RECEPTION: Lanny Shereck & Yvonne Singer @ loop Gallery, 1273 Dundas St. W. April 22, 2010

Lanny Shereck In Between
Yvonne Singer Gone Missing

April 22 – May 16, 2010
Reception: Thursday, April 22, 2010, 6-8 PM
Yvonne Singer will be present Saturday, April 24, 2-5 PM
Question & Answer Session: Saturday, May 8, 3pm.

loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Lanny Shereck entitled In Between and Yvonne Singer entitled Gone Missing.

Lanny Shereck's new body of work started as a search for in between spaces where people don’t tend to look. Shereck noticed the spaces between buildings on the side streets of the Lower Annex where he lives and works. These spaces revealed a hidden world of garages, gardens, coach houses, fences and the flotsam of domestic life. Some of Shereck’s early work – particularly the PEDESTRIAN series – dealt with the theme of watching and targeting individuals as they went about their business on the streets of Toronto; this new work is also a bit intrusive and odd. Shereck walks close to private homes, and takes pictures of these less public, more private spaces; often experiencing the same discomfort he did when taking people’s photographs on the street without permission.

What has drawn Shereck to these particular images, aside from the narrative concerns of public and private spaces, are formal concerns of design, colour and light. As a painter and sculptor, Shereck brings together the constructive nature of sculpture with questions about the nature of painting. Using collage as a way to construct a painting with wood and board pieces of flat shape and colour, Shereck creates a relief with the painterly effect of close up abstraction; upon standing back, the image both flattens and gains clarity.
Another aspect of this new work is the repetition of images. The spaces are all different and although they share many common features, each one is a unique and real space built around a shared social, environmental, and architectural setting. Each space can be interpreted formally and narratively in a unique way.

Lanny Shereck is an artist and art teacher working in acrylic and oil paint and using photographic collage to create images of urban life in Toronto, Montreal, Havana and Mexico City. Shereck’s work, although based in realism, explores the relationship between perception and abstraction. This is expressed through the experience of standing close to the work and seeing formal shapes and colours and then standing back from the work and seeing the emerging image come into focus. Shereck has been a member of Loop for 3 years and is represented by The Fran Hill Gallery in Toronto. Shereck has been an art educator for 30 years teaching painting, sculpture, drawing, ceramics and art history.

Lanny Shereck will speak about his work during a Question & Answer Session at the gallery on Saturday May 8th at 3pm. Facilitated by Ronnie Rosenberg.

Yvonne Singer's Gone Missing is an installation consisting of 2 elements; a series of neon sentences and a video travelogue with images from Paris, Venice, Berlin and London.

Through a series of sentence fragments produced in neon, and the flashing images of travel, Gone Missing suggests narratives of memory, loss and longing. The words produced in neon and the impressionistic wordless images of travel express the ephemeral and fragmented nature of memory. They allude to clues to an unrevealed mystery about personal identity. The use of neon to represent conversational language reflects Singer's interest in language and subjectivity. Together with the rapidly flashing images of travel, these two elements of the installation investigate the construction of memory and place. There is an inherent tension between the iconic postcard travel images, the familiarity of the neon sign as the language of advertising and the private thoughts suggested in Gone Missing.

Yvonne Singer is a practicing artist with an active national and international exhibition record. Her installation works employ multimedia techniques, often with cryptic texts to articulate cultural issues of disjuncture and perception. She is particularly interested in the intersection of public and private histories.

Exhibitions include “sometimes I like a happy ending; sometimes I like a sad ending (Kiwi Sculpture Garden, Perth Ontario) random objects:random thoughts (Akau gallery, Toronto), Signs of Life; an intimate portrait of someone I don't know (Loop Gallery, Toronto), The Trouble with Translation (tour - Germany, France, Canada), Alphabets (Stewart Hall, Montreal), Crossroad (Visual Art Centre, Clarington), Staging Memory (Montreal Holocaust Centre), The Veiled Room (ACC Galerie, Weimar, Germany), Images of Girlhood (McCord Museum, Montreal). She has received several public art commissions and her work is found in many private collections. She has served on the boards of the Koffler centre for the Arts, Toronto Arts Council http://www.torontoartscouncil.org/ and C Magazine .

Professor Singer is tenured faculty in the Department of Visual Arts, York University and was Graduate Program Director in Visual Arts from 2003-2009. She is currently on sabbatical.

Yvonne Singer will speak about her work during a Question & Answer Session at the gallery on Saturday May 8th at 3pm. Facilitated by Bill Huffman.

Please join the artists in celebrating the opening reception on Thursday, April 22nd from 2-5 pm. Yvonne Singer will be present on Saturday, April 24th from 2 – 5 pm.