Archive of Craig Scott Gallery Shows & Fairs, 2006-2010

Marian Wihak returned to her native Regina for a solo exhibition of works produced from 2007 to 2009 at the Art Gallery of Regina. The exhibition curator described the show, "Marian Wihak uses dramatic prairie skies to convey ideas about boundlessness, the dichotomous experience of being suspended between the crushing enormity, and the liberating power and freedom of Big, Big space. Her work evokes a sense of reverence for Nature and compels us to reflect upon our place in the grand scheme of things and our impact on the ecology of the planet." Wihak describes the genesis and nature of the works in the show as follows: Boundless: Sublime Maelstrom is the second phase of the Boundless body of work in which I am rendering large-scale oil paintings that reference cloud masses, dramatic weather systems, and limitless geographical horizons as I've witnessed in Southern Saskatchewan and Alberta... [read more]

The year 2009 marked the 100th anniversary of Malcolm Lowry's birth in Liverpool, England, with major scholarly and artistic events organized around this centenary. One of them was a mega-conference at the University of British Columbia (in collaboration with Vancouver Island University), at which a slide show of all of Jorge Martínez' prints from his Lowry/Under the Volcano series were projected as part of the opening of the conference. Following the UBC Conference was a multi-disciplinary extravaganza at a public arts centre called the Bluecoat, in Liverpool (The European Union's City of Culture for 2008)... [read more]

From amongst the gallery's roster, the gallery curated an eclectic selection of exciting new works in March and April 2009 in a tongue-in-cheek homage to the global economic near-depression. The common denominator of the works in the show were that they were all fun and/or fabulist works. Also, many of the works were priced at under $1000. The bare-all works by Zachari Logan then went on tour with the MFA Now international art competition for which Logan was the only Canadian winner... [read more]

Craig Scott Gallery is privileged to have a great roster of artists who work on paper, whether in printmaking, painting, drawing, or mixed media. The gallery’s group show called “Out of the Vault: Works on Paper “ was mounted on the premise that, unless friends of the gallery had managed to get to the gallery for every show,many would likely only have had an attenuated sense of the treasures that sit in a dozen cabinet drawers and several portfolios at the gallery. And, even then, much of what the gallery has to offer in terms of works on paper had not been shown in a specific exhibition, although many pieces can be viewed on this website. ”Out of the Vault” was designed to encourage visitors to discover the hidden side of the gallery... [read more]

On October 15, 2008, a unique art showcase curated and mounted by Craig Scott Gallery took place at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto as part of the annual Business Achievement Awards Gala of CAMSC (the Canadian Aboriginal and Minority Supplier Council). Attending the combined Reception and Dinner Gala were over 400 representatives from major corporations that support CAMSC, including such companies as the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank of Canada, CISCO, Chrysler, Dell, Office Depot, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Alcatel-Lucent, and Corporate Express. CAMSC’s mandate is to deliver programs to promote and facilitate procurement opportunities between major corporations in Canada and suppliers owned and operated by Canadian Aboriginal persons and members of visible minorities. CAMSC was founded by corporate Canada to facilitate access for Aboriginal and minority-owned suppliers that may not previously have been able to penetrate traditional corporate supply chains... [read more]

With his fall 2008 solo exhibition Further Unmanned Strategies, Christian McLeod took up where he had left off his first exhibition with Craig Scott Gallery in June 2007. In that 2007 show, Ascending Language, a work called "Unmanned" introduced a new thematic as well as a new aesthetic that McLeod build on with the title piece for the 2008 Further Unmanned Strategies exhibition. McLeod's unique narrative abstracts explore urban landscapes framed by the theme of surveillance and evasion in our contemporary security moment. Below is an essay written on the Further Unmanned Strategies show by Martin Mills. *** Four ideas regarding "Further Unmanned Strategies" Paranoia London is the most highly surveilled place in the world, with an estimated half-million CCTV cameras on private premises alone, not including the galaxy of government surveillance equipment... [read more]

Samuel Chow’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” exhibition was presented in association with the Toronto International Film Festival: Future Projections, 2008. See the TIFF release, "Cinema Meets the Visual Arts at TIFF 08 with Moving-Image Projects throughout the City of Toronto". The Artist Samuel Chow graduated from the Master of Fine Arts Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; prior to that, he received his BA (Honours) in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto... [read more]

As part of its participation in the first World Washi Summit that took place in 2008, Craig Scott Gallery presented a group exhibition of works on washi (Japanese handmade paper). In the north gallery was a full-room installation by Noriko Saito, consisting of a fleet of washi dories arranged in an ambiguous relationship to each other. Viewer were struck by a feeling that the boats simultaneously converge towards each other and move away from each other... [read more]

Rupert Sheldrake, one of the most boundary-pushing scientists of our times, wrote on the occasion of the opening of Rudolf Bikkers’ “Morphogenetic Fields” exhibition, “I am delighted that Rudolf Bikkers has produced these striking images based on the idea of morphogenetic fields, exploring some of the fundamental processes in the emergence of natural form. “ Twenty-five years before, in his essay for the catalogue of Rudolf Bikkers’ 1982 exhibition, Icons, at the London Regional Art Gallery, Martin L. Robinson described the forms in Bikkers’ mixed-media works (colour lithographs with acrylic painting) as “biomorphic, biocentric, or, perhaps better, biodynamic.” These forms are “bursting with energy and anticipation[,], [s]ome divid[ing] in a biological or cellular way while others…explode.” A quarter-century later, Bikkers’ work remains true to Robinson’s observations... [read more]

Posted May 28, 2010: Raymond Waters’ “Values” exhibition work, “Mickey Mouse (1932 – 1933) 16 mm”, is being offered at auction by Phillips de Pury in New York City at its June 24, 2010, FILM modern and contemporary art auction, alongside works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Mike Kelley and James Rosenquist. Click HERE to go to the auction page for Waters’ Lot 116 alongside Warhol (Lots 112 & 113), Rosenquist (Lot 114), Kelley (Lot 115), Lichtenstein (Lot 119), and Sugimoto (Lot 120). **** The Raymond Waters “Values” exhibition engaged with the values and symbols of American life – by both affirming and querying them – as well as of American presence in the world... [read more]

On October 11, 2007, Craig Scott Gallery presented works by Samuel Chow, Liu Jian, Don Russell and Amir Shingray at the 3rd Annual Awards Ceremony of CAMSC (Canadian Aboriginal and Minority Suppliers Council) at the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel in Toronto. Five prints from Chow's Toronto series were donated by the gallery as awards for the evening.... [read more]

From June 21 to July 15, 2007, David Folk and Zachari Logan, colleagues in the University of Saskatchewan MFA programme, mounted a show at From June 21 to July 15, 2007, Zachari Logan and David Folk, then Master of Fine Arts colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan, mounted a show at Craig Scott Gallery called "Play Boys: A Two-Man Exhibition." The work in the exhibition explored the nature of masculinity in a constant dialogue with how art has historically treated the male nude. [This page is in the process of being updated.]... [read more]

For the CONTACT 2007 Photography Festival in Toronto, North America's largest such event, Craig Scott Gallery mounted two solo shows in parallel in separate rooms in the gallery. Each addressed, in radically different ways, the CONTACT theme for 2007, which was The Constructed Image. In the south gallery (room), the gallery was pleased to exhibit, for the second year in a row at CONTACT, work by one of the most rapidly rising photographic artists in China and indeed globally, Maleonn. His show was called "Labyrinth."In his own words, Maleonn’s theatrical and painterly photographic world “cannot be completely classified.” He turns to aesthetic expressionism “to demonstrate the labyrinth of our spirits,” preferring his work “to be the same as my spiritual world: complex and profound, kind and wicked, naïve and cruel, suspicious and trustful, painful and happy, all existing at the same time and becoming more real by virtue of their interaction.” From the interaction between meticulous choreography, on the one hand, and last-minute flashes of imagination and embracing of accidentality, on the other hand, Maleonn’s fantastical compositions emerge from a series of intuitive judgments, starting with the raw idea that he draws as a kind of storyboard... [read more]

From April 5 to April 29, 2007, Craig Scott Gallery mounted an exhibition of works by Jean Charles entitled “The Bach Variations.” The works in the show emerged through a series of dialogues. There was first of all the dialogue between two individual artists whose alter ego is “Jean Charles.” Jean Charles is the nom d’artiste for the spousal collaboration of classically trained painter, Jean Miller- Harding, and Kent Harding, a self-taught artist whose own work is created as Charles Kent. For more information on the artists and their collaborative method, click here: Jean Charles. The second dialogue was between the artist and J.S... [read more]

On February 10, 2007, Craig Scott Gallery, in partnership with the Tall Poppies Group, presented an exhibition by one of Thailand’s most exciting young emerging artists. “Introducing Uttaporn Nimmalaikaew” presented 10 works in the unique style of Nimmalaikaew’s winning entry in the Sovereign Asia Art Prize competition of 2006. Nimmalaikaew has developed a mixing of media that produces magical results... [read more]

Ron Eady’s oils and encaustic paintings in his 2007 exhibition. “Stages of Mind”, carve out subjects and images from within his soul. His signature cross-hatching (or “wire work”) technique yields powerful and sometimes unsettling interpretations of the fragile wiring of the human psyche... [read more]

Don Russell's 2006 solo show, "Elements of Memory," explored the philosophy of landscape at the intersection of materiality and mind, abstractness and representation, art and biography. His meticulously generated images of water and forest (both oils and encaustics) were created over weeks of building up dozens of layers of pigment, wax and glaze – and, with his encaustics, carving back to hidden layers and primordial canvas – in a process of artistic communing that finds its analogue in viewers’ meditative engagement with the final works. Alongside Russell's signature oils and encaustics were several haunting drawings of forest scenes. As part of "Elements of Memory", Russell continued his exploration of realist abstraction with new works from his transfixing “Water Meditations” series... [read more]

On June 1, 2006, Sicily’s Gianni Pennisi returned to North America after highly successful shows in Asia (Singapore and Hong Kong). Pennisi’s show, “Alchemy”, at Craig Scott Gallery had the double purpose of exhibiting a selection of collage work from 1975 to present and presenting a new series of collages called “Gli imaginari di Gianni Pennisi” (“Imaginaries of Gianni Pennisi”). Work on display included a series of larger collages that paid homage to ‘literary travellers’ who have visited and written about Sicily over the centuries, from Jouvain to Goethe to Peyrefitte. Pennisi is one of Europe’s leading collagists of the postwar era... [read more]

Craig Scott Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in April 2006 was a mini-retrospective of Jorge Martínez prints across a wide range of etching and engraving techniques, and printed using a range of inks and papers – alongside several paintings in varied media. Entitled “Poesy”, the exhibition’s centerpiece was a series of eleven readings by Martínez of the work of the Greek-Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy. Reading Cavafy in Spanish, Jorge Martinez has translated into his distinctive neo-baroque art the following Cavafy poems:"Waiting for the Barbarians", "Walls", “The Windows", "The Ides of March" (in 2 different prints), “The God Abandons Anthony", "Ithaka", "Morning Sea", and One of Their Gods" In addition, Martinez has produced two works honouring Cavafy: "Kavafy, I", in its own way a printed poem; and "Constantino Kavafis, 1933", a marvellous portrait of the poet.The April 2006 show also exhibited five works recently acquired (May 2005) by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and also introduced the North American art world to Martínez as a major painter. A series of magnificent oil and acrylic paintings were exhibited in frames that Martínez had specially made to be an integral part of the works... [read more]