Artist reception: Thursday, October 15, 6 - 8 PM
Nicholas Metivier Gallery is pleased to present Slipstream, an exhibition of new paintings by Joanne Tod. The exhibition will open on October 15 and will be on view through November 7 with a reception for the artist on Thursday, October 15 from 6 – 8 PM. A brochure including ten colour plates and an essay by curator Tom Smart was published for the exhibition. Slipstream is Tod’s third exhibition at the gallery.
Over the last three decades, Tod has exhibited nationally and internationally and is widely regarded as one of Canada’s premier realist painters. Tod has a remarkable talent for rendering light, space and human likeness creating compelling compositions while facilitating a sharp-witted social critique. In recent years, Tod has explored controversial aspects of institutions including the proprietary and moral rights of museums and the divides and hierarchies within academia. Although these paintings are less overtly politicized than some of Tod’s earlier series, their meanings unfold over time.
Slipstream continues Tod’s investigation on the subject of the institution. The buildings depicted in the exhibition include the university where she teaches and the museum for which she serves as a board member. Many of the paintings are renderings of long corridors and stairways. In these works, Tod conflates notions of presence and absence – visually describing what is essentially a void or an empty space. They also function as metaphors for the inevitable passage of time and personal journey.
Included in the exhibition are paintings of a university lecture, a board meeting and musical troupes captured from the performer’s perspective. Further addressing the theme of presence and absence, these populated interiors juxtapose and highlight the emptiness of the uninhabited spaces. Tod’s use of compositional tools and verisimilitude removes the barrier of the two-dimensional canvas, engaging our imagination and stimulating our senses.
As we experience these paintings we are drawn into – slip into – the illusory spaces involuntarily. The strong perceptual pull is deliberately set down as a quality of the paintings’ various scales and is made stronger by the device of open foregrounds. Seeing is akin to falling into imagined dimensions or being propelled across the thresholds of the picture planes to populate the painterly worlds, as would an invisible presence. Her works are intended to be painted slipstreams, a slipstream meaning the drawing effect behind a moving object that occurs when a wake of displaced air or water is moving at the same speed as the object. For Tod, the slipstream encapsulates the idea she is expressing in these paintings: visual momentums meant to lure us farther and farther into the compositions.
– Excerpt from Slipstream, 2015 by Tom Smart
Joanne Tod teaches in the Department of Visual Studies in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto and is a member of the board for the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Recent series Vanity Fair(2002), Kingdom Come (2009, Oh, Canada – A Lament(2007 – 2011), and University and Spadina (2012) have been the subject of much critical attention. Her work is held in many prominent collections including, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Vancouver Art Gallery and Musée d'art contemporain, Montreal.