Channel Gallery Opens Fulcrum

It's an exhibit right up the alley of Bill Nye fans.

Channel Gallery, a partnership of five Toronto-based artists, opened their latest exhibit, Fulcrum, last Thursday. The show explores the still point on which movement rests. The gallery artists look at the complexity and fragility of balance - at how little it takes to destroy stability, and at the peculiar tendency of chaos to give rise to order.

The five artists are:

Jess Riva Cooper - works with clay and focuses on the relationship between the figure and the vessel.

Helena Frei - deals with words, colour and change - working primarily in textiles, she examines the stresses that usage and history bring to bear on the material environment.

Melanie Gordon - photographer, whose images reveal glimpses of dream and reality and negotiate the space in between motion and paralysis, clarity and chaos, strength and vulnerability, light and dark.

Susan Leopold - focuses on the dynamic between past and present, conscious and unconscious, what is visible and invisible and how we interpret what we see.

Peggy Mersereau - captures the ephemeral in her work and elicits the essence of light, shadow and passing time.

While their personal and professional backgrounds are as far apart the Maritimes,
California, Ontario and the Czech Republic, these five women share an awareness of the importance of materials and process in the making of their art.

It's like the Matrix. OK, not quite.

Channel Gallery, Case Goods Warehouse, Distillery District. Studio 109 - building 74 on 55 Mill St. 416.840.0187. www.channelgallery.ca