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Exhibitions at Artword Gallery, 2003

Exhibitions took place at Artword Gallery, 75 Portland Street, Toronto ON M5V 2M9
Curator: Judith Sandiford


Mina Goodman, Molye Yampolsky, Shelley Yampolsky
Mothers and Daughters and Threads
February 1 to March 2, 2003
OPENING RECEPTION Saturday, February 1, 2003, 2 - 5
an exhibition of work by three generations of the Goodman/Yampolsky family: Mina Goodman (needlework), Molye Yampolsky (sculpture) and Shelley Yampolsky (ceramics, drawings and photographs)
The making of this exhibition was filmed for an episode of Mothers and Daughters, produced for the W Network and aired starting April 2003. Mothers and Daughters is a 13-episode documentary series examining the unique bond between mothers and daughters, produced by Breakthrough Films, a Toronto-based independent production company.
Judith Sandiford: Large Scale Drawings
March 10 to April 22, 2003
Large-scale drawings by Judith Sandiford from the Fluctations and Parallel Realities series, done in the early 90s.
Ivaan Kotulsky: World Class City
part of Contact 2003, Toronto's annual photography festival
Reception with the artist: Saturday, April 26, 2003, from 2 to 5 pm
An exhibition of photographs by Ivaan Kotulsky. Ivaan Kotulsky, an artist and photographer, lives and works in downtown Toronto. For more than a decade, Kotulsky has been photographing the people who make up Toronto's street life. Using his extensive collection of old, classic cameras, he has captured a visual history of Toronto's street people which is poignant, haunting, humorous and disturbing.
Barbara Caruso: The Alphabet Project and Beyond: Drawings 2001 - 2003
October 3 to 23, 2003
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 4, 2-5 pm
Barbara Caruso writes: "In 2000, I began an open-ended series of drawings based on an alphabet designed in 1919 by Theo van Doesburg. I wanted to explore the potential in this alphabet's square shapes and the rigour of its relationships. In 2002, I exhibited Alphabet 1 - 32 under the title The Alphabet Project: Part 1 at Artword Gallery. For this new exhibition, I have selected 17 alphabet drawings from the 44 works that follow Part 1 and I have added a selection from the drawings that go beyond the Alphabet Project.
Van Doesburg designed his alphabet using only the horizontal and the vertical. The letters integrate perfectly with a square shape. In my drawings, I close the letters and draw the whole square with lines in four directions: horizontal, vertical and two diagonals. It is the square that interests me, its order and its surface."

Debbie O'Rourke: Beautiful World
November 12 to December 13, 2003
New large-scale drawings and sculptures, including work from Wild Life Count: Trinidad.
Reception with the artist Saturday December 6, 2-4 pm
With artworks inspired by a Canada Council residency in Trinidad and by wildlife encounters in Etobicoke and Brampton, artist Debbie O'Rourke celebrates the fact that we live in the best neighbourhood in the universe, the best address in the cosmos. No planet could offer more nurturance or more adventure than this blue pearl of ours, shared with a host of incredible creatures.
O'Rourke doesn't try to mimic nature. With a simple crayon line, she strokes an agouti's curved back, feels the weight of a giant snapping turtle, captures the breeze from a passing hummingbird. The resulting drawings range from six inches in size to twenty-two feet long. Her works in wood, all made from deadwood rather than living trees, range from celebrations of liveliness expressed in form and pattern to silent expressions of complex situations in the living world.
For the past two years, O'Rourke has been turning her practice from gallery-oriented artwork to creating drawings, photos and carvings that remain either outdoors or on the internet. "Beautiful World" marks this transition. It also celebrates the artists relationship with Artword Theatre and Gallery. Artword Gallery curator Judith Sandiford mentored O'Rourke's transition by giving the artist her first opportunities to work in public and on the web.
O'Rourke's web-artworks, Milkweed Patch and Wildlife Count, can be accessed through her web-site at
www.milkweedpatch.com