Opening reception, Thursday November 5th, 6-9pm
Show runs through Saturday November 28th
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Saturday 12-5pm
http://www.roqlarue.com

MAIN GALLERY:

ALESSANDRA MARIA
DI MINORES

With her delicate use of graphite, carbon pencil, and meticulously applied gold leafing, Alessandra Maria’s work places itself firmly in the lineage of iconography and illuminated manuscripts. To redefine divinity beyond the sexual, she draws on traditional portrayals of feminine deities, and in particular those within the Abrahamic religions. The result is a compelling, hauntingly beautiful collection of works portraying otherworldly women, florals, and pattern beyond the corporeal. For her show “Di Minores”, Maria creates lush, verdant, and compelling drawings with gold leaf inspired by these potent stories, presenting the “other” trinity: virgin, matron, and courtesan. She deliberately fills her works with an abundantly Baroque population of butterflies, flowers, youth and beauty; toying with the tropes of femininity to flirt with the notion that there is certainly more beyond our immediate characterization of beautiful women, each with a presence and gravitas completely their own.

ZACHARI LOGAN
GROTESQUES

Saskatoon artist Zachari Logan explores the intersection of masculinity and queer identity through the hybridization of flora and fauna. For his show “Grotesques”, he creates figurative work from composites of petals, leaves, branches, twigs, vegetables, flowers, and animals. The composition of his pastel paintings mimic the tradition of opulently woven Medieval European tapestry, lush with botanical forests, blossoms, and vines flowing from top to bottom surrounding his figures. Blue pastel drawings on mylar present themselves as more ethereal wisps, their composition playing with the space around them as they emerge into focus; often portraying a hybrid of plant and animal, or plant and self-portrait of Logan’s own face, hands, or feet. Unlike the legendary unicorn, Logan does not imagine the body as a mythical pursuit. For him this is a re-wilding of the figure as a tangible embodiment of nature. The result is an engaging story of the body as fantastical landscape, creating a powerfully dynamic shift in the art historical gaze.

LOFT GALLERY:

JOE RUDKO
BROKEN IMAGE

Joe Rudko builds mixed media collage from cut or torn photographs, often extending or enhancing the image with paint, graphite, marker, or photographic spotting pen. For his show at Roq La Rue, “Broken Image”, Rudko focuses on color, form, and line. Some pieces are reorganized according to their tonal make-up, while others serve as blown up soft-focus images as translations suggestive of the imagery in the photographs he uses. The final compositions reveal an intricate geometry of mazelike patterns and layered, scalloped edges. Some appear as fractured windows or mirrors, bursting with a kaleidoscopic array of color. Others appear as gestural color fields revealing the expression of an image kept just out of focus, but suggestive enough to evoke a powerful sense of space. Made of several fragments pieced together to make a larger whole, he shreds, rips, cuts, or folds these photographs in various arrangements to highlight tone, pattern, and symmetry, creating new ways of perceiving space whether real or imagined.