The Fall Group Show,
September 24- October 8, 2011.

Featuring the work of gallery artists, Nikola Nikola, Goran Lucic, and Nicole DeBrabandere.

Nikola Nikola

The exhibition revolves around a trilogy of large encaustic works by Nikola Nikola. Each is set in a field of browns, ochres and muted yellows, configured into energized forms that evoke rivers, honeycombed vessels and biological organisms. In each work, the narrative suggests a life or spirit ensnared, etched into dignified submission by powerful networks or force fields, defined here by vibrant black tributaries -- or cages. It’s as if Gulliver were made anew -- and still trapped -- by modes of interaction both contemporary and timeless: especially our quest for meaning -- and love.
Nikola’s work often incorporates bold imagery and abstracted properties. If there’s one definitive conflict or experience consistently offered in his art, it usually manifests in the thinnest air of human perception, the boundary or edge world between the temporal and the celestial, the existential tightrope on which maintaining one’s balance depends on addressing the larger questions: Who or what are we? Where are we going? These and other questions are answered in Nikola’s work as representations of cosmic forces that simmer in the blood, often without a conscious voice, but directing us all the same.
Nikola has been working and exhibiting in Canada for thirty years, and has done four solo shows in different media at the Alison Smith Gallery. The Fall Group Show also features his photographic work.

Goran Lucic

Goran Lucic is an emerging artist who has shown encaustic painting in two solo shows at the Alison Smith Gallery. These works often appropriate visual motifs from older fine-art traditions and different cultures, and do so with the freshness of a sensibility conversant in the language and effects of pixels and pulsing screens. The outcome is uncannily mature, disciplined in technique even while unguardedly – joyously – resonant with the spirit of experiment.

Nicole DeBrabandere

Nicole DeBrabandere is principally a ceramic artist. In much of her work to date, DeBrabandere innovates with the conventions of decorative objects, often with subversive humour. Her work has the force -- and imaginative wickedness -- of a genius vivisectionist, toying with old artisanal traditions to renew them. In recent shows, she’s created small sculptural works by mixing parts of old ceramic molds, constructed paper, bricks and other castaways into phantastical objects that feel like new life forms -- but still designed for contemplation on a shelf or glass cabinet, or perhaps under a microscope. In a recent show of watercolours DeBrabandere explored the terrain of the biomorphic figurative, developing constellations of imagery from body parts.