Exhibitions: Physical Presence | Sculpture Group Exhibition & New Dimensions 2024 | uOttawa BFA Group Show

Exhibitions: Physical Presence | Sculpture Group Exhibition & New Dimensions 2024 | uOttawa BFA Group Show
Vernissage: Saturday, July 13 @ 3 – 5 pm
Show dates: July 13 – 27

Wall Space Gallery is proud to present two group exhibitions this July – “Physical Presence” and “New Dimensions 2024”. “Physical Presence” celebrates the three-dimensional form, with ceramic and sculptural works by Dauma, Gosia, Martin Hyde, Marney McDiarmid, Patti Normand, and Jeannie Pappas. In their unique approaches to the use of clay and mixed media, each of these artists explore personal and community-based narratives through references to nature, the human body, and kitsch pop culture.

Dauma, Marney McDiarmid, and Patti Normand create imagined hybrid figures and fictitious plant species, using surrealism and anthropomorphism to contemplate human-nature relationships and the human-toll on the environment.

Turning inward, Gosia’s serene female figures and Jeannie Pappas’ quirky porcelain creatures act as vessels for translating the artists’ inner emotions into relatable moments of ‘humanness’.
Martin Hyde’s blue-and-white porcelain bowls and plates seek to spark poetry through the seemingly accidental combination of arbitrary motifs and images. Touching on the visceral space between subconscious dream and waking reality, his combinations of kitsch, popular culture imagery with botany, cowboys, pin-ups, insects and mouse-cursors reveal a darkly-humorous perspective on the tropes of desire and cultural consumption.

“New Dimensions 2024” is the inaugural annual exhibition in collaboration with the University of Ottawa's BFA program. This years’ exhibition features works from emerging artists Élie Crighton, Emma Gauthier, Chris Glabb, Bella Laflamme and Erin Szturm. Working across painting, animation, video, sculpture, printmaking, and their intersections, these five artists unravel the underlying mechanics of (dis)comfort. Their respective approaches find common ground through their individually complex relationships to the concept of ‘Home’, and feminist and queer perspectives on the objectification and mythologizing of the self and the other.