Airborn 5 – Who Stoops To Conquer? Est-ce que tu viens chérie ? by the collective Padejo: Paul Walty, Denis Leclerc and Joseph Muscat, opened Tuesday at the Glendon Gallery and the Centre of Excellence.
The exhibit consists of an installation featuring the mythical Minotaur in the lobby of the Centre of Excellence until March 2, as well as a presentation of the individual artworks of the three artists of the collective in the gallery until March 14.
This dual presentation is a platform that allows both artists and spectators to observe the many ramifications and influences between the work developed by the group in the Hall of Centre of Excellence and their individual artworks presented in the art gallery.
Paul Walty is a Toronto-based visual artist who has been active professionally since 1980. His primary means of expression is analogue and digital drawing, although he does indulge in sculpture, installation and digital animation when the whim strikes him. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto, where he focused on archaeology and the Ontario College of Art. He currently supports his art habit with teaching, and gigs in graphic and web design. He is an active supporter of artist-run culture. He currently is a member of the Programming Committee at Le Labo, a Frenchspeaking research and production facility in Toronto specializing in new technology, a board member of La Galerie du Nouvel‑Ontario in Sudbury, and president of ARCCO, an association of Artist-Run Centres and Collectives of Ontario. Archaeology demonstrated to Walty the effectiveness of working in groups, something he has explored repeatedly in visual art.
Denis Leclerc’s artistic development is dual. As creative director at Costa Leclerc Design Inc., he uses his creative skills to market his client services. As a visual artist, he applies art as a mean to explore free expression. Leclerc’s recent works are inspired essentially by scientific developments, especially the theory of chaos in the realm of physic. He has found in the random combination of forms pieces of papers, explosion of forms and symbols — a visual language that is closed to the origin of life, by using chance and fate as the main source of his inspiration. His expression has found that vector images allow him to work without size restrictions, a characteristic that complements his amazement for the infinity of scales. Leclerc thinks that artists have to confront the relevance of their visual language by working in collaboration with other artists.
Joseph Muscat graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1981 and since then has exhibited his work extensively in solo and in group exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Europe and South America. His work is widely collected in many public, corporate and private collections. He has received numerous Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council grants and his work has been included in Art textbooks and reproduced on book and magazine covers. He has lectured at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture and teaches visual arts part time with the Toronto District School Board. He is a member of several professional artists associations and sits on the Board of Directors of the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition and Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts. He has sat on a number of arts juries locally and nationally. He is presently represented by David Kaye Gallery, Toronto, and Shayna Laing International, Montreal.
For more information, including hours, visit the Glendon Gallery website.