Sunrise, Sunset

July 13 to September 2, 2023
Opening: July 13, 5 to 8 pm

Amanda Baldwin

Jagoda Bednarsky

Demarco Mosby

Bridget Mullen

Veronika Pausova

Devon Pryce

Santiago Tamayo Soler

Joseph Tisiga

Ben Tong

Joani Tremblay

Janet Werner

Margaux Williamson

Robert Zehnder

Bradley Ertaskiran is pleased to present Sunrise, Sunset, an exhibition featuring the work of thirteen international artists. The exhibited artworks take landscape as their impetus but reach far beyond traditional representations. Instead, these artworks oscillate between order and disorder, redefining landscape through its portrayal of the natural environment and through our perception and interaction with the world beyond.

Some artworks explore sensorial trickery and skewed perspectives. Ben Tong’s immersive paintings balance chaos and calm, presenting a vivid blur of velocity and light that evokes the sensation of engaging with the world through a kaleidoscope. Bridget Mullen’s psychedelic compositions fluctuate between abstraction and figuration, employing repetitive layers of mark-making to shape delicate organic forms and dense monoliths alike. Margaux Williamson’s large-scale work shows a shoreline uniquely rendered from aerial and foreshortened perspectives, wherein despite the detailed brushwork, place and distance remain unclear and unfocused, creating an undercurrent of a slightly twisted world. ­­

Amanda Baldwin’s paintings blend landscape with still life, using jewel-toned layers of trees, shapes, and patterns that make it challenging to distinguish between organic and inorganic forms. Joani Tremblay’s vibrant and surreal paintings combine images of the natural world sourced from social media and advertising with architectural devices that frame, crop, and obscure the landscape. In Jagoda Bednarsky’s surreal work, soft, floating breasts sit atop white-cap waves or mountain peaks, recalling both mythical and pop culture influences. Robert Zehnder’s fictional vistas are seductive in their fantastical pastel hues and rolling hills, yet they evoke a sense of unease due to the lack of stable ground, as if the floor could be pulled out or shifted at any moment. Through painterly techniques and visual trickery, these artists reimagine the natural world as alluring and unsettling.

In other works, bodies interact with the surrounding landscape. Demarco Mosby creates illustrative allegorical paintings that depict emotional scenes of man and beast colliding with their environment, often laced with a tinge of violence and anachronism. Janet Werner’s unconventional portraits highlight the tension between her figures’ uneasy, contorted poses and their lush, lively backdrops, blurring the line between life and death. Devon Pryce’s application of thin paint imparts an airy, atmospheric quality to his intimate scenes, where figures are sprawled within domestic and outdoor settings, conveying a palpable vulnerability. Perhaps these works suggest that our bodies, our gaze, or presence cannot be separated from the landscape and its depictions.

Some artists explore landscape by constructing new, uncanny outer worlds. Santiago Tamayo Soler’s two-channel video juxtaposes digitally built spaces with found footage. Here, he presents a future-looking world that weaves together fictional and historical narratives, centered on a house in the Colombian mountains. Building on his ongoing exploration of fantastical yet critical storytelling, Joseph Tisiga’s painted scenes show absurdist objects and creatures in urban, rural, and make-believe settings, rich in scope and detail. Veronika Pausova’s large-scale diptych provides a window into a playful world inhabited by whimsical and unlikely creatures: gangly booted spider legs stretch across a red and blue horizon line, as if stepping out of the canvas and into our reality. If the long-cherished genre of traditional landscape once sought to depict the outer world in its unaltered beauty and splendour, then it is these works that strive to flip our perceptions and build new spaces altogether.

_{Artwork by Amanda Baldwin courtesy of Hesse Flatow; Artwork by Demarco Mosby courtesy of Luce Gallery; Artwork by Bridget Mullen courtesy of Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Artworks by Devon Pryce courtesy of Galerie Nicolas Robert; Artwork by Joani Tremblay courtesy of Harper’s; Artwork by Robert Zehnder courtesy of Mrs.}