Wednesday, April 16, 2014 to Thursday, May 1, 2014
This publication features an essay by curator Jenna Faye Powell, regarding the exhibition Extra Ordinary that took place at Forest City Gallery featuring three emerging-artists Matt King, Sam Mogelonsky and Bree Zorel.
Use the link below to navigate the online publication or connect to the article through this link: http://issuu.com/forestcitygallery/docs/extra_ordinary-final_publication
About the Writer:
Jenna Faye Powell is an emerging artist who specializes in painting and miniature sculpture. She has attained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Western Ontario. Powell has participated in various solo and group shows over the last five years including “Brave New Worlds” at Museum London. Powell was nominated as a 2012 RBC Painting Competition Finalist, exhibiting her painting at the Power Plant Gallery in 2012. Powell particularly enjoys books with full-bleed colorful photographs, building miniature dioramas of any sort and anything that involves the words ‘optimistic,’ ‘utopic,’ or ‘light-hearted’. Powell practices and resides London, Ontario, working as the Director of the Forest City Gallery.
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.
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.
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