Stop by The Sculpture Center to see the two works currently on display: "Shadows - Wall Disease" by Ryan Legassicke and "Processional" by Janet Macpherson.
Ryan Legassicke: Shadows - Wall Disease
A 2014 W2S Exhibition
MAIN GALLERY
Ryan Legassicke's current work examines contemporary urban spaces and makes connections between our shared aesthetic experience and the idea that we are becoming progressively more disconnected from ourselves, each other, and the places that we inhabit. His work addresses the ways in which various ideologies (socio-economic inequality, racism and migration) are manifested in the built environment and the resulting psychological effects. Legassicke's aim is to reinterpret urban landscapes where histories are removed, intolerance is enforced and people attempt to resist a paradoxical space both present and absent. His current project Shadows: Wall Disease, creates three dimensional full scale sections of structures such as the Berlin Wall. These life size models appear not as replicas but as objects which physically delineate the space that these barriers occupied in real life. Conceptually they are meant to appear as shadows: mental after-images.
Ryan Legassicke received his MFA from SUNY - Buffalo in 2009. Legassicke has shown nationally and internationally. He has received numerous awards and grants including the Ontario Arts Council, Emerging Visual Artist Grant in 2010 and again in 2011 the Toronto Arts Council Emerging Visual Artist Grant. He most recently participated in the exhibition, Borderline at the Living Arts Centre, Mississauga, Ontario. He currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Janet Macpherson: Processional
A 2014 W2S Exhibition
EUCLID AVENUE GALLERY
Janet Macpherson explores the complicated relationship humans have with their physical bodies. She examines the denial of corporeality, while simultaneously asserting its un-sanitized and powerful presence. Her work is influenced by the history of Christianity, martyrdom and the monstrous, as well as society's outlook on pleasure and pain, and the hierarchical beliefs around nature in which we categorize, consume and attempt to control the natural world. Using repurposed commercial plaster molds as well as hand-made molds cast from found items, she recomposes objects that upon closer inspection reflect a physical process of manipulation and fragmentation.
Janet Macpherson received her MFA in Ceramics from Ohio State University in 2010, after maintaining an active studio practice in Toronto working with functional ceramics. Macpherson has shown her work nationally and internationally. She has won many awards, and her work has been in various publications, such as Plaid Magazine. In 2013 Janet was awarded the Toronto Arts Council Grant and the Projects Grants for Visual Artists from the Canada Council for the Arts, and in 2012 she was awarded the Tuckers Pottery Supply Award from the Ontario Crafts Council. Janet is currently an Artist in Residence at the Craft Studio at Harbourfront Center, Toronto, Ontario.