Tanya Cunnington & Martha Eleen @ loop Gallery, October 3 - 25 October 3, 2009

loop Gallery is pleased to announce exhibitions by loop members Tanya Cunnington entitled homesick, starry-eyed and Martha Eleen entitled Distant Early Warning.

Tanya Cunnington’s current body of work, homesick, starry-eyed is based on the idea of personal nostalgia; creating a feeling or a mood that almost makes one yearn for a time passed and irrecoverable. Obviously a romantic, Tanya traveled to certain noted cities in art history for inspiration. What were once very realistic representations of these cities turned extremely process-based, and have now been broken down into abstractions comprised of mixed media.

For Cunnington, each painting is very much about the moment in which she creates it, which in itself becomes very nostalgic for the artist. Ultimately the artist strives to portray her own feelings of nostalgia while at the same time encouraging a sense of personal longing within her viewers.

Martha Eleen’s exhibition, Distant Early Warning is a portrait of an Arctic village. In Tuktoyaktuk, the Inuvialuit people still live close to the land and their history is embedded in the landscape. The title is borrowed from the iconic local DEW line, a radar system set up during the Cold War. The Arctic has become a sort of environmental ‘canary in the tunnel‘, as the melting ice reveals a wealth of new resources to exploit, and the resulting pollution threatens this delicate eco-system.

The exhibition includes Eleen’s current work in progress, The Necessities of Life. These paintings explore the signage of the big box mall, the fourth series in an ongoing investigation into suburban sprawl outside Toronto, which depicts an environment based on the unsustainable, and already collapsing, car culture, where nature is suppressed and destroyed as opposed to treasured. The language of the big box mall signage is an expression of our denial of the impending global ecological crisis. www.MarthaEleen.com

Please join the artists in celebrating their opening receptions on Saturday, October 3rd from 2-5 pm.

loop is pleased to present Eleen’s and Cunnington’s exhibitions during Nuit Blanche on Saturday October 3rd, starting at sunset and continuing through the night until sunrise on Sunday, October 4.