Paul Butler casts the dining room in a cool elegance for the winter months with a new site-specific installation. These works are iconic Butler, based on collaged book pages where the artist has removed the focal points - cutting out figures, wild life and perhaps text; leaving white silhouettes that in some cases expose the fluorescent tubes that illuminate the light boxes.

As a result, the images suggest the depth of an expansive view while simultaneously collapsing that space to reveal the hardware that makes the partial illusion possible.

Butler's installation will remain on view till early spring, but if you miss it, watch for it's return once the snow flies next year.

Paul Butler is a Winnipeg-based artist, curator and dealer with an interest in multidisciplinary, social and alternative pedagogical practices. His practice includes hosting the Collage Party, a touring experimental studio established 1997. In 2008, he led an experimental residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts titled Reverse Pedagogy. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Los Angeles; Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Hart House, University of Toronto; White Columns, New York City; Creative Growth Art Centre, Oakland and Sparwasser HQ, Berlin. His curatorial projects have included the works by Matthew Higgs, Mitzi Pederson, Harrell Fletcher, DearRaindrop and Guy Maddin.

Currently, Butler is rebuilding Greg Curnoe's favorite bicycle, in order to commemorate the artist's work as a Canadian arts activist. This year he will organize "The Exchange," a two-part exhibition at Dorset Fine Arts, Cape Dorset and The National Gallery, Ottawa, in an effort to bring together Canada's southernmost and northernmost art communities.

It Looks Different From This Angle
Curated by Mia Nielsen

Jay Isaac . Jason Kroenwald . Susy Oliviera . James Olley . Derek Sullivan

Judging by exhibits in Toronto galleries as well as those further afield, it seems genre painting is alive and well in the 21st century. Interesting since these themes: portrait, landscape, still life were formalized centuries ago. These themes flourish in the hands of contemporary painters, perhaps because the treatment of these subjects continues to evolve. At one time the medium was there to deliver the message - a picture of a beautiful girl, a stormy sea or a vase of flowers. In the current remix, the medium is the message itself, where pristine realism gives way to luscious pigment.

This shift away from a pictorial experience may in part explain our lasting fascination with abstraction. It wasn't long ago that an abstract painting was a radical statement, but over the last 5 decades abstraction has evolved into a new genre, one with an iconography of it's own. With these the experience of the medium stands on it's own.

On the surface, image and medium seem to wrestle back and forth, challenging who will take centre stage. It's really the viewer who wins, treated to the lush physicality of paint (or bubble gum, for that matter) and suggestions of landscapes, flowers and figures that call to mind the ideal beauty of another era.

Works in this exhibition were generously loaned by: Angell Gallery, Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Le Gallery and Paul Petro Contemporary Art.