Towards is pleased to present At Home in the World, a group exhibition featuring the work of Sarah Cale, Khalil Jamal, Vincent Larouche, and Les Ramsay.
What becomes of the spaces we create? How do they frame the material, political, and social fabric of our lives? How do we shape them, knowing that in they in turn will mold us?
Using the permeability of space as a starting point, At Home in the World brings together four artists to examine ideas of domesticity, the psychological and the physical, as well as slippages between literal and figurative space.
Les Ramsay’s work draws upon a wide range of often idiosyncratic source material that the artist has collected over many years. Spanning art history, craft, popular imagery and folk art, his work collapses traditional distinctions between high and low while further expanding upon the historical and formal language of painting. His often expansive canvases create complex environments where seemingly disparate elements co-exisit, intermingling in a kind of productive entanglement that doesn’t privilege any singular reading of the work.
For Khalil Jamal, questions of space take a structural and functional turn. Space is organized, form is created, and systems are put into place. Elements exist as both singular objects but also as part of a larger whole. Trained as an industrial designer, his work speaks to a type of domestic space, while simultaneously raising questions of production, materiality, and playfulness.
Sarah Cale’s work can be read as an investigation in an intersection of painting and collage. Her layered canvases are built up of “secondhand brushstrokes” where paint is first applied to a temporary surface, allowed to dry, and then re-assembled into highly intricate compositions. This layering creates rich, tactile paintings’ where surface, colour and form oscillate back and forth with one another. Through this process, Cale reconfigures many of paintings long-established concerns — interrogating ideas of materiality, gesture, as well as the pictorial representation of space.
Similar to Les Ramsay, Vincent Larouche’s paintings also draw from a vast personal collection of source material. Working across a diverse range of scales, styles and subject matter, Larouche’s work is really an investigation into the multitude of ways in which we construct images. The paintings within At Home in the World speak to what might be referred to as “liminal space” — the space between “what was” and “what comes next”. These are spaces of flux — where elements are in transition and all outcomes remain possible.
The artists within At Home in the World share an interest in a certain type of “borderless space.” Lines blur, territories shift, and histories overlap. It is within these borderless spaces they create that a world of possibility exists.
