Wider than High

June 16 – August 11, 2018
Opening Reception: June 16 from 7:00-9:00 pm

The term ‘landscape’ often draws up connotations of a natural space rendered in a sweeping horizontal expanse. In Wider Than High, artists Agata Derda, Laura Brandreth, and Tess Visser challenge the notion of landscape by applying the term to aphysical worlds, such as realms of memory, myth and human emotion. The unconventional landscapes explore the questions of human existence. What does it mean to exist? Is existence something that can be experienced from above, looking down? Or something that has to be experienced from ground level, fully immersed?

This exhibition is accompanied by a critical essay by Brittany Sostar, which can be downloaded HERE.

Laura Brandreth is an emerging artist from Ancaster, Ontario. She received a BFA Honours in Fine Art and a Minor in History from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Laura's work has been exhibited in galleries throughout southern Ontario, of which such exhibitions include a graduating show at The McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, SHOW.17 for emerging art practices in Ontario at the Idea Exchange in Cambridge, and winner of the Carnegie Gallery Emerging Artist Competition and subsequent solo exhibition at the Carnegie Gallery Barber Atrium in Dundas. Her practice makes a general use of unconventional material and subject matter parings that play with both memory associations and language.

Agata Derda was born in Poland in the 80s as a second of four siblings in a working class family. She started her art education as a child in a local youth centre and continued up to 19 years of age in High School of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland. A Few years after finishing high school, Derda immigrated to Ireland where she undertook BFA in Printmaking in Galway Mayo Institute of Technology. She graduated with Honors in 2010. Derda moved to Edmonton, Canada in 2011 to start MFA at University of Alberta. She has shown her work in Hamilton, Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver as well as internationally in Poland, Slovakia, Ireland, France, UK, China and the United States Currently lives and works exclusively on her art practice in Toronto.

Tess Visser is an emerging interdisciplinary artist from Mississauga, Ontario. Growing up as an only child, Tess has always turned to painting and drawing as an outlet for self-reflection, and uses simple, repetitive tasks throughout her practice as different forms of coping mechanisms. Her works span from tactile media such as painting, illustration, sculpture, and installation as well as various digital means of production. Since graduating from McMaster University’s BFA program, Tess has remained in Hamilton, Ontario and is independently continuing her artistic practice.