Sisters are doing it for themselves at RMG Fridays Mar 4

RMG Friday marches on with an all female line-up of musicians, artists, chefs and filmmakers. The IRIS group has a show opening in Gallery A and Chef Sarah from Berry Hill Catering will be serving some of her choices offerings. The IRIS Group membership includes Margaret Rogers, Sally Thurlow, Maralynn Cherry, Rowena Dykins, Laura Hair, Holly McClellan, Judith Mason, Janice Taylor-Prebble, Mary Ellen McQuay and Wendy Wallace. They are individually fine, wonderful artists and collectively a force. Their showing is titled IRIS at 20, it celebrates two decades of working together making a difference.

Music is by the fab Kate Boothman (aka Sunbear) from Kendal and Melissa Payne from Peterborough. Photography from the National Film Board will be on display and the film for the evening is Clearing Spaces V by the Broadbent Sisters. March 8 is International Womens Day but you get a jump as RMG Friday is Mar 4. 

Ron Lambert exhibition Feb 27 & 28 at Visual Arts Mississauga

Visual Arts Mississauga is presenting a two day exhibition of Ronald Malcolm Lambert Saturday and Sunday Feb. 26 - 27 2016. Lambert was born in Oshawa and is one of Canada’s original abstract artist. He was a student of Alexandra Luke (Painters 11) when he was eight as well as studying with A.Y. Jackson (Group of Seven) as a teenager. He also studied with Modernist master Hans Hofmann. The exhibit covers Lambert's time with Hofmann when he was 19 juxtaposed with his current work created at the age of 88, a span of 69 years. Lambert will be on hand both days for an artists’ talk.

Janet Read's atmospheric abstractions at the Navillus Gallery Mar 5 -26

It is as if one can still the stream long enough to see the beauty in the transparency of the light passing though, this is the joy in Janet Read's paintings. 

Read's exhibition "Atmospheric Abstractions" runs Mar. 5 to 26, 2016, at Navillus Gallery in Toronto. The works of the Markham, ON.-based painter are soft-focused views of misty landscapes, vaseline-smeared lens-like sky and sea, cloud and waters. 

That is if one was to look directly into them and search for the physical, the tangible atmosphere. They have heritage from JW Turner and Monet but they are devoid of the human hand; neither Turner's ships nor Monet's curated gardens are evident. Read shows only the wild at large, devoid of separation, devoid of line. 

But these wild works are also metaphors for the abstract of modern living with its mass of media, its fluidity of messaging containing no hard truths just the fuzziness of uncertainty. The information is liquid. There are no walls, just wave after wave awash. 

Read seems to be saying, this new now world without borders, in all its layering transparency is warm, welcoming, wondrous and wholly our own. Read perceives a plausibility of a pattern at the centre of our techo-age. She perceives a beauty, she presents a soft truth; in this flood there is familiarity.

Charlotte Hale Gallery celebrates Tom Waits for everyone!

Tom Waits Is A Wild Wild Man is the title of a loosely curated exhibit based on the Vaudevillian Poet of the Underworld. Its on now at the Charlotte Hale & Assoc. Gallery in Mirvish Village in Toronto. Hale has gathered up a fine collection of sculpture, photographs, lithographs and paintings by several artists, many of whom we consider to be part of the SlowCity community including Francis Muscat, Lynne McIlvride, Olex Wlasenko and Viktor Tinkl. Work by Steve Stober and and the wonderful Claude Miceli are also on display. The show runs until Feb. 28.

The opening reception on Thursday Feb 18 featured music by Rory Taillon and Dan Brooks. The music continues with members of the Hairy Holler on Friday Feb 27.

Celebrate Black History Month with Cultural Expressions in Ajax Feb 20