have their permission. Instead, I'll just show you bit parts of the show so I can talk about the work.

Unfortunately, my phone didn't capture the clearest image of this piece. My bad photography sacrifices a lot of the nuances in Karen's piece, here. What you can see, however, in a created landscape, where the trees are forks - which look like they've bent under the weather organically, in spite of being metal. The little birds sit high above the scenery, serenely organized like they're part of an android's dream. Karen was telling me about the process that went into making this piece, including the polishing of the forks, which were very badly tarnished, to the appropriation of the birds from a napkin ring set gift, much to the chagrin of the gifter.

Here we have a piece by Vashty (left) and a box by Karen (right). We placed these two pieces together directly outside of the Mainstage Theater. The upcoming show which will run to the end of V and K's display will be about Holocaust survivors. Not to hit people where it hurts too much, we made a point to take a look into which shows would be playing in which theater room and when, so that we could place the art works in the most impactful way that we could. When patrons are lined up to see the upcoming show, they'll already be in a headspace to notice the intricacies of the work. Vashty's piece is a WWI setting, and Karen's is more directly Holocaust-related. There are elements in each piece which echo one another, such as the visual of a time-piece, the analog clock, but also of broken things. This is a prime example of artistic alchemy, the transmutation of pain into art.

These two pieces are also near the box office. On the right is an acrylic painting by Vashty, another classic beauty, made whimsical with iridescence, and eye stocks. On the left is one of Karen's newer pieces, titled 'I didn't do it'. I think these pieces work well together because they share a motif of eyes, almost symbolic of paranoia to accusation by ones peers. They peek in the same direction towards some outsider, while they themselves represent who we see as outsiders. My phone caught a bit too much glare to properly see everything, but this shot is a great example of Vashty's personal style in acrylic. Very fun, very glamour, and very bold line-work. She uses lots of rhinestones in her acrylic work. Not evident in this one, but when you go see it in person, there's a lot of fun light-play, with shine and glitz.

This piece, Karen told me, has never seen a public wall before. She created it from a frying net that she collected from a man who used to come around her neighbourhood and fry treats for kids. Nuts of some kind, if I'm remembering correctly! We placed it on a pillar just outside the Extraspace Theater, where there's a show playing about two girls who'd been trapped in cages for an extended period of time. The portrait inside, and the guarded jewels inside will likely be evocative to the patrons who come out of that theater after the show.
Putting it up where light hits it through every side, it was hard for me not to be a little emotional, seeing Karen see her own work in a new way for the first time. She'd only seen it in the diffuse lighting of her own household, and not in any space where there were multiple angles to view it. It was almost like it was finally revealing itself to the artist.

For the rest, y'all will have to get yourselves out to shows at the Tarragon to see it. If you find yourselves in Toronto, check it out. They always have some award-winning something or other playing in one or both of their theater spaces. I managed to get myself to see one called Harlem Duet a few months back. It was excellent. Very powerful. I wish I could remember what the names of the shows I've been referencing were. I would look them up, but my laptop is presently being very very slow, so instead I will just copy/paste the website so you can see for yourself, and maybe buy tickets.

http://www.tarragontheatre.com

If you'd like to contact Vashty or Karen about any of these pieces I've shared, here are their websites:
https://artbyvashty.webs.com/
http://tcupskeleton.com/Home_Page.html