Katie Bethune-Leamen and Catherine Telford-Keogh exhibition opening

Thursday, November 8, 2018 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Katie Bethune-Leamen artwork Composition for looking and being looked at
Gallery One
Katie Bethune-Leamen
Orchid mantis. Tom Selleck.
Hats. (Gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover.)
Also hats. 

Katie Bethune-Leamen’s new work continues her preoccupation with the presence and resonance of objects. Combining amorphous, blobbily glazed porcelain forms with gaunt, steel supports, and a maelstrom of orbiting imagery and elements—high-crowned hats, irregular neon light lines, digitally printed silk yardage, vintage movie posters, found objects, hairclips, dangling lumpen pearls, pretty insects, gaudy framing devices, sheets of coloured latex—Bethune-Leamen’s installations form conversations between ambiguous objects that elide language yet remain firmly grounded in the material world. Paralleling the evocative title—Orchid mantis. Tom Selleck. Hats. (Gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover.) Also hats.—the artist pieces together and organizes seemingly irreconcilable elements in a choreography of objects that intersect and merge on intuitive, metaphorical, and expressive levels.

The artist acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts

Catherine Telford-Keogh artwork Modern mathematics and sullied diapers was all Hal needed
Gallery Two
Catherine Telford-Keogh
Dental Dam

Catherine Telford-Keogh combines domestic, industrial, and edible materials in unfamiliar ways to highlight inherent connections between human and non-human matter. Adopting the forms of tables, trays, containers, and other familiar functional objects, her sculptures act as flatbed terrains for the accumulation of aqueous and encrusted materials mixed beyond easy recognition. Dental Dam presents an installation of new objects configured to consider the excess and blockage of the mouth; a porous site of communication, sexuality, and ingestion. The artist overlays, coats, and embeds a gamut of objects and liquids that shift and chemically alter over time to simulate aspects of digestion. Her intense layering of elements combine to form chains of superimposed ingredients—including brand names such as Yankee Candle® Fragrance Spheres™, Froot Loops®, and Purina® Dog Chow®. The use of prolonged titles and lists of materials makes explicit the base materiality of these elements and their relationship to capitalist material culture. Telford-Keogh’s work suggests a discomfiting intimacy between bodies and things consumed, evoking underlying links between ecology, consumption, and bodily function.

The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Katie Bethune-Leamen. Composition for looking and being looked at and liking (a lot) through looking and then maybe things go downhill from there—Gustav von Aschenbach, Tadzio/Bjorn Andresen, with some bars of Dr. Bronner’s (lavender scent) and jambon bindle, 2017.

Catherine Telford-Keogh. Modern mathematics and sullied diapers was all Hal needed to formulate the truly terrifying theological models that characterize Contemporary Life, 2018.