Oddities

Gallery Gachet Annual Members Show
Exhibition runs: January 9th- February 22nd, 2015
Opening reception: Fri, January 9th, 7.00 – 10.00pm

Gallery Gachet is an artist-run centre committed to demystifying and challenging issues related to mental health and social marginalization in order to educate the public and promote social and economic justice through artistic means. Our gallery and studio space, precariously balanced in a neighbourhood undergoing advanced gentrification, has emerged as a symbol of creative refuge and artist-driven authenticity.

Gallery Gachet is pleased to present this year’s Annual Members Show, Oddities.

Artists include: Afuwa, d.June Conley, Rebecca Chunn, Cherise Clarke, Lara Fitzgerald, Edzy Edzed, Murray Huehn, Kara Lee, Pierre Leichner, Peter Lojewski, Laurie Marshall, Carmen Ostrander, Mary O’Toole, Bruce Ray, Karen Ward, and Ilir Xhediku.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a cabinet of curiosities was a place, or more precisely a wooden piece of furniture with several compartments, where people would exhibit bizarre objects, artifacts and specimens —in a word oddities. Everything from a two-headed cow fetus soaking in formaldehyde to an alleged unicorn horn, these objects gesture towards the complexity of the world and the vastness of the unknown. While these displays were successful in sparking the creative imaginations of many, they exist as a mode of classification, capable of objectifying and subjugating what is different by suggesting a particular and often misguided reading to the viewer.

Classification of the atypical has taken on many forms throughout history; witch hunts, circus sideshows, and in modern medical practices including the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM.

Oddities will set out to answer these questions posed by artists from the Gallery Gachet collective: Can we achieve a more holistic sense of the human experience by assuming or subverting labels such as mad, freak or weird? What parts of our experiences do we want to keep strange? How much do we want to explain? Is there still room for the uncanny or fantastic? Can we, as artists, create an alluring space of wonder while representing ourselves and our experiences?

To see pictures from this exhibition, please visit our Flickr account https://www.flickr.com/photos/gallerygachet/sets/72157650286150312

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Salon Shop

The Salon Shop is Gachet’s micro-exhibition space and shop that features the artworks, crafts, and other arts objects of local community members, as well as Gachet volunteer, associate and collective members.

The Inward Eye
Featuring the artwork of Bruce Ray
Exhibition runs: January 9th- February 22nd, 2015
Opening reception: Fri, January 9th, 7.00 – 10.00pm

Through drawings, sculptures and poetry, Ray explores dream-reality and the subjective realms one can create within their own mind. These works take the viewer on a journey through the meaning of dreams to a landscape which transcends physical laws.

To see pictures from this exhibition, please visit our Flickr account https://www.flickr.com/photos/gallerygachet/sets/72157650234892546

Bruce Ray’s Bio
I have been an artist all my life. I was trained in commercial art in high school. I have been involved in Gallery Gachet as a member for twenty years. I have had five solo shows and been involved in numerous group shows. I have worked with acrylic paints and done linocut prints. I have made graphic novels and published a book of poems. I have spent time writing stories and done pieces of Sculpture. I hope to be with the Gallery for a long time. My work has a lot to do with the telling of stories. I affect the role of the one who tells tales. I do not believe in surrealism as an expression of madness but as a vision of the fable. In this way all my work is a thing of fictional reality. I hope to express this in everything I do. I am an actor who does not put on a mask but takes it off. I believe that art is a human right and is very important in the community. It is provocative and arises out of discontent. The dissident voice is the muscle of society. We strengthen the truth by questioning it. We prove the rules by breaking them.