Inaugural Exhibition: Gary Clement & Richard Mongiat @ loop Gallery's New Venue, September 5 - 27 September 5, 2009

loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Gary Clement entitled Cluster and Richard Mongiat entitled How Things Work Underwater. The show is the inaugural exhibition at loop's new venue at Dundas and Dovercourt.

For the purposes of Gary Clement's exhibition, the term "cluster" refers to three distinct categories of phenomena, the man-made, the cosmic and the organic. The most familiar, the man-made, is here best illustrated by the urban form, the modern city, with it's hive-like network of glass and concrete structures that encroach, or are encroached upon first, by surrounding nature and ultimately, limitlessly by the deep and endless sky. That limitless sky is filled with matter and objects of great fascination, among them globular clusters. Dense, hivelike (again) spheroidal collections of up to several million stars that formed toward the early evolution of the Milky Way. And finally, there is the organic: dense, complex structures of blood, bone, plasma and incomprehensibly large amounts of microcosmic life.

All this matter, the essential building material of an incomprehensibly vast and variegated universe, is the same matter that is the building material of our homes, offices, stores and cars, of our trees and mountains, rocks and microbes and ultimately, of us.

Richard Mongiat's How Things Work Underwater is a painterly dive into an imaginary watery world - think of Carlos Castaneda and Jacques Cousteau sharing a picnic on the ocean floor. After watching Werner Herzog's documentary "Encounters at the End of the World" with it's beautiful and bizarre underwater footage I realized that my tendency of building layers of compiled shapes and imagery was a perfect match for the teeming world of sea creatures and plant life. Working with larger, clumsier brushes I was looking for a clunk-ier approach to the shapes being depicted and to the application of paint in general. I even changed the way I normally hold my brushes. And although I allowed my whimsy free reign, can anything really compare to the strange beauty of a seahorse?

Please join the artists in celebrating their opening receptions on Saturday, September 5th from 2-5 pm.

Stick around for loop's Grand Opening Party at our new space, beginning at 6pm also on Saturday, September 5, 2009.

loop Gallery
NEW ADDRESS:
1273 Dundas Street West | Toronto, Ontario Canada | M6J 1X8

Gallery Hours: Wed - Sat 1 to 5 pm, and Sun 1 to 4pm. Artist is in attendance on Sundays.
For more information please contact the gallery director at 416-516-2581 or [email protected].
www.loopgallery.ca

Official Website: http://www.loopgallery.ca