Art Metropole

Shawn Kuruneru was born in Toronto, Ontario. He has shown at The Drawing Center (New York, NY), Ribordy Contemporary (Geneva, Switzerland), Night Gallery (Los Angles, California) and Battat Contemporary (Montreal, Quebec). His drawings were recently acquired by the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum.

Garry Neill Kennedy is a senior Canadian artist. In addition to an active career as an artist, Kennedy taught studio art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD University) for over forty years where he also served as president for 23 years (1967 – 1990). He was visiting professor at California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) and Ēcole des Beaux Arts, Paris (ENSB-A). His most recent solo museum exhibitions were held at The National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, The Owens Art Gallery and Portikus (#86, Frankfurt am Main). In 2003 he was a recipient of the Order of Canada and in 2004, the Governor General’s Award in the Visual and Media Arts. In 2011 he received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from NSCAD University.

Kennedy recently had solo shows in Toronto at Diaz Contemporary, 2012 and in Vancouver, BC at Or Gallery in 2013 and The Apartment in 2014. He has also recently completed two books — one for MIT Press, The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968 -1978 and a second, a catalogue raisonne of his printed matter published by the Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, both in 2012. Kennedy team teaches part-time with his wife, Cathy Busby at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC where they make their home.

Jimmy Limit is a photo based artist. Using a large format camera, his work currently is exploring themes of ruin and decay with aspects of science fiction narrative. He has self published a large amount of artist books (zines) which are available around the world, but mostly exist in a box in his studio. He has exhibited in group shows internationally as well as locally including Paris, New York and Montreal. His photos have been published in numerous books and magazines including New York Times, Frieze Magazine and L’Officiel Hommes. He lives in Toronto.

Maggie Groat is a visual artist working in a variety of media including collage, sculpture, artists’ books, video, site specific interventions, and field studies. Forming an ongoing research-based practice, her work explores the interdisciplinary potential of artistic intervention and envisioning. Maggie’s work is interested in discovering how assuming amateur positions (in other disciplines or even in entirely made up fields) can help locate what occurs in the intersections and gaps between dichotomies, particularly between art/science, politics/poetics, utopia/reality, romanticism/conceptualism. Her work has been exhibited at a number of places across Canada including Parker Branch, Xpace, Georgia Sherman Projects, Art Metropole, The Niagara Artists Centre, as well published in Front Magazine and Cmagazine. Maggie studied visual art and philosophy at York University before attending The University of Guelph, where she received an MFA degree in 2010. She is currently divides her time between living and working in St. Catharines and Toronto, Ontario.

Katie Lyle’s work stems from an interest in portraiture, the act of painting, archetypes and images of femininity. The impulse and process apparent in The Green Years echo a loose collection of external referents. Paint application and visual language are tied to notions of personal desire tempered with discord. Brash, clumsy brush strokes sit next to ordered painterly ones; delicate features top exaggerated collaged limbs. Through this dialogue between image and application, Lyle illicits an obscured familiarity — the composite figures anonymous yet known, intimate but ageless.

As with classical portraiture, Lyle’s paintings seduce the viewer through a kind of recognition, with the subject acting as surrogate for both viewer and artist. However, her translation of photographic sources into paint obscures the individuality of the subject in favour of layered cultural signifiers — hair, clothing, pose, ground. These paintings are concerned with the conflicted intimacy of imprecise recognition, and the uncomfortable but compelling terrain between knowing and not knowing.

In creating these paintings, Lyle corresponded with women in their twenties and interviewed female family members. The distinctly personal specificity of this research — of oral history and apocryphal experience — informs her ongoing work.

Katie Lyle grew up in Ontario and received her BFA from Concordia University (2005) and her MFA from the University of Victoria (2009). She has worked as a sessional instructor of drawing and painting at the University of Victoria and has exhibited across Canada. Lyle lives in Vancouver and currently works at Western Front.

Jesse Harris is a Toronto-based artist. His message-oriented art is a platform for personal politics, direct communication and discussion of the limits to free expression in culture.