April 1 – May 2: Gilda Mekler: “Meditations and Landscapes” an exhibition of paintings on paper in watercolour, ink, and gouache by the late Gilda Mekler, curated by James Deahl and Judith Sandiford
Sunday April 11 from 2-5 pm, opening reception with the curators, and a poetry reading by James Deahl. James will also be present during the Friday April 9 James North Art Crawl from 7 to 10 pm.
Gilda Mekler died suddenly in early February 2007. Her husband, poet James Deahl, put together a posthumous exhibition of her paintings last February 2008, at The Blue Angel Gallery in Hamilton, curated by Cynthia Hill.
The current exhibition at Artword Gallery presents a number of Mekler’s landscape drawings and paintings in ink and watercolour, selected by Judith Sandiford and James Deahl.
Before she died, Mekler had been exploring the swift, assured and minimal gesture, in a manner evocative of Japanese brush paintings. She would return to the same composition repeatedly, each time with delicate and telling differences in the stroke. The current exhibition was selected to give viewers some idea of this beautiful and subtle investigation.
Gilda Mekler was also an editor and illustrator. Her illustrations are part of a number of poetry texts and literary anthologies. She and husband/poet James Deahl had a publishing company, Mekler and Deahl, that focussed on works with a sense of place in the Hamilton region.
Review by Stephanie Vegh:
http://stephanievegh.ca/blog/2010/04/13/james-north-art-crawl-april-3/
“At Artword Gallery, €˜Meditations and Landscapes€™ brings together selected works on paper by the late Gilda Mekler. Curated by Artword curator Judith Sandiford and Mekler€™s husband, poet James Deahl, the exhibition is a sensitive archive of Mekler€™s repetitive investigations that revisited a Japanese-inspired series of landscapes and botanicals with visible patience that yielded a number of deftly confident works like the elegant ink study above.”
