Exhibition: Stephen Bulger Gallery - Sara Angelucci: Arboretum

Exhibition Dates: October 22 – November 19, 2016
Reception for the Artist: Saturday, October 22, 2-5pm

TORONTO, Oct. 12, 2016 /CNW/ - The Stephen Bulger Gallery is pleased to present "Arboretum" our first solo exhibition of work by Canadian artist Sara Angelucci.

"Arboretum" builds upon issues raised by her previous series "Aviary", part of an award-winning exhibition first shown at the Art Gallery of York University. With "Aviary", Angelucci sourced Victorian era portraits which she digitally combined with photographs she took of endangered and extinct birds in the Royal Ontario Museum's ornithology collection. In "Arboretum" the artist extends this technique to examine deforestation, one of the major challenges to bird populations.

To produce the series "Arboretum" Angelucci scanned found nineteenth-century cabinet cards with painted forest backdrops and transformed them with her own photographs of trees indigenous to Ontario, allowing the trees to take over the figures. In doing so, the forest claims a position in the foreground of the picture, becoming the main subject, while the figure becomes the ground.

As the artist explains: "Taking its cue from the pictorial tradition of nineteenth-century landscape painting, studio backdrops adopted an idealized vision of nature as a romantic setting for the figure, essentially taming the wilderness to provide an elegant pictorial frame – the picturesque. Embedded in this act of representation is the problematic notion that we are the main subject, and that nature is a mere decorative feature subservient to us. "Arboretum" gives visual presence to the notion of the sentient tree, extending the concept of the family album beyond the frame of photographic pictorial tradition. These pictures suggest a deeper consideration of not only the figure/ground relationship in photography, but also our position in relationship to nature."

Sara Angelucci is a multi-disciplinary artist, who, for the past twenty years has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council, and been awarded the Chalmers Fellowship, and the award for best exhibition design by Ontario Association of Art Galleries with Art Gallery of York University. Her work is included in public collections such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton; Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton; Trinity College, Toronto; National Portrait Gallery, Ottawa; Museum of Civilization, Ottawa; among others.

SOURCE Stephen Bulger Gallery

Stephen Bulger Gallery, 1026 Queen Street West Toronto Canada, 416.504.0575, [email protected]