Friday, April 4, 2014 to Friday, May 9, 2014
Opening Reception: April 4th, 6:00- 9:00 PM
Publication Launch: April 4 2014, 6:00- 9:00 PM
Forest City Gallery is proud to present Extra Ordinary the curatorial debut of Jenna Faye Powell, featuring emerging-artists Matt King, Sam Mogelonsky and Bree Zorel.
About the Exhibition:
Seduction is a powerful thing. Seduction, here, is not limited to just the animate. Objects too have the ability to entice a second glance, to provoke feelings of infatuation. A shiny penny, a displaced game piece, the thing you carry around in your pocket. Objects that are no longer utilitarian. The artists chosen for this exhibition have crafted objects that may seem too shiny, too humourous or too ubiquitous to hold any other agenda than to entice and tempt. Yet, the drawings, sculptures and things in this exhibition draw us in for one reason, but keep us attuned for another. The pieces in this exhibition, politely-sized, patiently sit for inspection. Comfortable in their disguise, the artworks in Extra Ordinary appear as an ersatz version of reality, comedically off-kilter, humorously endearing.  Whether a pile of used books or a junk-drawer-amount of thumbtacks, items mimicked in this exhibition are so beyond commonplace, so ordinary, they are extraordinary.
Toronto-based artists, Matt King, Sam Mogelonsky and Bree Zorel transform unremarkable objects to first optically captivate and then interrogate. Taking cues from the Situationists of the 1960s, spectacle and humour is employed to subvert how we think of these everyday objects, and their easily passed-by aesthetic. Upon closer inspection of the works, initial infatuation quickly fades. As colors dim, social commentary around the everyday, empathy, consumerism, and object fetishization becomes prominent.Â
 -Jenna Faye Powell
A digital publication was created in response to this exhibition, check it out by clicking the link below:Â
About the Artists:
Bree Zorel
Born and raised in Calgary, Bree Zorel is an artist and art educator currently living and working in Toronto. She holds a BFA from Alberta College of Art + Design, and an MFA from NSCAD University. Her artworks utilize diverse media to investigate the relationship between art and everyday life, and explore the performative possibilities of everyday circumstances. Characterized by a self-conscious optimism and a mixture of humour and pathos, her works shift continually, crystallizing in formations of drawing, sculpture, video, textiles, and photographs that alternate between artworks and documentation of actions and activities. Playfully DIY, her use of materials tends towards the provisional, using a makeshift yet heartfelt aesthetic to invite in the viewer an acknowledgment and acceptance of imperfection and the unfinished nature of the human project. The near-failure of the materials symbolically calls attention to the social, cultural and personal failures we experience every day, and thus situates itself at a starting point for rebuilding. In Zorel’s current series of drawings, imaginary book covers describe the mundane experiences of daily life, while also inviting modestly magical interventions. Fictional instructional manuals, storybooks, and puzzles interject hope and laughter into the experience of the daily struggles and frustrations of surviving as a young artist in Canada.
Matt King
Matt King is an emerging artist and musician based in Toronto, Ontario. Matt holds a diploma from Ontario College of Art in Integrated Media and a Bachelor of Fine Arts also from OCAD Univeristy. His current practice explores the language of visual symbols and the malleability of information conveyed. Slight alterations to an object’s expected physical characteristics or visual context can implicate new meanings through a viewer’s interpretation. King’s focus is the re-contextualization of representation and he aspires to create a disruption between expectation and experience. King continues to exhibit his works locally and nationally most recently in Micah Lexier’s curatorial project, More than Two: It Makes Itself exhibited at the Power Plant in Toronto. Matt co-currently performs in the art-rock band, Absolutely Free. Â
Sam Mogelonsky
Sam Mogelonsky is an emerging Toronto-based artist. Her work challenges limits of adornment, contemporary consumption and its tendencies towards excess by using obsessive repetition and process-driven labour. Her painstakingly obsessive sculptures use embellishment to speak to notions of craft production and decoration, while the physical body is referenced through arduous routine repetition used to alter her found materials. Sam’s works reference ostentation and design, as well as allude to the dual nature of pleasure and pain, while also engaging the dialogue between the mass-produced and the hand-made.
She holds a BFAH from Queen’s University, (Kingston, Ontario) and an MFA from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art (London, UK). She has participated in residencies at the Florence Trust (London, UK), the Château de la Napoule Art Foundation (Mandelieu de la Napuole, France), CeRCCa (in Llorenc de Penedes, Spain) and Artscape Gibraltar Point (Toronto Islands). She has exhibited in Canada, the UK, France, Ireland, and Portugal, with exhibitions in artist-run, commercial and publicly funded galleries. Her work is held in Canadian and international collections and she is the recipient of a 2013 Emerging Artist Grant form the Toronto Arts Council.