Vernissage: Wednesday, June 22 at 6 pm
Exhibition: June 23 to July 16, 2005
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition that celebrates nine years in the career of Montreal born artist Dorothy Stewart. The exhibition features eight large acrylic paintings on canvas along with smaller works on paper, produced between 1995 and 2004. Stewart’s work references interior and exterior space, resulting in evocative poetic compositions that bring together large colour fields with forms that recall cubist investigations of the still life.
Dorothy Stewart writes, “Today, we are so attuned to non-objective art that we are geared to looking not for meaning in the recognizable, but reading feeling and then making associations with what the abstract artist has set down. Colour ascribed to particular shapes should then sharpen a viewer’s response or even strike an ambiguous note…It’s all to do with relationships.”
Dorothy Stewart was born and raised in Montreal. She graduated with honours from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where she won scholarships for Best Woman Painter and First Prize, Painting. For the first half of her career she lived and worked in Montreal. In the late 1970’s, Dorothy moved to New York, where she spent 20 years painting and exhibiting. She participated in numerous group shows as far afield as Japan, United Arab Emirates, and Spain. Recently, she returned to Toronto where she continues to paint.
Vernissage: Thursday, August 4 at 6 pm
Exhibition: August 5 to 27, 2005
Exhibition Press Release:
The McClure Gallery is pleased to present a mixed-media exhibition in collaboration with the Montreal Dialogue Group and the Full Circle Mandala Project that features the collective works of Jews and Palestinians/Arabs who are actively engaged in finding the human in the “other”.
Meeting in the Middle for Peace in the Middle East is an exhibition based on an intercultural exchange with an emphasis on peace, through mutually supportive Arab/Jewish relationships. The project is meant to bring awareness to spiritual, humanitarian and social issues through the participants’ personal stories told in writing, painting, sculpture, photography and mixed media.
A group of Montreal Jews and Palestinians/Arabs, some artists, some not, collaborating for the first time, created a collective artwork in the form of mandalas (symbols of sacred and structural unity). The mandalas are constructed from a wide variety of materials, including paper made from Israeli and Palestinian newspapers, newspaper clippings, family photos, mementoes and bits of journals. The participants also cast their hands and faces to create sculptures that express the immediacy of their physical and emotional involvement in the stories they have recreated.
This project was initiated by Helga Schleeh (artist, director of the Full Circle Mandala Project and Visual Arts Centre faculty member), and Nada Sefian and other members of the Montreal Dialogue Group.
With special thanks to Engrenage Noir, the CRB Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support.