Help Eastern Edge start 2017 the right way!
Join us on Saturday, January 7th from 7 PM onward for the opening reception of Toronto-based artist Steven Beckly in the Main Gallery, and local artist Alex Noel in the rOGUE.
There will be artist talks beginning at 8 PM.
Main Gallery: Steven Beckly
Steven Beckly: A tender touch can bend the straightest of things
January 7th - February 15th
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 7th from 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Steven Beckly’s new exhibition A tender touch can bend the straightest of things cleaves images and objects, photographs and sculptures. Each work expresses an intimacy from touch in both content and form, interrelating the visual and the haptic. His pictures of colour, light, and skin are printed on a variety of surfaces—opaque and translucent, hard and soft. Forming a typology of textures and producing a range in perception, they delicately bend and fold against the apertures of the gallery space. Arousing sense and sensation, they affirm paper as a tactile and three-dimensional space of exposure. By transforming flatness into volume, the installation overturns the traditional conception of a rectilinear photographic frame. As viewers navigate the installation, they encounter a space disrupted by the touch of another presence, pointing to an intimacy between the physical and the spiritual, the natural and the spectral.
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Steven Beckly’s images fluidly take the forms of photographs, books, and sculptures. Cultivating a poetics of desire, he explores the epistemology of intimacy and its value in our increasingly interconnected lives. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include solo projects at Daniel Faria Gallery, Art Metropole, Bunker 2 (all Toronto), AKA artist-run (Saskatoon), VU (Québec), and Eastern Edge (St. John’s). He received his MFA from the University of Guelph in 2016. He lives and works in Toronto.
The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
rOGUE: Alex Noel
Alex Noel: Adhesive Love
January 7th - February 15th
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 7th from 7:00 - 9:00 PM in the rOGUE
Adhesive Love is a series of mixed media works that explore and juxtapose the performance of masculinity in both sport and painting. The term "adhesive love," borrowed from Walt Whitman's Calamus poems, denotes "manly bonding" and/or camaraderie between masculine subjects.
This work deals with the covert homoeroticism within the world of sports and the visceral tensions between players on the field and in the locker room that are erased or redefined by the heterosexist culture of athletics.
Painting is much like sport. Just like the football coach will develop a ‘play’ to get the ball past the goalposts, I make rudimentary sketches or write proposals to later develop into objects. Just like sport, my entire body is engaged in the act of painting -- it is a performance, not just an end result. And it is a performance that, much like sport, requires the painter or player to engage with a history that has canonized the white, hyper-masculine male. Adhesive Love attempts to reveal these parallels and disrupt assumptions about masculinity and leisure.
As an artist-activist I use my work to offer social critique, informed by both my lived experience and critical theory. I explore themes of identity, morality, and temporality as forms of resistance against overarching systems of power and modes of discourse, to make space for alternative narratives and dialogue.
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Alex Noel is a visual artist, activist and community organizer based in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Noel earned a BFA in Visual Arts from Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland (2015) and was a recipient of the 2015 BMO First Art! Award. Their work has been exhibited in Canada as well as the UK and it can be found in private and public collections, including Memorial University’s permanent collection.
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Membership continues to be an vital component of Eastern Edge Gallery. With your support, we are able to continue to bring you the best of local, national, and international contemporary art through the programming of our Main Gallery, the Rogue Gallery, and our newly re-named summer arts festival, HOLD FAST. Eastern Edge also facilitates over forty creative events annually, including artist talks, workshops, members’ events, music nights and much more!