Open Studio Gallery
Tara Cooper: Weather Girl’s Field Guide to Lightning
Nick Novak Fellowship Exhibition

Derived from true stories documenting recent encounters with lightning, Weather Girl’s Field Guide to Lightning depicts a myriad of subject matter from meteorological equipment, weather patterns and cloud formations to the quotidian—a light bulb, a metal chair, a bottle of Jack Daniels and a lottery ticket. Combining print with film and sculpture, the guide conflates the impersonal language of the statistic with the impact of the personal experience—a place where both the weather and the viewer share the role of witness, impartial bystanders to the events of everyday. You can follow Weather Girl's adventures at taracooper.tumblr.com.

Tara Cooper (Nick Novak Fellowship recipient) received her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2008, specializing in the disciplines of print, film and installation. She also holds a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Bachelor of Education from Queen’s University. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo. Beneath the rubric of Canadian Nature, Cooper’s observations combine fieldwork and footwork moving from the amateur ornithologist, to the idea of north, to her most recent study involving the language of weather. This interest in fieldwork has led Cooper to participate in many national and international artist residencies including: Kloster Bentlage in Rheine, Germany, Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California, Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, The Frans Masereel Center in Kasterlee, Belgium, Malaspina in Vancouver and St. Michael’s Printshop in St. John’s, Newfoundland. In 2010 she received support from the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council. She is also a member of Loop—the Toronto artist collective.  

Print Sales Gallery
Lauren Nurse: There's always room on the broom
Donald O'Born Family Scholarship Exhibition

Cultural perceptions of nature have always held a certain amount of anxiety, and have spawned numerous myths, legends and fables.  These narratives expose culture’s uneasy relationship with the natural world; the figure of the werewolf is the ultimate symbol for the transgression between human and animal, and fears about being consumed are embodied in the figure of the vampire.  In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, Nurse considers the mythic as a symbolic expression of the cultural unease that pervades a society and shapes its collective behavior. 

Previous work has revolved around the idea of collisions between nature and culture—passing comment on some of the ways in which we see nature as existing outside of culture and society, yet simultaneously influencing the ways in which we live. The work in There’s always room on the broom synthesizes the artist’s previous interest in the modern separation and opposition between culture and nature, and her current interest in locating the mythological/uncanny in evocations of the ‘wild’.  She is interested in the dissolution of boundaries between categories, ideas, and objects, the tension between inside and outside, and the intersections that occur when borders of the body become fluid and porous. 

Lauren Nurse (Donald O’Born Family Scholar) is a Québecer living and working in Toronto. She is a graduate of Concordia University’s Print Media program, and recently completed York University’s MFA program. She has participated in exhibitions in Toronto, Montreal, New Mexico and Italy, and attended residency programs at Montréal’s Atelier de L’ile, Atelier Circulaire, the Vermont Studio Center, Newfoundland’s Pouch Cove Foundation and Muskoka’s Tree Museum Sculpture Garden. Recent exhibitions include an off-site project at the Blackwood Gallery, and a two-person exhibition at Board of Directors.  She teaches Print Media and Design at Sheridan College, and Lithography at OCAD and York University.  Her current work explores intersections between real and fictive environments. 

George Gilmour Members’ Gallery
Flora Shum:RLPA2011THF
Don Phillips Scholarship

RLPA2011THF (an acronym for The Rules of Life – Project A: To Have Face, 2011) explores identity and the need to save face and conceal personal weakness. The work reflects the artist’s compulsion to dissect identity, carefully angling a scalpel and shaving off a slice, sticking it between glass, and sliding it under a microscope. Of course, while science allows one to split something open and magnify it to find answers that are understood as facts, in matters of identity we are left to explore the confusion of boundaries we are given, the expectations of others and of oneself, the hyper scramble to always advance, and the desperation of finding a sense of belonging. RLPA2011THF is a series of etchings—exploring the possibilities, blurring the boundaries, creating new bodies, new bones, new organs, new tissues, new cells, inserting information into nuclei.  The idea is to create, alter, clone and construct new super-cyborgs. Technology fixing what technology created. Here are the prototypes, the possible organs, please find the instruction manual enclosed. Order in multiples: it’s always good to have back-ups. Thus we have The Rules of Life – Project A: To Have Face, 2011 (RLPA2011THF).     

Flora Shum (Don Phillips Scholar) graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design with a BFA in Printmaking. She has participated in several shows, art fairs, print exchanges and collaborations. Her work explores themes of a cyborg society, the use of landmarks and landscapes with which to define and identify, the structure of values and the deconstruction and reconstruction of society. Her work incorporates various aspects of printmaking and papermaking, creating installations out of the prints and materials themselves.