Message to Japan

Sending you a message of courage and optimism. Thinking of you and hope that things are better now. Moving forwards, rebuilding, living, laughing and loving again, I wish all good things for everyone in the disaster area.

I’ve looked into how to present that whale painting and it’s looking like a major problem, to build some kind of a solution would take longer than just making a new painting. So it its ok with you then that’s what I’ll do. It will be a vertical painting and just hang off the pack and drape down. I’m not sure of imagery yet but maybe a building. How does that sound?

Best regards
Douglas

Artist information

Douglas Walker was born in Brockville, Ontario. He graduated with an Honors Diploma from the Ontario College of Art in 1981. He presently lives and works in Toronto.

During the 1980′s Walker received early acclaim for his work in photo-drawing, photography, and sculpture. In the 1990′s Douglas turned to painting and recently reduced his palette to the Blue and White for which he is now known for. Through these disparate media he has consistently articulated a finely wrought vision of the beautiful residing in the strange.

Considered a unique talent, Douglas is known for his ability to make works of a compelling originality regardless of media. Walker has exhibited his work at the ICA in London and the Dia foundation in New York. In Toronto he has shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Powerplant, YYZ, Mercer Union and at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Walker has been the focus of a traveling mid-career retrospective curated by The Mendel Art gallery in Saskatoon and an overview of his career was featured at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art gallery. He has also shown at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa, Hallwalls in Buffalo, and the 49th Parallel in New York City. Many of these exhibitions were supported with publications.

Douglas’s work is included in many important public and private collections most notably the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mendel Art Gallery and Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. He has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council. Walker’s work has captured extensive media and critical attention wherever he has exhibited.

Official Website: Douglas Walker
Blog: Douglas Walker Blogspot

Artist information

Creating fantastical structures from commonplace appliances, Toronto based photographer David Trautrimas unlocks the mind from a state of static recognition as his photographic compositions reveal an alternative take on architecture & landscape. His digital constructions of buildings made from abject and dismantled housewares at once announce the limits of industrial proliferation as they bring levity to the possibility of recycled innovation.

Trautrimas’s fictitious documentation of buildings that never were glean the look of a post apocalyptic world where larger than life structures loom over the surrounding landscape, but they also breath fresh air into architecture’s infinite promise of pushing the boundaries of physics in order to renovate the way we live. Safe to say, Trautrimas’s work serves as both catalyst for creativity as it does cautionary tale for what we ultimately do with it.

His work has appeared in both group and solo exhibitions around the world, including Toronto’s The Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art,The Korean Arts Center in Seoul, Toronto’s LE Gallery, Brooklyn’s KlompChing Gallery, the Photo Eye Gallery in Santa Fe, Oakland’s Johannson Projects, Queensland Center for Photography Australia, and Eckhart Gallery in the Hague, Netherlands. He has received international acclaim from publications such as ArtNews, The Globe and Mail, NOW Magazine, Germany’s Immobilien Zeitung, China’s Can Magazine and the New York Times, and has been featured on major online websites such as Designboom, Dezeen, and Gizmodo. He is represented by LE Gallery in Toronto, Photoeye Gallery in Santa Fe NewMexico, and Eckhart Gallery in the Hague Netherlands.

Official Website: trautrimas.ca

Artist information

Alex McLeod

Alex McLeod constructs hyperrealistic 3D environments filled with crystalline mountains, fiery lakes, and rotund clouds, all rendered in a sickly sweet and gooey candy-colored palette. Recalling the wide-open vistas of Romantic landscape painting while at the same time staging otherworldly dystopias, McLeod’s CGI prints act as hybrid spaces that imply an almost infinite recombination of the past and present, the real and virtual. Beneath their seductively polished surfaces, of glimmering fortresses and floating geometric abstractions, lies a haunting stillness that comes forth in the aftermath of cataclysmic events. The cause of destruction remains unknown in these depopulated spaces -there are no people in these images, however much human traces remain in the rickety railways and empty fortresses.

And yet, from the twilight of devastation shown in these strange dioramas lies possibilities for hope and rebirth in our own digital milieu through the artist’s new approaches to concepts as varied as ecological responsibility and the shared intersections between photography and painting.

Official Website: Alex McLeod