Impact Resistance features photographs and video that reflect philosophical engagement with the passage of time. Three photographic series, 33 bathhuts and a hotdogstand, Remnants, and Swimmers, pivot on moments of emotional vulnerability, exploring their place in human memory. Complemented by abstracted seascapes, these gentle and contemplative works prompt us to meditate on the formative moments that inflect the landscape of our pasts and resonate unexpectedly into our present.
 
Join Mats Nordstrom at the opening of his solo exhibition at the Julie M. Gallery in the Distillery District, Thursday May 30, 6 – 9 pm.

Impact Resistance features photographs and video that reflect philosophical engagement with the passage of time. Three photographic series, 33 bathhuts and a hotdogstand, Remnants, and Swimmers, pivot on moments of emotional vulnerability, exploring their place in human memory. Complemented by abstracted seascapes, these gentle and contemplative works prompt us to meditate on the formative moments that inflect the landscape of our pasts and resonate unexpectedly into our present.
 
Join Mats Nordstrom at the opening of his solo exhibition at the Julie M. Gallery in the Distillery District, Thursday May 30, 6 – 9 pm.

On Saturday, June 1st, Mira Godard Gallery is pleased to open an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by OTTO ROGERS. This is Rogers’ first solo exhibition in Toronto in ten years.
 
“BETWEEN VISION, DESIGN AND EXPRESSION there is no seam. Neither is one thing the cause and another the result. I have been referred to as a landscape painter and yet my efforts have concentrated on composition as poetic abstraction, an activity in which I make reference to nature but do not seek a landscape depiction. Rather, the search is for a heightened realm of reality. While developing the configuration on each canvas, panel or paper, my hope is to achieve a resolution that transcends the act of making, presenting the viewer with an elevated feeling, with a presence so palpable that time is suspended.”
Otto Rogers
Otto Donald Rogers, 2007
 
OTTO ROGERS was born in 1935 in Kerrobert, Saskatchewan. He attended the Saskatchewan Teachers College (1954). He received a Bachelor of Science in Art Education (1958) and a Masters in Fine Art (1959) from the University of Wisconsin. As Professor and Head of the Department of Art at the University of Saskatchewan (1959–1988), Rogers helped revive the Emma Lake Artist Workshop, Saskatchewan (1971–1987). From 1988 to 1998 Rogers lived in Haifa, Israel, where he served two, five-year terms as a Counselor member of the International Teaching Center at the World Centre for the Bahai Faith.
 
Considered one of Canada’s important painters, OTTO ROGERS has exhibited internationally for over five decades. Rogers' works are found in over 1500 international public, corporate and private collections including Art Gallery of Ontario, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina; Mendal Art Gallery, Saskatoon; Montreal Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Canada; the National Gallery of Iceland; Bank of Montreal; General Foods and Scotiabank.
 
OTTO ROGERS lives and works in Southern Ontario.
 
To arrange an interview with the artist, or for more information, please contact the gallery at (416)-964-8197, via email godard@godardgallery.com, or visit: www.godardgallery.com.

In the front space, MKG127 is pleased to present Untitled (Photo Assemblage) by Winnipeg-based artist Dominique Rey.
 
Opening Saturday June 1, 2-5 PM.
 
The subject matters Dominique Rey explores focus on individuals and communities on the periphery of dominant culture. Rey enters their contexts to work from a position of inclusion that approaches, as closely as possible, the residing dynamics of social and psychological forces. Over the course of the last seven years, she has developed a project that explores questions of subjectivity among a group of catholic nuns, Les Filles de la Croix (Sisters of the Cross) in Canada, Brazil, Argentina and France. Untitled (Photo Assemblage) is based on a distillation and recontextualization of an extensive photographic archive in which themes of stillness, precarity and temporality are interwoven.
 
Dominique Rey is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, video, painting, performance and installation. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and in the United States, Germany and Slovakia. She previously exhibited at MKG127 in the summer 2011 exhibition Go Figure.
 
The exhibition continues until June 29.
 
MKG127 is located in Toronto at 1445 Dundas St. West between Dufferin St. and Gladstone Ave. on the south side. Hours are Wednesday to Saturday from 12 to 6 PM or by appointment. For more information call 647-435-7682. www.mkg127.com

MKG127 is pleased to present She Walks Through Her Sunken Dream, an exhibition of new work by Toronto-based artist Geoffrey Pugen.
 
Opening Saturday June 1, 2-5 PM
 
In Geoffrey Pugen‘s first exhibition at MKG127, he turns a reflexive eye toward the heterogeneous surfaces that assemble and constrain the artistic economy of body, self and object. Interweaving the silent movements of a fashionable gallerist with the robust installation of art objects, this two channel video narrativizes an accompanying installation, and explores the active dialectic between vision and gesture as a continual performance of self and group identity. Incorporating horror and the camp of David Bowie, the video, sculpture and adjacent walls coalesce into an uncanny, disjointed frame of experience, and the viewer becomes one of the reflective surfaces in an ongoing mystery.
 

Geoffrey Pugen explores relationships between real and staged performance, the natural and the artificial, and tensions of virtual identity through altering and manipulating images. Working with video, film, performance and photography, Pugen renders situations that examine our perceptions of how history, documentation and simulation intersect. His videos and art have been exhibited nationally and internationally. He is the recipient of the K.M Hunter Award for interdisciplinary art. Pugen’s work Images (2012) can be seen in the lightbox on the exterior of MKG127.
 
The exhibition continues until June 29.
 
MKG127 is located in Toronto at 1445 Dundas St. West between Dufferin St. and Gladstone Ave. on the south side. Hours are Wednesday to Saturday from 12 to 6 PM or by appointment. For more information call 647-435-7682. www.mkg127.com

Pari Nadimi Gallery presents the second solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Italian duo artists Botto + Bruno. A Featured Exhibition of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.
 
Known for their constructed photographic and video works which, at times, used as material for creating their large installtions, Botto + Bruno continue to be interested in investigating the revolts, wishes and dreams of teenagers who live in the immense suburbs of our planet.
 
For their exhibition at Pari Nadimi Gallery, Botto+ Bruno present an installation of a large wallpaper, as the center piece of the exhibition, made out of A3 sized photocopies. The photocopies start with a text (a text cut up from Ballard‘s Kingdom Come) and then develop into drawings and finally in black and white photography. A number of small works with grey background and white framed, made of a drawing and a photo collage, are placed over the wallpaper. The installation also includes 3 large photographs. Every A3 and large photographs contains Botto + Bruno’s investigations of marginal places that are photographed, selected, archived, assembled, photocopied by the artists to make the final collage.
 
The installation is a project that starts from a raw objective data and then becomes material for moulding. It breaks up and rearranges itself to become a hint, the phantom of a landscape made of a horizon line reaches for the infinite, tries to get close to a musical score carrying the rhythm of its architectural fullness and emptiness, where nature and abandoned architectures meet and clash, memory and daily routine reactivate one another, the walking experience becomes part of the work.
 
Botto + Bruno have been part of the prestigious international biennales such as: 49th Venice Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann titled “House where nobody lives” (2001). 8th Shanghai Biennale (2010). Busan Biennale (Korea 2002).
 
Their work has been exhibited, in numerous international art museums and public art galleries just to mention a few: Wall’s place, MAMCO, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (Genève, Switzerland), The Memory of a Meeting Place, New Museum (New York, USA), A hole into the water, MAMAC, Musée d‘Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (Nice, France), Gran Torino, Frost Museum (Miami, USA), Italian video today: Double Identity, Macy Art Gallery, Columbia University (New York, USA), Parc du la Villette (Paris, France), IAC di Villeurbanne (Lyon, France), Borders & beyond, Kunsthalle Helsinki (Helsinki), Misura italiana, Reina Sofia (Madrid, Spain), Le Printemps de septembre, Le Château d’eau, Espace écureuil (Toulouse, France), Italy, Kids riot, per l’Arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci di (Prato, Italy), Under my red sky, Palazzo delle Esposizioni a Roma, Sharing passion, geografie della contemporaneità, Palazzo della Fortuna (Turin,Italy). Botto + Bruno are the winners of the 2012 Madrid Photo prize.