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Fielding the Uncanny

March 23 - April 01, 2010

With works by John Ancheta and Stephen Talasnik.

Fielding the Uncanny brings together the work of established American artist Stephen Talasnik and emerging Canadian artist John Ancheta. Talasnik, who has shown extensively in the USA and Europe, creates intricate and fantastical quasi-architectural / organic structures which fascinate and intrigue, while Ancheta’s hazy abstracted landscapes provide obscure fictive spaces one can become lost within. Each artist builds imaginative worlds for us to explore, but in both cases, although the imagery is slightly familiar, it is also elusive and often delightfully intangible.

The paintings and drawings exhibited by John Ancheta form part of his Ether series. ‘Ether’, whether defined as an anaesthetic – providing escape into another world of sleep – or a reference to the heavens or upper regions of space, when applied to Ancheta’s paintings allows an understanding of foggy otherworldly spaces, ephemeral forms, and escapist reveries. They emit an eerie dream-like sensation.

Stephen Talasnik’s sculptures and drawings also embody aspects of the uncanny – they resemble architectural, scientific and organic structures, but are in fact constructions of fiction. The forms appear as intuitive, imaginative coalescences, emerging almost transiently from the artist’s subjective process of creation. Often asymmetrical, sometimes submerged in resin, Talasnik’s forms appear as if they could orbit away into space or are waiting, frozen in gestation.

Experienced as a whole, the exhibition becomes a subjective imaginary for viewers to question, explore and immerse themselves within.

www.isarte.net