Fall 2014 exhibitions
20 September 2014–4 January 2015
Opening: 19 September, 8–11pm
with the artists Pedro Cabrita Reis, Julia Dault and Shelagh Keeley
The Power Plant
231 Queens Quay West
Toronto, Ontario M5J 2G8
Canada
The Power Plant presents three solo exhibitions featuring newly commissioned projects that are the result of the artist’s direct engagement with the physical site of the gallery.
Pedro Cabrita Reis: fourteen paintings, the preacher and a broken line
Curated by Gaëtane Verna
The Power Plant is pleased to present the first Canadian solo exhibition by Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis. The three projects in this exhibition continue the artist’s investigation into the perceived boundaries of architecture, sculpture and painting. Cabrita Reis works with everyday objects such as chairs, tables or doors combined with industrial materials such as neon lights, steel girders and bricks turning the familiar into new and abstract compositions. A Broken Line (2014), a commissioned installation using aluminum beams, fluorescent lights and electrical wire, addresses the architecture of The Power Plant. Paired with this site-specific project, the artist presents The Toronto Suite I–XIV (2014), a new series of paintings and the photographic series The Preacher (2013). Together these works exemplify Cabrita Reis’s slippage between media.
Julia Dault: Color Me Badd
Curated by Julia Paoli
The Power Plant presents a major solo exhibition by Brooklyn–based artist Julia Dault. This exhibition of new and recent work demonstrates her ongoing interest in balancing spontaneous gesture with responsiveness to rules, logic and the constraints of materials. Physical negotiations are central to Dault’s textured paintings and improvised sculptures; both are exhibited in Color Me Badd. Her rule-based painting process involves responding to mass produced elements—vinyl, patterned silks, pleather, unmixed paint—with unconventional tools, such as squeegees and rubber combs. These tools create quasi-standardized gestures that skirt the line between expressive abstraction and cool, machine-like facture. The idea of the artwork as an index of the artist’s labour recurs in Dault’s sculptures. Improvising on site, the artist manipulates and coerces industrially produced materials into imposing curved forms and affixes them to the gallery wall. Each sculpture is titled with a time stamp that reflects the duration it took to complete. In this gesture, as with her paintings, she underlines the temporal nature of her art-making process.
Shelagh Keeley: Notes on Obsolescence
20 September 2014–18 May 2015
Curated by Gaëtane Verna
Canadian-American artist Shelagh Keeley uses the gesture of her hand and the physicality of her body to produce large-scale site-specific wall drawings. Each of her pieces is created in situ and marks a moment when the work—a visual document of her movement—is produced. Keeley works with the limits of a wall and the constraints of its architecture as a counterpoint to the openness and improvisation of her physical action. Inspired by communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s 1970 text “A Note on Obsolescence,” Keeley’s new work juxtaposes the rapidity of mechanical photography with the slow process of drawing.
Support for Pedro Cabrita Reis: fourteen paintings, the preacher and a broken line is provided by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Debra & Barry Campbell and
Don Tapscott & Ana P. Lopes CM.
Support for Julia Dault: Color Me Badd is provided by RBC Wealth Management, La Fondation Emmanuelle Gattuso, Hal Jackman Foundation, Diana Billes, Robert Desjardins & Pam Dinsmore, D.H. Gales Family Foundation and the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund.
About The Power Plant
The Power Plant is Canada’s leading public gallery devoted exclusively to contemporary visual art. It is a vital forum for the advanced artistic culture of our time that offers an exceptional facility and professional support to diverse living artists while engaging equally diverse audiences in their work. The Power Plant pursues its activities though exhibitions, publications and public programming that incorporates other areas of culture when they intersect with visual art.
