Go Figure features works by six artists who present or reference the body by diverse approaches.

Edmonton based, Brenda Draney, winner of the 2009 RBC Painting competition, paints from memories of her childhood growing up in Slave Lake, Alberta. Just as Slave Lake was recently devastated by fire, nearby, Old Town was abandoned due to catastrophic flooding. For Draney, this place stood like a bookmark for a story which she has created from memory.

Toronto based, Dean Drever is a Member of the Haida First Nation. He is exhibiting a button blanket which is a ceremonial garment worn by North American west coast First Nations. Originally, they were made of skins and cross-hatched cedar, then with wool, when introduced by European traders. Traditional designs embody individual identities through a visual language of family history, moiety, and spirit animals. Drever’s blanket expresses a contemporary sociocultural and spiritual incarnation.

London, Ontario Based, Sky Glabush continues his investigation of painting as a site where the imagination is translated through convention. He has chosen relatively common portraits of artists both for their theatricality and beauty but also for the way they exude notions of the modern genius. Cutting the canvas or pasting over it irretrievably alters the image while also highlighting the physical, material quality of the painterly gesture resulting in portraits, not only of faces, but of the process of painting.

Toronto based artist and writer, Sholem Krishtalka presents works from his Lurking project. The wide usage of Facebook has borne a new vernacular meaning for the verb ‘to lurk’. In this new coinage, ‘to lurk someone’ is to troll through their Facebook photos, to investigate their visual history, in some sense to stalk them. With this work, Krishtalka does precisely that: all of the drawings in this open-ended series are made from his friends’ Facebook photos. Krishtalka sees this project as a deconstruction (or perhaps more aptly, a reconstruction) of his life; it documents his relationships, mapping his life and community. While it may seem initially voyeuristic, Lurking is much more a document of his life than that of those portrayed.

Winnipeg based, Dominique Rey presents work from her Pilgrims project. Throughout her artistic practice in diverse media, Rey has been fascinated by the representation of the other — a figure both real and imagined — and the ways in which this figure ultimately embodies our deepest fears, our suppressed longings, and the infinite complexities of human life. Pilgrims explores notions of the unbeautiful and how the unbeautiful becomes permissible, and even desirable, under the guise of performance and public display. Pilgrims is an investigation into the paradoxical nature of the mask and the repressed desire to become the other.

Toronto based, Jeff Tutt is interested in the multi-stability of volume in space and the insatiability of the emotionally charged form. He is presenting his September paintings which are renderings of light-rays that have been interrupted by a body. The compositions are facilitated by the use of a ‘shadow-machine’ – a non-mechanical device which captures the absence of light.

Also launching on Saturday August 6 is a new project by Toronto artist, Josh Thorpe on the exterior of the gallery. Mountains One (Santa Ana) is the first in a series of works that is cross-fed by both abstract painting and representations of landscape. The project also comes from Nietzsche, who wrote of the folly of climbing mountains — they should be looked upon from below and afar.