Block Party | Sherry Czekus & Construction Season | Eryn O’Neill

Exhibitions: Block Party | Sherry Czekus & Construction Season | Eryn O’Neill
Vernissage: Saturday, June 15th @ 3 – 5 pm
Show dates: June 13 – 29, 2024

Wall Space Gallery is proud to present Block Party, the latest solo-exhibition by painter Sherry Czekus (Waterloo). Her near colour-block approach and use of negative space in the portrayal of ‘crowdscapes’ breaks away from realistic representation into the tenuous tensions between colour and form. Czekus is ultimately fascinated with the organic fluctuations and movements within gatherings, and the moment when individual identity collapses into a larger collective presence.

Though Czekus pares down her forms into blocks of colour, she maintains the subtle presence of the painted mark, and ultimately of her own hand, in the soft blends, transparencies, and directional brushwork that build or dissolve her figures. The works are deeply grounded in questions of painting and its ability to represent, in gesture, colour, and form, the bodily experience and pace of the urban ‘flanneur’.

Czekus’ oil paintings draw on the sensory. Each crowd depicted by Czekus expresses the sense of community and liveliness felt when engaging in social environments. Her use of bright, enticing hues echoes the bubbling laughter, footsteps, and chatter of group gatherings. She transforms her subjects into avenues of colour, simultaneously defining them from one another and flattening them into interlocking rhythms of movement.

Construction Season by Eryn O’Neill (Ottawa) features a curated selection of works from her recent series, Stage 2: The Construction of Ottawa's Light Rail System, with scenes of her painterly reconstructions of Ottawa's pedestrian routes and urban construction landscape. Across this collection of works, O’Neill interconnects art, architecture and urban advancement through the lens of painting.