I’d like to declare the death of the death of painting, just so we don’t have to have that debate every time an exhibition of emerging painters pops up. Curator Spencer Harrison introduces his take on the subject Why the @#&! do you paint?, now on display at the Gladstone Hotel, with the original epitaph for art on canvas (Paul Delaroche, 1839), but I’ll forgive him that (just like I’ll forgive him for some of the work included in this show) because he’s celebrating the making of paintings and not just the looking at them. 
Bogdan Luca, The Flag
As per most group exhibitions assessing the collection is akin to throwing a basket of laundry against the wall to see what will stick. The inclusion of student work skews the results toward a familiar obviousness in intention, but the variety of approaches saves the day. Bogdan Luca’s landscape photograph of a painting in flight takes the curatorial conceit to its furthest limit, and in doing so sets the overall tone of playful innocence. A painting as straightforward as Tamara Kwapich’s idyllic Summer Day shares that sense but stands at the opposite end of the spectrum and succeeds through means as traditional as the selection of colours. Somewhere closer to Luca there are a bunch of artists clearly wrestling with the titular question in the age of digital reproduction – Tamara Thompson’s GIF series and Elizabeth Chan’s glitched pixellation being two examples. And then back towards Kwapich, you’ve got the ongoing battle with representing the real seen in Jean-Luc Lindsay’s modest portraits of insignificant scraps of garbage or Justin de Lima’s slightly more conceptual double-portrait of his grandfather.
However you end up navigating the buffet table of products on display, the overarching ethos – as per the curatorial directive – is one of unextinquished fervor for the process of laying pigment on canvas. In the presence of all that life, who wants to dwell on the dead? 
Alec Sutherland, Reworn: Fair Isle Toque
Not that there isn’t already enough to see in the painting exhibition (it’s crammed), but the top two floors of the hotel are simultaneously hosting Hard Twist, the venue’s annual textile art invitational, where the oddities outweigh the standard fare, so making the trip up the stairs is worth your while. The twists are as conceptual as they are methodological or literal. More than one artist exploits the secret shared history of crafted graphics and digital outputs (Dylan Fish’s punning Comment Thread 0001 is a particular favourite) while others, like Alec Sutherland’s nostalgic recreations, cross media to befuddle the line between representation and the real. Add to that the appropriated abject objects-as-artwork in Andrea Vander Kooij’s Mend Collection and you’ve got a micro-show within the show that serves as a reminder: wheels get reinvented in wonderful ways if you’re willing to look.
The Gladstone Hotel: http://www.gladstonehotel.com/art/current-exhibitions/
Why the @#&! do you paint? continues until December 6.
Hard Twist 10: Memory continues until December 27.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Why the @#&! do you paint? at the Gladstone Hotel
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