Tanja Rector, Weeping Willow Blue Heron, 2024, oil on canvas, 72" x 60" (photo courtesy of Paul Kuhn Gallery)
Tanja Rector at Paul Kuhn Gallery
If you’ve seen the movies Iron Man, The Hangover, or White Oleander, or the TV series House, you may have seen the artwork of Tanja Rector.
In addition to myriad solo and group shows at galleries across North America and around the world, the Los Angeles, Calif.-based artist is also the founder and designer of Spot Orange Design, which specializes in creating art for the TV and film industry.
And now through June 14, her latest exhibition, New Horizons, is on view at Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary.
Rector created a name for herself with bright abstract works made from textiles. “The shapes — rectangles, stripes, triangles, quarter-circles and more — align in jaunty rhythms like the fragmented building blocks of poems,” wrote Leah Ollman in the Los Angeles Times.
But this latest show also features large-scale oil and canvas abstracts, “built up compositions of scribbles and gestures,” notes Kuhn. Coming to a TV show near you? Perhaps.
Installation view, Anique Jordan, “To Score the Marvelous,” 2023, Epson Enhanced Mat, 24" x 16" (photo by Patel Brown)
Anique Jordan at Patel Brown
Canadian artist and writer Anique Jordan draws inspiration from Indigenous worldviews, queerness, Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices and her own physical body for Underbelly, on view now at Patel Brown in Toronto.
Underbelly includes images depicting a utopia established away from colonization and extraction systems. “Jordan’s Underbelly joins a history, a pattern, a chorus and a tradition of knowledge-making that is concerned with the liminal. It is an intentional betrayal of colonial, white supremacist logics,” said Patel Brown in a news release.
Jordan is a Toronto-based artist, writer and curator who holds a master of fine arts in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. She was granted the 2017 Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist of the Year award and has exhibited her works in various galleries, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of York University and Y+ Contemporary. ■
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