Gallery House is excited to announce PULP – Works on Paper, a group show featuring new work by Gallery House artists Ray Caesar and Selena Wong and guest Lori Field at Gallery House, Toronto Canada.
5 new never-been-seen Ray Caesar’s works will be released in occasion of the exhibition. Ray Caesar goes deeper into the unconscious dream world of fable and myth uncovering a world of deep desires and secrets, the kind we conceal even from ourselves. In these works he explores the inescapable weight of memory and how it can haunt our perception of the physical world.
Ray Caesar, Communion Study, 2017 24 x 20″, Digital Ultrachrome on Canvas & Varnished, One of a Kind. Courtesy of Ray Caesar | Gallery House
Ray Caesar’s digital paintings exist in a world unto themselves, a place that is not on any map or mentioned in any guidebook. Ornate, architectural and sinister, they echo the grandeur of Reynolds and Gainsborough and the grace of Rococo artists Watteau and Boucher, but have a dreamy, dark, otherworldly quality that feel both sensual and sinister.
Selena Wong, Together They Glow, 2017, 18 x 24”, Gouache on paper. Courtesy of Selena Wong | Gallery House
Selena Wong’s delicate gouache and ink work is a secretive, miniature world where humans and rabbits live in a kind of dream like landscape of fog and enchanting clouds. Hidden within these richly rendered, intense in detail and carefully crafted environments are magical, places timeless and removed from reality. Wong is inspired by artists Henry Darger, Gustav Klimt, Yoshitomo Nara and Kiki Smith.
The series that make up this show find their inspiration from the memory of her grandmother. Drawing on the beauty and horror she once lived, her life and her stories; coping with her death, and the hurt that softened with time; bits and pieces of her life, reimagined and romanticized, creating an alternate reality to take part in, escaping the one we’re in now; loss of self and starting over, finding her voice again, her fitting in. Also are themes which run through all of Wong’s work, animals speaking through her, and rabbits, subtle and quiet – staying silent, hiding away from the predators in real life.
Lori Field, The Gods Must Be Crazy, 2012 16” x 30” Silverpoint. Courtesy of Lori Field | Gallery House
Primarily self-taught, Lori Field is a textile designer and illustrator who returned to making fine art when a series of life-altering events caused her to rethink the direction she wanted to take with my creative energies. Her mixed media drawings, paintings and sculptures straddle a border between reality and dream, past life and present. They evoke subliminal, mysterious worlds – planets of her own creation, demimondes peopled with tattooed angels , mutants, exhibitionists, seducers, chimeras and other intimate strangers.
Submitting to an obsession with obsessiveness, and exploring and visualizing the concept of “the other”, the work is deliberately intimate, containing fetishistic figures that are emotionally confrontational and exaggerated in their “otherness”.
Image 01: Ray Caesar, Vampyr, 2017. Courtesy of Ray Caesar | Gallery House
PULP – Works on Paper
Ray Caesar | Selena Wong | Lori Field
November 4 – December 14, 2017
Gallery House, Toronto Canada
Discover: galleryhouse.ca
