ROAD SHOW - The Travelling Drawers
ASHPA NAIRA GALLERY & HEADBONES GALLERY
August 6 - 21, 2009
Opening Reception: 7-9 PM, Thursday, August 6
Ashpa Naira Gallery is hosting an exhibition of works from Headbones Gallery, Toronto. Featuring new work by Julie Oakes, paintings by Robert Farmer, recent collages by Scott P. Ellis & prison drawings by Charles Bronson.
Julie Oakes - Back in the Okanagan for the summer, Oakes has brought four of her recent gouache paintings and new bronze sculpture with her to Ashpa Naira Gallery. Oakes will be creating work in the Fintry studio for Genesis; her next solo exhibition in Toronto at Lonsdale Gallery, October 1-31, 2009.
Bronson, The Prison Drawings - Courtesy of the Princess, are a play by play visual documentation of a prison romance from 1997 - 2000 told in graphite, ink and coloured pencil. The drawings are brutally revealing. Bronson's hand is controlled but his subject matter is not. The Princess is his muse, foil and interlocutor. In late 1995, The Princess, woman prisoner TG0786 and Ontario College of Art (OCA) graduate, found herself incarcerated in the United Kingdom. With an interest in art therapy, she began writing to Bronson after seeing one of his drawings in a British tabloid and a romantic correspondence of drawings both singular and collaborative, was begun. Eventually, the happy couple pledged to be married, never having personally met, and the British tabloids went wild with their sensational story of love and commitment. With a curiously sweet candour, brushed with naughtiness, Bronson tells his story, confined by the size of the paper and materials made available to him. With no emotional holds barred, Bronson tells it as he sees it from within prisons of cement blocks, spied upon by surveillance cameras and tortured by his very active imagination. This sociological, psychological and diaristic presentation of the life of an inmate is an exhibition that encourages study and contemplation, yet also rewards both the curious and the art lover.
ASHPA NAIRA GALLERY
9492 Houghton Rd. Vernon, BC V1H 2C9
Tel: 250-549-4249
E: ashpanaira@telus.net
W: www.ashpanairagallery.com
Gallery Hours: Friday to Sunday / 10 am - 6 pm Other times also by appointment.