CANADA is excited to present Contact Sport, a group exhibition organized by Rachel Eulena Williams at the gallery’s 61 Lispenard Street space. The show brings together a group of ten painters and sculptors whose work has a visual connection to Williams’s practice. The work is full of color and embodies a strong physicality that comes from highly intuitive and engaged making processes. Like Williams, many of the artists treat the gathering of materials as an important part of the process, adding everyday things like QR codes, magazine images or using store bought mops to apply paint into their work. The eclectic list of materials is a way of recontextualizing and reimagining quotidian visual culture.
Often the work has a sense of pushing out, expanding into bodily space. Sculpture and bas relief paintings seem to literalize and inhabit form. Paint takes on a physically active role, becoming, like the title suggests, something beyond merely descriptive–alive and tactile. While remaining rooted and direct, the work has an uncanny or dreamlike quality. These artists guide us through imagery that is warm and familiar while remaining beyond the boundaries of the known world.
