Katie Bethune-Leamen – Snog Marry Avoid
Snog Marry Avoid is an installation of new and recent sculptures by Toronto-based artist, Katie Bethune-Leamen. Engaging with a colour new to the artist — brown — this installation is comprised of work in a range of materials including porcelain, neon, digitally printed fabric, and found objects. Snog Marry Avoid extends the artist’s ongoing exploration of the language and form of contemporary abstraction.
Read the exhibition essay by Saelan Twerdy.
Opening reception and artist talk: Saturday, October 24th at 7pm
Katie Bethune-Leamen works in sculpture, installation, and video, toward a consideration of the nature of objects, our relationships with them, and our relationships with each other as mediated through them. She is interested in the inchoate and the abstract — amorphous things subsisting in an in-between state — as location for engagement and possibility for meanings. Recent solo exhibitions include: turn that brown upside down (Modern Fuel, Kingston), YOU WIN! (february) (8-11, Toronto), Hologram Tupac. Other Things. ALL-ONE! (OpenStudio, Toronto), Shiny, Object, Person. (AGO, Toronto), the commissioned project Blobs for Lawren Harris’s Glaciers, Icebergs, and Unknown Things (AGO) and participation in the group exhibitions Future (ESP, Toronto), Northern Exposure (Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax), and More Than Two (Let It Make Itself) (The Power Plant, Toronto). Recent residencies include the Residency of the Americas (Darling Foundry, Montreal), Fogo Island Arts (Fogo Island, NFLD), and SIM (Reykjavik, IS). Bethune-Leamen is a 2015 recipient of an Ontario Arts Council Chalmers Fellowship Grant to research sculptural abstraction through travel to Japan, Germany, Italy & the USA. In 2016, she will participate in the Canada Canada Council for the Arts International Residency – Paris, and will subsequently hold the position of artist in-residence at NSCAD, Halifax. She received her BFA from Concordia University, and her MFA from the University of Guelph.
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The exhibition is generously supported by the Ontario Art Council and the Toronto Arts Council.
