"Observatory" is Eisler's process-based exploration of folded canvases and staining, the final works are much less divulging of their journey. Cohene's new video installation, 'I Told You That Might Happen', draws upon tenuous relationships between film-watching and our experience of present time.
John Eisler - Observatory
Observatory is an exhibition of new paintings by John Eisler. Although this series
continues Eisler’s process-based exploration of folded canvases and staining, the final
works are much less divulging of their journey.
Instead, subtle suggestions of relations
to objects slowly reveal themselves through their repeated stenciled impressions upon
the canvas. What results is not a painting of something, but impressions of imagined
networks. Eisler’s process of image-making exists between a painterly approach and one
evocative of photographic and other technological processes.
John Eisler received his MFA from the University of Guelph in 2008 and his BFA from the
Alberta College of Art and Design in 1997. He has previously had solo exhibitions at Paul
Kuhn Arts in Calgary and the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre in Guelph, Ontario. He has
also exhibited in softcore HARDEDGE at the Art Gallery of Calgary (2010), which also
travelled to the East and Peggy Phelps Galleries, Claremont Graduate University in
Claremont, CA (2011).
Most recently, Eisler was part of the major exhibition of Canadian
painting, 60 Painters at the Humber Arts and Media Studios in Toronto. He is featured in
the collections of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Macdonald Stewart Art
Centre. Eisler has exhibited with Diaz Contemporary since 2008.
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Aleesa Cohene - I Told You That Might Happen
Aleesa Cohene’s new video installation, I Told You That Might Happen, draws upon tenuous
relationships between film-watching and our experience of present time. Known for her
dissection, appropriation and re-contextualization of popular 1980s and 1990s Hollywood
film footage, Cohene meticulously crafted this latest work from the 236 films that Gilles
Deleuze discusses in his critical texts Cinema I and Cinema II.
I Told You That Might Happen explores the relationship between a dream analyst and her
analysand: the former, a composite character of numerous on-screen women, and the latter,
an off-screen male voice. The unraveling of the analysand’s dream and thoughts mirrors
Cohene’s process of creating from disjointed fragments.
Cohene’s installation invites viewers to engage themselves physically with the work’s
fabricated plot. A single narrative divided into three linear parts is realized through a
physical experience of journeying through three different viewing stations. The viewing
experience also features accompanying sculptural work that further implicates the viewer
into a bodily experience. I Told You That Might Happen challenges our expectations of
cinematic viewing and space with insertions of physical reality that may ultimately appear
more uncanny than real.
Aleesa Cohene’s videos have been screened throughout North America and abroad in
Germany, Netherlands, France, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey, Finland, Greece, Spain, Indonesia,
Japan, Cambodia and Brazil. Recent solo exhibitions include: Sequences in Reykjaík, Iceland,
Hart House at the University of Toronto and Galerie Suvi Lehtinen in Berlin, Germany. In
2011, Platform Gallery and MAWA in Winnipeg presented a multi-venue retrospective of
Cohene’s work. She will receive her Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto
in 2013 and previously completed a fellowship under Matthias Müller at the
Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, Germany in 2010.
Opening Thursday 28 March from 6 to 8
Diaz Contemporary
100 Niagara Street, Toronto
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11-6 or by appointment
Free Admission