Libby Hague & Liz Parkinson @ Loop Gallery (Toronto) June 27 - July 18 June 10, 2009

Loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by Loop Gallery members Libby Hague; entitled Double Vision and Liz Parkinson entitled Paradise Field


The work for Libby Hague’s Double Vision began last summer in a residency on Toronto Island. Inspired by the gentleness of the place and season, she decided to return to landscape painting,something she had loved twenty years previously.

Double Vision is a series of small intense paintings done from nature and later from the imagination, painted in acrylic with oil superimposed. The outdoor acrylic painting respects the complexity and specificity of a place infusing it with all the physical aspects of the moment. The oil component has a more intense chromatic and textural register that overlays an emotional, abstracted response. In this way, two ideas of one place are folded together and sustained at the same time. Both layers have their own speed, their own focus, their own anxiety and their own happiness.

In Paradise Field, Liz Parkinson continues her interest in collections and how choices are made about those things that surround us: Sometimes they come to us, again and again. Here an undulating field of traditional-looking botanical prints shifts in perspective. Drawn versions of local wildflowers, they collectively re-present an ideal Southern Ontario garden paradise in a soothingly familiar field of information. Each plant is easily named, free of labour, has a history of botanic use, and is perennially returning and together bloom continuously throughout our growing season.

But all these plants were introduced to Canada. Their names are multiple reminders of someone, somewhere or something else. From royalty (Queen Anne’s Lace), the gods and saints (Helenium) and
animals (Bird’s Nest) they are not our own. Naturalized into fields and waste places, they carry their history with them but are habitually seen as always here, always our own. What has this paradise replaced? Despite a desire for a singular understanding, a longing for permanence in an ideal return, paradise is a shifting construct based on a changing field of understanding. Collections always refer to someone, somewhere or something else.

Please join the artists in celebrating the opening receptions on Saturday June 27th from 2-5 pm.
The artists will speak about their exhibitions in an Artists’ Talk on Thursday, July 9th from 7-9pm.


Gallery Hours are Wed-Sat 1-4pm & Sun 1-5pm

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