Coming of Age, as exhibition, reflects the deeply ambivalent social and personal perceptions of aging. Are the senior years a time of completion, reflection and serenity, or of impoverishment, loss and sorrow? Whether glorified or disparaged, aging is buried under a heap of preconceived ideas. Three accomplished female multi-media artists, Mary Kainer, Ramune Luminaire, and Judith A. Mason, each hovering around her 60th year, excavate this messy terrain. They consider age not only as a biological fact, but a cultural – and gendered - one. 
 
Kainer’s banner-like quirky mixed-media drawings combine data, collage, biomorphic forms and text. They address a range of health issues for the elderly:  dementia, diabetes, cancer, osteoarthritis and vision loss. In them, she confronts the related over-prescription for geriatric, oft ill-defined illnesses and draws attention to individual experiences of deprivation that challenge the formation of existing societal myths around aging. Her accompanying figurative sculptures twist and reach, achingly passionate in their struggle.
 
A larger than life-sized female form by Luminaire pirouettes and arches her naked body with abandonment as she defies the disparaging descriptive words on the pedestal beneath used, at times, to describe the aging woman. Across the gallery, her floor-to-ceiling full-wall wooden game board – replicating “Snakes and Ladders” – plays out in surreal drawings an enticing, chaotic game for the over-60s: fall in love, long hospital stay, travel to see Taj Mahal, Alzheimer’s!
 
Mason’s evocative, vibrantly rich abstract paintings and mythological drawings combine in exhibition to tell of the not-easily-articulated interior life of the older woman. These two-dimensional works and the accompanying group of felted marionette-like figures restage her original ground – the psychic, physical and material space/places from which her feelings, sensations and sense of self emerged. Her evolving experiences of her familial intimate relationships as content are then exposed as she circumnavigates the terrain through these works (including an opening performance) showing collapse, emptiness, starkness, storms, pleasure, pressure and release.
 
The three, as generative makers, combine efforts in an attic installation where the detritus of their creative lives is reformed into seductive heaps of objects and materials exposed or partially hidden as memory boxes or illusive reminiscences. A contemporary triad of witches, they hover over a cauldron: oh, let the moment come when I may give myself over entirely to… to what? To art? To life?
​

​Frances Ferdinands Feed Me, Free Me, 2005, Acrylic on Canvas, 23" x 31"

Frances Ferdinands: Connective Threads brings together many past and recent painting projects for the first time.  For three decades, Ferdinands’ paintings have explored food, cultural belonging, difference, and women in society.  She incorporates elements of her Sri Lankan heritage and touches on themes related to colonialism, cultural identity and migration.  As an accomplished painter, Ferdinands creates works that are sometimes ironic, allegorical or witty. She merges popular culture and art history with the world around her and, in so doing, heightens the discontinuities of life in Canada.

Sri Lankan born, Canadian trained artist, Frances Ferdinands has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Paris, Bogota, Honolulu, the continental U.S. and across Canada.  Her work is found in corporate, private and public collections including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Judith & Norman Alix Gallery, and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery.  Her paintings are featured in two art books: Rethinking Acrylic and Acrylic Innovation: 60 Visionary Artists.  Originally from Toronto, she currently lives and has her studio east of Toronto in the Northumberland Hills.  Recently she was the winner of the Royal Canadian Mint competition to design the 2017 Diwali Commemorative Coin.

Five years in the making and spanning over 50 feet, The Great Canadian LEEDscape is an original painting panorama, which explores the ongoing transformation of Canada’s natural and built environments.

It consists of thirteen panels, one for each province and territory in Canada. The regions are positioned from west to east, according to the longitude of each capital city. Leading examples of sustainable architecture (LEED certified buildings) are combined with neighboring trees, mountains and waterways. In recognition of Canada 150, this painting examines Canada’s changing urban landscape and suggests what the future could hold.

Using squeeze bottles filled with liquid paint, The Great Canadian LEEDscape was built from the ground up with hundreds of lines and dots. Shackleton manipulates where and how each drip will fall by working with gravity and spinning her canvases. As in real-life construction, the architectural details are calculated, measured and controlled in order to assure precise locations of each line. As in nature, the environmental elements are more spontaneous,
unpredictable and liquid.  “This is the most ambitious painting of my career in both scope and scale. It has demanded
extensive research, Canada-wide travel and a larger studio space. I spent time in every province and territory to photograph landscapes and hunt down buildings that were developed with nature in mind. I walked on sea ice in Nunavut. I braved -35°C in Manitoba. I hiked mountains in Alberta, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Yukon. The multi-year process has been a labour of love and I couldn’t be more excited to share it in my first ever traveling
exhibition!” -Amy Shackleton

​Dermot Wilson and Jason Brock will perform at the closing of the current exhibition:  Our Cosmic Geometries - Images from the Two Worlds
 
Experience soundscapes synced to video projections.  Computer voices and musical instruments conjure and resonate with images from nature, found footage and silent film clips.

These two Ontario based artists have been working together since 2006. As Director/Curator of The WKP Kennedy Gallery in the North Bay Arts Centre, Dermot showed Leszek's work. In the artist's words: "The works presented in Our Cosmic Geometries offer up a different (and very ancient) way of visualizing our place in the natural world by imagining spherical perspectives, as if we exist in bubbles of perception. The paintings, prints, photographs and drawings are simply illustrating both these spherical perceptions of nature and the concept of circles of thought expanding and contracting from the middle point, ourselves."

The VAC kicks off 2017 by celebrating the young artists in Clarington with an exhibition of great work and amazing talent from all our local high schools.

Join us Friday November 18th @ 7 pm for the opening reception of our year end exhibition 100 small painting show and sale.  This exhibition celebrates our members, and it's more than just painting...  All works are for sale with 100% of the sale price going directly to the artist.  This is a great opportunity to find that one of a kind painting, print, piece of pottery or sculpture for a unique Christmas gift while supporting a local artist in your community!

This is not a juried show, we accept the work as it comes in ... until we hit 100 pieces!  If you are an artist get your work in by Tuesday, November 15th - get your submission form here 

Our annual fundraiser Wall to Wall is here!  Join us on Saturday November 12 @ 6 pm.  47 Works of Art to choose from... Get your ticket today and join in the fun - for $200 you get to select a work of art and take it right off the gallery wall!  The evening includes hors d'oeuvres and a cash bar!

Join us for our 36th Annual Juried Art Show - enter your own original work of art or just  come out and see the amazing talent of Clarington and beyond!  Get your entry form here