Headbones Gallery is introducing a Toronto-based artist to an Okanagan spring, where she will seed the local arts scene with her cultural influence.
Stanzie Tooth is Headbones Gallery’s current artist in residence, and will be at the Vernon gallery all this week. Her exhibition, Surfacing, featuring oil paintings on canvas and works on paper, opens at Headbones Thursday and continues to May 26.
Tooth’s most recent works are as lush and as blousy as a spring day, and will on display in the main gallery at Headbones.
Born in rural surroundings, Tooth now lives and works in her Toronto studio, which is in the heart of the arts district at the west end of Queen Street.
It’s a classic old factory building now occupied by tenants of the artistic persuasion, where she paints sheltered glades that are more akin to Monet’s Garden than the gritty urban environment where they were created, said Headbones owner Julie Oakes.
“Tooth’s upbringing was more countrified and she responds to the vitality and call of her roots through her work,” said Oakes.
“When it is copacetic to interrupt the fecundity, she peoples these bucolic settings with vague figures, coming, going or sinking into the fronds with relaxed simpatico.
“Tooth uses teal, magenta, perse and the rare thalos –– colours that veer to the more refined supernal shades of the primaries –– as if conjuring the better side of life.”
Also opening in Headbones’ Drawers Gallery, a space dedicated works on paper, is Ruth Waldman’s exhibition, Mellifluous.
Hailing from New York, Waldman charms with biological imagery as she tells tales with a visual vocabulary set in a surrealist space, said Oakes.
“Biomorphic creatures cavort with animated vegetation, wisping and wending their way across the virgin expanse of pure, white paper,” she said.
“The coloured-pencil fantasy describes mutations between the floral and sinuous. It is the fronds and ferns of woodlands translated into a more designed order than the divine had devised.
“In bright pastels, wriggly things play within a dreamy perspective as Seuss-like illustrated botanicals, futuristic aliens and beings of otherness are distilled through tubes to burst into bloom.”
Tooth will be in attendance at Thursday’s opening reception, which runs from 6 to 9 p.m. Headbones is located at 6700 Old Kamloops Rd. Parking is limited and visitors are recommended to carpool from the Kin Race Track.
