en-ca SC0345-TST-MM-1

en-ca Newnham - Building D - Level 3 - Right of Room D3056

en-ca Stanzie Tooth

en-ca Heartbreaker

en-ca 2018

en-ca Mixed Media

en-ca Plaster

en-ca Felt

en-ca Pigment

en-ca 35.6 x 26.7 cm

en-ca "If you want to know what has become of the work of Stanzie Tooth, the answer can be found in blue.

In blue, you see, there is room. Room for gentle leanings toward green, or purple, or grey; room for the smallest piece of presence or a cascade of inky depth. In blue there is room for the simultaneous advancing and retreat of the colour’s own will and within it the weight of the world. In blue the sky meets the sea and there they come close enough to touch. Blue separates day from night and delineates the earth as a place to stand. In blue there is room for the firmament beneath our feet and “the mind in borrow of the body”.

The works Stanzie Tooth has created for The Distance of the Moon are embodiments in and of blue. If you think when looking upon these things that this landscape painter’s feet might rest more lightly upon the earth than they once did, you would be right. Based out of Berlin since early 2016, and the beneficiary of numerous recent international residencies including the 2015 Joseph Plaskett Award, Tooth has been playing the part of a painting nomad. As a result, she has evidently thought a great deal about how paint is collected and carried. This may have begun as an issue in practicality, but practicality—like colour—is an excellent breeding ground for intention. Travel has given Stanzie Tooth’s paintings consciousness of the space within their grasp and movement has increased the span of this painter’s arms. Resolute in their blueness and the room it provides, the paintings in The Distance of the Moon are the orbit of earthly and extraterrestrial. Stanzie Tooth’s year of migration has loosened her ties to a practice of landscape painting that grounded itself in knowing and from within it she has gathered to herself the pleasure of the unknown.

The Distance of the Moon is a title shared with a short story by Italo Calvino. In it, the moon and the earth are so close to one another that trips to the lunar surface are made by boat, providing that travelers can accomplish a choreographed leap from sea to sky at just the right moment. The gesture requires a certain grace and a willingness to abandon attachments in pursuit of what the moon could yield. Successful jumpers harvest the richness of the moon’s surface and enjoy an altered perspective on the earth below but are subject to the complexities inherent in leaving home. The turn in Stanzie Tooth’s new paintings exemplifies the rewards of a well-timed leap. Her works on canvas are subject to a quiet gravitational pull toward solid ground while those in plaster explore new worlds. “This should give you an idea of how the influences of Earth and Moon, practically equal, fought over the space between them,” Calvino writes.2 Stanzie Tooth is traversing the room between them. She is doing it in blue." (Jessica Bell)

en-ca Stanzie Tooth

en-ca Formally speaking, Tooth’s work depicts the concept of absence through abstraction, as figures and forms act as voids within a swath of blue, amassing to a form of recognition in absentia. The canvases are unassuming, and generously line the walls of the gallery, giving the viewer ample space to contemplate and decrypt these modest artistic curiosities. The selection of blue works that initially greet a visitor upon entering General Hardware are inspired by Tooth’s adventures throughout Greece’s Mediterranean topography, while visually resembling sundried domestic fresco paintings or antiquated interior tiling. The colour blue can signify the ocean that surrounds and provides sustenance the nation, or more rudimentarily, the predominant scheme used in the Greek national flag. However, the proceeding artistic efforts rely less on instant identification, but instead, rest solely on a metaphorical undertaking that may require less passivity when experiencing the exhibition. What Tooth may intend to yield is the deterioration of memories, which resemble fractured portions of a significant whole, or porousness within a concrete image, symbolically visualized through a present or deficient use of blue.
In The Distance of the Moon, lived experiences are akin to the human body; both succumb to a form of weathering and disfiguration as time progresses. However, photographs, videos, and in Tooth’s case, paintings, are strident efforts to prolong those images beyond the impermanence of memories and transform them into personal histories. (David Saric)

en-ca Art Toronto

en-ca Purchased from General Hardware Contemporary on November 30, 2018.

en-ca No signature

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